Don't ask me why, but I'm really into visiting filming locations. In October I went to North Bend, Washington to eat lunch in the diner from Twin Peaks. I once made my girlfriend drive to Wales in the rain so I could wander around Portmeirion, the village where they shot cult '60s TV series The Prisoner. I've also been to the Water Gardens of Dorne in Seville, the Ghostbusters firehouse in New York City, the set of The Good Place in Los Angeles, and… well, you get the idea. I just really like going to places that have been in things.

But I'd never been anywhere from a videogame before, which inspired me to take some time out of a recent holiday to Japan to visit locations from two of my favourite series, Yakuza and Shenmue. I've spent many memorable virtual hours in Kamurocho and Yokosuka beating up street punks, feeding kittens, and looking for sailors. But what would it be like to actually go there?

I was based in central Tokyo for a few days, which made getting to Kabukicho (the real-world basis for Yakuza's seedy Kamurocho district) easy, and Yokosuka (the setting for Shenmue, about 40 miles south of Tokyo) slightly more difficult, but basically still easy because of Japan's super efficient rail network.

I decided to start my journey on the mean streets of Kabukicho, the neon-splattered stomping ground of the world's nicest gangster, Kazuma Kiryu. I'm not sure why they renamed it Kamurocho in the Yakuza series (and, more recently, its brilliant spin-off Judgment), but it's obvious the second you arrive that it's the same place. This has been the setting for multiple Yakuzas and is one of those game worlds that almost feels like a second home to me. Of course, I went at night to experience the full force of all those colourful signs.

After navigating the crowds in Shinjuku Station, which is said to be the busiest in the world and absolutely felt like it, it was just a ten minute stroll to the iconic red gate of Kabukicho. As fans of the Yakuza series will know, this is a red light district, stuffed with dodgy bars, love hotels, host and hostess clubs, and other debauchery. You can't walk an inch without a barker trying to lure you into a club or bar, which makes being there a fairly intense experience.

Kudos to the artists and sound designers at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, because they absolutely nailed the loud, relentless atmosphere and cluttered, people-stuffed streets of Kabukicho. It was deeply surreal actually being in that space for real and I was even able to navigate using my knowledge of the games. Everything I expected was there: vending machines, convenience stores, tiny ramen shops, sex clubs, arcades with UFO catchers, garish advertisements for preened hosts and hostesses, and I even found a batting centre.

It started raining when I arrived which made the place look even more chaotic and atmospheric, with neon signs reflecting in the puddles and people rushing around with umbrellas. Before I left I squeezed into the Golden Gai District (called the Champion District in the games) which is a network of tiny, cramped alleys filled with charming, ramshackle little bars. This is one area Yakuza doesn't get exactly right. The basic layout is the same, but the real thing feels way busier and more hectic. It was more like being in Blade Runner.

Thankfully I made it out of Kabukicho without bumping into Mr. Shakedown or having to fight off a load of thugs with a swordfish. About the worst thing I encountered was a fat, wet rat sniffing around some bin bags. If you're ever in Tokyo I highly recommend checking Kabukicho out, and don't worry about the fact that it's a red light district: a lot of that stuff is hidden behind closed doors and there'll be plenty of other tourists there. And if you want to know more about the area, and how much seedier it was in the 1990s compared to today, check out Jake Adelstein's brilliant book Tokyo Vice.

The original Shenmue is one of my favourite games. It's probably in my top five, actually. And ever since I first played it on Dreamcast back in 1999 I've always wanted to visit the city where it's set, Yokosuka. Getting there from central Tokyo by train involves a few changes and takes about an hour and a half, so you'll need to devote a good chunk of your day to going there. When I arrived at the station and walked outside, the first thing I saw was a stretch of water and, in the distance, the docks where Ryo Hazuki worked as a forklift driver.

So far so good, but the real reason I was there was Dobuita Street: a little shopping district and a major location in Shenmue. If you've played the game you'll have ran up and down here hundreds of times, quizzing the locals and chatting with hot dog vendor Tom. Walking there myself, I was a little disappointed by how different it was to the game. You can tell it's the same place, but it felt more bustling and city-like than the quiet, parochial little streets in Shenmue. But the game is set in the 1980s, I guess.

Yokosuka is a weird town, mostly because of its large American presence. A nearby U.S. Navy base means the city is frequented by sailors, and I saw several very American-looking dudes in full camo strolling around, shopping, and eating in restaurants. And the local businesses reflect this, with stars-and-stripes flags, English signage, and even some saying they accept U.S. Dollars. It was by far the least Japanese place I visited in my two weeks in Japan.

You know how a lot of Japanese restaurants have plastic food outside to show you what you're ordering? They had that on Dobuita Street, but with plastic burgers and onion rings. One restaurant even had an Obama burger. I also saw a number of tattoo shops, which of course Ryo Hazuki finds himself searching for at one point in Shenmue. Things felt more like the game when I drifted away from Dobuita Street into the quiet little side streets running parallel to it. I climbed a steep hill to some traditional-looking houses and it was really peaceful and leafy. I could imagine Ryo walking around here.

Even though it was a little deflating how different Yokosuka was to how I imagined based on the game, I'm still glad I visited. Before I left I had tacos in a lovely place called Taco House Yas, which you should definitely visit if you're ever in the area, and I returned to Tokyo feeling like I'd experienced a unique part of Japan. But of the two videogame locations I visited, Kabukicho felt the most like being there. It's remarkable how well the Yakuza games have captured the feel of that crazy place, and seeing it first-hand was a real buzz.

Whenever life is getting you down it's helpful to remember that the Yakuza games exist. The past few years have seen PC ports of the first two Kiwami games and 0, and while the most recent mainline game, Yakuza 6, still hasn't made the jump, Sega now considers the series a "multi-platform" one. 

So it's worth getting excited that a new Yakuza game will be unveiled next month, and it'll be the first since Kazuma Kiryu's story concluded. There's not much info regarding who will star in the next generation of the series, but the below teaser, posted by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's Twitter account, suggests Yakuza Online protagonist Ichiban Kasuga will at least appear in the game.

The Tweet promises a press conference on August 29. It's an exciting crossroads for the series: after seven main games and the recent solve 'em up spin-off Judgment, the shedding of Kiryu sees the Yakuza series at a crossroads. Will it still be set predominantly in Kamarucho? Will karaoke return after its devastating absence in Judgment? Only time will tell. One thing seems fairly certain, though: it'll launch of PS4 before it comes to PC, so prepare for a gruelling wait.

Phil has had the great pleasure and responsibility of reviewing the Yakuza PC ports, and the verdicts have been favourable. The most recent port, Yakuza Kiwami 2, was described as "a return to form for the singular crime series".

Sure, we pretty much already knew that Sega plans to release a PC port of Yakuza Kiwami 2 on Steam. The game has been rated for PC by the ESRB, after all. But now we have another clue: A logo change for Sega’s official Steam account. The account's new avatar is very clearly the eyepatch worn by Yakuza series side-star Goro Majima. 

How do we know this matters? Well, it’s been the way Sega has signaled this kind of thing for years now.

A couple years ago, Sega released an 8-bit version of Bayonetta to tease the fact that the game was coming out, along with Vanquish, on Steam.

Now that Sega is using Majima’s eyepatch as its official Steam avatar, it seems pretty likely that a PC reveal of Yakuza Kiwami 2 is imminent.

This seemed like a pretty certain thing already, given that the both Yakuza 0 and Kiwami have already landed on PC. But Sega likes to hype up these PC reissues, and they’re giving us a pretty clear indication now that the next Kiwami version of the Yakuza series is imminent. 

As far as we're concerned, bring 'em on, Sega.

Yakuza spin-off, Judgment, may be headed to PC. 

In an interview with IGN Japan (via ResetEra), producer Kazuki Hosokawa intimated that the team was keen to release the series on formats other than PlayStation 4 in order to "increase the player base". While he dashed hopes of a Nintendo Switch release any time soon, he did not do the same for PC—instead, Hosokawa said the developer was "considering the possibilities" across a range of additional formats. 

"I think the hurdles have been lowered by putting [Yakuza] on Steam," Hosokawa said. "I think that we were able to increase the player base because people who do not have PS4 can also play the games. At present, [Judgment] has not been decided yet, but it is considered as one of the options. We are in the process of considering the possibilities not only for Steam but also for other formats."

Last week, an ESRB rating tipped us off that Yakuza Kiwami 2 was due to hit PC. The game initially came out on PlayStation 4 in Japan in 2017, and it's a remake of 2006's Yakuza 2 in the Yakuza 6 engine. 

Yakuza Kiwami came to PC last month, too, but before you play that, you might want to jump into Yakuza 0, which Phil gave 90/100 in his review last year.

Welcome back to Kamurocho, the city district where nearly every problem can be solved by kicking, punching or just lifting a guy up into the air and slamming him arse first onto a bollard. A conman tries to scam you out of money? You can punch your way through that. A retired judo pro requests a tour of local nightlife? Yet more punching. An eccentric gangster engineers a series of increasingly elaborate attacks in an attempt to provoke you into fighting him? You get the idea.

Your oath brother murders the head of your crime family? That's a slightly trickier problem to solve. Instead, series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu decides to take the fall, resulting in a ten year prison sentence and his expulsion from the Toko clan. Kiryu returns to Kamurocho in 2005, only to learn that Nishikiyama—the man he willingly gave up a decade of his freedom for—has betrayed the clan, triggering a desperate battle for leadership. This, too, is a problem that can be solved by punching. A lot of punching, spread over many hours.

Yakuza Kiwami is, in other words, another Yakuza game, and will be instantly familiar to anyone who's played Yakuza 0. There's the slowly unfolding melodramatic crime drama, the slice-of-life sidequests, and the selection of minigames and activities, from bowling to karaoke to a questionable card battler about scantily clad women roleplaying as insects. It's both serious and silly, sometimes within the same cutscene, but it works because Kiryu is such an inherently likeable lead—calm, authoritative, naive and endearing.

If you haven't played Yakuza 0, go and do that first. Yakuza Kiwami is a remake of the first game in the series into Yakuza 0's engine—its story ever-so-slightly tweaked and expanded to better integrate with the plot points of the '80s prequel. You don't need to have played 0 to understand what's happening in Kiwami, but it's the bigger, better and more well rounded experience. As a remake of a 13-year-old game—even one with extra features—Kiwami takes place entirely in Kamurocho, and offers fewer side activities and less playful substories. It's a relic from a time before the series fully knew what it was, dressed up in the clothes of Yakuza at its best.

Perhaps it's better to think of Yakuza Kiwami as an expansion pack to Yakuza 0. It's by no means a bad game, but expectations need to be managed. Take the reappearance of Kamurocho. Every Yakuza game features the district, but most offer new perspectives, or balance it alongside other locations. Not so in Kiwami. Yet it's still a joy to discover how the setting has changed in the 20 years since the events of Yakuza 0—realising the significance of Millennium Tower in relation to 0's main plot, or discovering what lurks beneath West Park's homeless camp.

0's colourful filter is gone, and the streets feel greyer and less vibrant. The '80s bubble economy is long over, and money is harder to come by—no longer flying from the bodies of beaten up thugs or earned in the millions thanks to the chicken you assigned to manage your real estate holdings. One of the things I love about the Yakuza series is that its semi-satirical edge isn't aimed at the vague concept of urban Japan, but at specific points in time. By using 0's engine, Kiwami highlights the difference between the mid-'80s and mid-'00s in the starkest possible way.

This is a mostly faithful remake. Many of the cutscenes are shot-for-shot recreations of those found in the PlayStation 2 original. But Kiwami also adds new elements, both for better and worse. A clear improvement is the cutscenes added between each chapter, that show what happened to Nishikiyama during the ten years Kiryu was away. They help to add further depth to the character, and build nicely on his role in Yakuza 0. Less positive is what the remake does with Majima.

He's the star of a new system called Majima Everywhere, and it's a bit of a mess—a clunky way to shoehorn Yakuza 0's second protagonist into a game he barely appeared in. When Kiryu returns from prison, Majima challenges him to a series of fights—ostensibly as a way to help him resharpen his edge after ten years away. Throughout the game he'll appear, either chasing you down on the streets or ambushing you out of bins and manholes and giant traffic cones.

Some of the scenarios are entertaining, but the frequency and progression of the system means it quickly becomes tedious. Yakuza Kiwami's combat system is just as explosive and entertaining as 0's (because it's exactly the same), but the lengthy, protracted battles against Majima at his highest ranks are more about repeated execution of a handful of safe counters. After a certain point, he's just not much fun to fight.

Worse still, the system feels incredibly jarring whenever you encounter the version of Majima that appears in the story proper. The character has softened a lot across the series, and so the version of him newly written into Majima Everywhere feels like a completely different person to that found in the 13-year-old main plot. One second he's impersonating a club hostess as a way to goad Kiryu into a fight, the next he's brutally beating his own men for not following instructions he never explicitly gave them. There's always some dissonance to be found in open world games, but this is a failure of characterisation in a series that revolves around the bonds between its characters. That's difficult to reconcile.

Despite everything, I still recommend Yakuza Kiwami. If nothing else, it's worth it for the story, which introduces characters and events that go on to shape the series as a whole. More than the internal disputes of the Tojo Clan or the peculiar friendship of Kiryu and Majima, the heart of the series' story revolves around Kiryu's relationship with Haruka. That makes Yakuza Kiwami, and the pair's initial meeting, an important part of the series as a whole. Kiwami is probably my least favourite Yakuza game, but it's still an evocative, detailed and largely entertaining gangster thriller full of charm and absurdity.

Update: Sega has confirmed the February 19 release date with the trailer above. Yakuza Kiwami will cost a lean £14.99/$19.99 when it releases on Steam. 

Original story: A PC release of Yakuza Kiwami (and Yakuza 0) was announced at last year's PC Gaming Show, but there was at the time no indication of a release date. A Steam update in November suggested that a launch was imminent. And now it appears, unofficially but only technically so, that it will finally arrive on Steam on February 19. 

The Steam listing still indicates that Yakuza Kiwami is "coming soon." Take a close look at the animated "Majimaaaa!" gif, however, and you might notice an odd flash at the very end. Download that sucker and split it into individual frames, and you will discover that the very last one looks like this: 

I've reached out to Sega for confirmation, but under the circumstances I'm willing to call it: Yakuza Kiwami on February 19. I'll update when the Steam release date is changed to make it officially official.