Yakuza Kiwami 3 and the Case Against Game Remakes

What have they done to my boy Rikiya and his wonderful hair?

By Moises Taveras | October 7, 2025 | 11:00am

Video Games Features remakes

Yakuza Kiwami 3 and the Case Against Game Remakes

The news around the remake of Yakuza 3 bothers me. On one hand, I’m literally in the middle of playing a remaster of the original game, which preserves most of the look and feel of the black sheep of the Yakuza franchise, warts and all. It’s blemished, but there’s something honest about how apparent it is aging. The same can be said of many games and art outside of the medium. If that’s the case, then, why is the games industry so hellbent on rewriting its history?

Yakuza Kiwami 3 sees RGG Studio once again remaking one of its older titles in a new engine, which is great for a variety of reasons. The Dragon Engine is a stunning piece of work and renders the worlds created in it with a vibrancy and depth that older hardware couldn’t handle. As a brawler, the Dragon Engine turns the series into a kinetic and weighty affair, a feat that the original games couldn’t always manage. I have no doubt that Yakuza Kiwami 3 will look and feel great. It just also won’t look and feel like…well, Yakuza 3.

Yakuza 3 does not feel great. It’s stiff as opposed to the buttery smoothness of later games, including the Kiwami remakes. The in-game models, which represent some of RGG Studio’s earliest work on the PS3, are a little jagged. Aspects of the environment, like a bike in the background of a fight, look kind of blocky, even in the remaster. There is an imprecision to combat in Yakuza 3—which, if you don’t know, is a huge element of these games—that’s frustrating to work around, and to make matters worse, the AI in the game seems to abuse blocks and dodges in order to make the player’s life hell and drag out most major encounters. Yakuza 3 is a hard pill to swallow at times, a game that occasionally feels like running at an impeccably stylish wall, but it isn’t impossible to overcome or love, and despite its wrinkles, it is still unapologetically itself.

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Kiwami 3 threatens to erode that sense of self and the place the original once held. This is especially true when it comes to the game’s supporting cast. In a move that has proven unpopular among a contingent of Yakuza fans, Kiwami 3 has given fresh new faces to some of its most beloved characters, including Rikiya, a punk-turned-ally with a punch perm and a heart of gold. He’s like a Walmart version of Lupin III, with about 30% of his charm. And yet, I love him. He’s a goofball, one who in our short time together has projected strength by conjuring the image of a tough-as-nails big-time captain for the Ryudo family that Kiryu encounters in Okinawa. A thing he does purely to protect the people and community he cherishes.

Only Yakuza Kiwami 3 changes his appearance completely. Gone are the perm and his goofy smirk. Gone is his boyish naivete and the way it marked his face. He’s utterly transformed into this instead.

Yakuza Kiwami 3 Rikiya

This isn’t a bad face. It’s rendered at a higher quality and sure looks expressive. It just isn’t Rikiya’s. It’s angrier. It’s less trusting. It’s not as impressionable. It’s not Kiryu’s aniki. And while RGG reserves every right to alter its own work as the studio sees fit—and trust me, it has—it feels alienating to see a vision of Yakuza 3 that doesn’t feature Rikiya as I know him.

The way in which RGG Studio has embodied such a trigger-happy attitude about remaking, and in some cases outright altering, aspects of its older work is a microcosm of a distressing trend in the wider industry. Just this year alone, we’ve also gotten another full-bodied remake that rewrote aesthetic choices of the original by way of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. And while that remake was well-received (a feat I expect to be repeated with Kiwami 3) I worry that we’re becoming more and more voracious for them with little thought to what it means to throw away part of gaming’s past—even the smallest part of it—so readily.

It’s an attitude in games that, frankly, I despise, and one that becomes further codified with each remake produced in this space. It is a belief that often frames older games as amateurish drafts that only saw the light of day because a product release demanded it. And even if that’s the case, that’s art, man! A painting on an easel is a collection of brushstrokes, some more elegant than the others. A composition is sometimes made up of pleasant and discordant tones working to make something more harmonious. To remake a game, or to remake an image, song, movie, show, book, or whatever, is to break a thing down and recombine it into something else, even if it looks and sounds similar enough. And there’s something to cherish in the nuances between these distinct forms, just as much as there is something to mourn—something that’s lost—in the transformation.

I’m sad to lose Rikiya because I’m sad to lose a piece of a game I adore. And while RGG Studio isn’t breaking into my house and ripping him out of the remaster I own, which tries to preserve him in its own way, I can already see them writing this vision of him out of Yakuza (and the developer’s) history. 10 years from now, Kiwami 3 will be dubbed the definitive way to experience this story, and Rikiya, as well as his dumb hair, will be lost to time. Discarded, even.

I’m tired of the games industry’s obsessive plumbing of the past. And I’m exhausted by the way it casually relinquishes bits of it to oblivion, all the while polishing the aspects it prefers and repacking them. It, by and large, stinks of a deep-seated insecurity that seems to have gripped the industry in the last decade and a half, and threatens every day to stifle and suffocate a space that deserves to grow and age, gracefully or not. It deserves better, and so does Rikiya.

Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.