Taking in Yakuza 3 [Remastered] for the first time ever
October 5, 2025
So this is the infamous “Blockuza”, huh?
Well, I wasn’t going to try this one out until I finished Yakuza 2, which I did some days ago, so now I’m finally here to give Yakuza 3 a shot.
If you’re here from my social media and had seen that Tamashiro clip, you may already have an idea of how much time I sunk just to figure out the way it is [at least so far in the three chapters I played], but if not, don’t worry - it will be key on the last stretch of what I have to say here.
Note that I’m playing the PC version of Remastered with SilentPatch and a few mods - nothing that changes the intended balance [like Rebalanced, which increases your default unarmed and heat damage…in hindsight now I see why that mod exists lmao] but more so fixing stuff that had got broken on the port, like the PS3 Heat Fix + Feel the Heat Bar, the Quickstep fix and even [from Chapter 4 onwards] the Better Shoulder Grab fix, which is for Y4 Remastered but turns out it works with Y3 as well. I’m otherwise playing the game with the same balance it shipped on the Remastered version.
Although there’s a good chance that those tweaks, even if not directly changing the behavior of the enemies itself, still happen to help a lot on the experience being more palatable than what the Remastered version offers out of the box, which is likely what many had the misfortune of playing and associating that with Yakuza 3 as a result even if those issues weren’t in the original. [Think Sonic Adventure DX’s later ports vs the Dreamcast original]
We ran out of pushovers, now we only got bosses who dodge and block
While the first enemies you fight for a tutorial are still obviously as easy as pie, although they may take a bit more hits to be out for good, you know that this game will be…different, the moment you step into the first fight with Majima.
If you have fought him before on Yakuza 1 and 2, it may not come as a surprise that he has a tendency to dodge most of the attacks you throw at him. But remember, this is the first boss fight of the game. So essentially, you’re thrown at a guy that will keep doing loops around you unless you can somehow stay put to wait for openings of his own.
...Or grab and pummel him repeatedly until he’s done for. Even if he keeps breaking out of your three hit punch combo, it is still possible to consistently grab him every time, so doing that until he’s low on his noticeably long health bar will eventually work - as the Feel the Heat finisher will appear on its own when its time to end the fight.
Even on videos of people fighting the first Majima, you can tell its nowhere near as bad as the proper boss fights with him in the other games either, since his most common charging attack is easy to tell and dodge for a free punish.
The next boss is Rikiya, and while he does block and dodge your attacks more often, he’s also a pushover if you play the classic wait and punish game…or use the tables, chairs and bicycles nearby to bash him while bypassing his usual evasion. He doesn’t really try blocking your weapon attacks in Normal, so going for those is a good way to get him out quickly.
So…if the first Majima fight is easy to do with just some waiting, and the second fight can be cheesed with chairs, then where’s the challenge so far?
Patience and upgrades are key
Are you familiar with Punch Out? You know, the boxing games from Nintendo where most fights after the first ones rely on waiting for your opponent to do a move, dodge and punish accordingly?
This concept isn’t exactly something that was absent in previous or future games after Yakuza 3 - some bosses in 1 and 2 require you to keep your distance to punish properly due to their armored attacks, and in a similar way, both Kurohyou games have bosses [or Yakuza-type enemies…in the case of KH2] that force you to keep your distance as they’ll otherwise consistently parry your attack attempts and leave you on the floor.
The thing with Yakuza 3 though is that this game, even in Normal difficulty, has zero intentions of sugarcoating things for you. It reminded me in a way of SpikeOut when both that and Yakuza 3 allow for attacking an enemy from behind for a guaranteed combo, on top of additional juggles with the right moves to cash out extra damage.
And also like SpikeOut, enemies can also juggle you back for a painful amount of damage taken. Only that SpikeOut, this only tends to happen from a group of enemies attacking you at the same time on a corner. On the other hand, I’ve seen that Yakuza 3 bosses can really take advantage of your stun by themselves alone.
SpikeOut is also a game that values your endurance, positioning and crowd control against enemies, especially if one or more bosses are nearby, which makes sense as an arcade beat-em-up game that only hands you health items and special attacks as dropped items from certain enemies - aside from dying and having to continue.
Yakuza 3 seems to be made for experienced players from the get go [besides the Easy difficulty] with how you’ll have to get familiar with weaving in and out of bosses range for them to attack and punish them accordingly, since they can often dodge or block your combo attempts from the front and punish you for it..
If you can’t maneuver around the bosses as they are, let alone with your starting stats without upgrades, then you better know what to stock up: Healing items, heat increasing items, weapons for easier time bypassing blocking enemies or using heat actions, EXP to upgrade your moves and health…you know the drill - this is a console game after all, so you always have the choice of buying as much as you need.
And I have the feeling that while the first two games sometimes knew this to mess with you [like Jingu’s two-phase fight in Y1 or Hayashi’s absurd healthbar in Y2], Yakuza 3 seemed to be the game where the designers decided that you had too much comfort with healing items and low-balling early bosses. I can say there’s no other early boss that exemplifies this more than…
Suffering with a fist-only fight against Tamashiro [Chapter 3]
So… I spent ONE hour fighting Tamashiro, with every attempt after the first couple ones having me set on beating him WITHOUT healing mid-fight or weapons.
I wanted to know what was truly the essence of “Blockuza”...and hoo boy, sure I got that through my skull.
Tamashiro in his first phase can swing a knife to attack you at close range, which can be easily avoidable at the right position to punish, or throw knives from long range in two specific ways - the first one where he stays still for three knife throws is the easiest one to punish if you remember to dodge and get behind him while he’s still throwing them.
While the thrown knives don’t do that much damage [although the close up knife attacks do], you still have to be patient with your punish attempts if fighting without weapons, as trying to attack him with a combo up-front will, as you may guess by now, only get you blocked or dodged - although it seems you could also intentionally force him to dodge with jabs and wait for his automatic counter attack to dodge and punish that instead. I didn’t really pick that up myself on my fight though, so I ended up relying on waiting for him to attack me instead.
If you decide to fight him without weapons, a funny strat is to whiff the first two hits in Square>Square>Triangle, meaning to whiff the first two punches but then land the gut punch - as you’re most likely to always land the first attack in a combos without getting blocked even up front. What you do with him after the gut punch is up to you, whether to shoulder grab for a guaranteed back combo, or try to loop the gut punch combo on a corner [you can restand him 3 to 5 times]. Charged kicks can also catch him off guard frequently.
If you’re just fighting him normally, then you may have used the furniture to bypass his blocking on the first phase…and then find out you should have saved the furniture [or have bought weapons and healing items beforehand] for his second phase, where he gets this red aura and pulls up brass knuckles.
He can go for 2 quick jabs, a 3 hit combo, a 4 hit combo that can break your guard on the third hit if you just try to block it [meaning you WILL eat the fourth hit in that case] but has the biggest chance for punishing with a back combo should you notice he’s going for it, and a charged punch with armor. You WILL have to keep an eye on his attacks to get a chance of your own, as he stops using knives at all when he switches to this phase.
He will even start trying to block weapon attacks, meaning that you’ll want to wait and punish with the weapon’s longer range [or use heat actions] to cash out the damage they provide.
But if for some reason you’re trying this fight without weapons and mid-fight healing like I did, then you have to be VERY careful to not get caught by his combos when approaching as they do quite the damage - more so if he hits you with the 4 hit combo, as he can do a follow up afterwards on hit.
Note that I DID use upgrades for this fight, for obvious reasons, but even that may still be not enough to stop this from being an arduous task, between the combo speed and heat action damage still being low at this point, as well as not having the guard breaking combo finisher available.
Ironically, I have a point of comparison with Yakuza 2 and Ryuji Goda’s fight in Chapter 3. I was at Level 1 stats [and stayed that way until Hayashi lol] with no weapons and low health without healing items, but I eventually managed an efficient strategy thanks to his glaring weaknesses.
As he can try attacking from a distance and whiff [trying to attack him from the front is still a bad idea because he has armored attacks], punishing those with a grab is easy.
I would pummel with Square if I didn’t have enough Heat yet, push him to the nearest wall with Triangle if I had Heat but was away from the wall…and heat attack him with the wall whenever that was ready. Rinse and repeat until the special Heat animation to end the fight. Figuring that out took me a couple of tries, but the final result was an one minute fight.
...The Tamashiro fight with no healing items [and banning myself from using weapons], even with upgrades, took me 5 minutes on the attempt where I won. After ONE HOUR. It absolutely counts as a [stupid] challenge, but I think it also illustrates how the game’s difficulty is noticeably higher even in Normal due to the weaker damage output you have unarmed [more so for your heat attacks] on top of Tamashiro’s two bars of health rather than one.
And remember, both Goda and Tamashiro’s first fights are in Chapter 3. Go figure.
So…what’s the verdict?
It sure is absolutely a DIFFERENT experience from the first two games, which may sound weird, but you already should have read the contrast I made between both games’s third boss fights.
I wouldn’t call it BAD myself, but I can obviously see why many people would, as it is the equivalent of having your favorite character somewhat nerfed early on [compared to Kiryu in Yakuza 2] while also having the early bosses already forcing you out of your comfort zone with the blocking and dodging - with the first PS2 Shimano fight being a relative pushover and the first PS2 Ryuji fight tasking you with paying attention but letting you cash in free damage easily if you can punish him with grabs.
Comparatively, Tamashiro is kind of like a mid game Yakuza 1 or 2 boss with how evasive he gets, the two healthbars, the fact he has a second phase and that said second phase will force you into dodging attacks at the right time for punishes to not get killed - or eat a bunch of food to stay alive during the fight on top of buying the weapon dealer’s entire stock before the long fight to not spend an eternity on it, whatever happens first.
I guess that I’m not actually at the decision of doing this itself because, if anything, its kind of cool that the bosses are such a threat early on - they aren’t simply walking punching bags to hammer on [Y1’s first Shimano fight is pretty funny due to this disconnect…although I heard Kiwami overcorrected that lmao], but rather are fighters waiting for you get impatient and do a mistake just to pummel you…the same way YOU would wait these bosses to slip up to beat them up..
However, for those that played through the first two games more casually, or even the later games that seem to dial back the blocking frequency, it may feel like the game decided to cut your wings and force you into a more disadvantageous position just for the sake of it, more so if you do something as stupid as try to beat the bosses without weapons or upgrades.
At the end of the day, I’ve seen a few other special fighters after this that forced me to either figure a silly strategy [My strat to beat Yonashiro with nunchakus was to wait for him to attack from away and then running dropkick his face…rinse and repeat] or to just let go of the ego and go for the more obvious options [I wanted to see what was in for Chapter 5, so for the Hasebe fight, after my first death to him suddenly knowing how to stab me with a sword while I was down, I used one or two healing items and tested the Wooden Nunchakus and Katana I had bought back in Chapter 3].
By the time I got to the first Richardson fight, I ended up testing the Better Shoulder Grab mod to use that move...and saw how I could use it for setting up guaranteed back combos, which is pretty nice - if you can get a gut punch into a knockdown that has them down but facing the right way, you have that free combo opening with the grab for you to get some more damage.
I sure have to, one of these days, show up and write something about my surprise enjoyment of the silly side activities in this game though - probably taking in Kiryu’s peaceful times only because I know things will not be so peaceful later on, but it was pretty funny to finally see Kiryu’s singing already be a joy to hear [both with his cheering for Haruka and his singing for Kamurocho Lullaby] as well as play hide and seek and the Mame training substory [which conveniently give EXP too]. Although I don’t know who let Taichi hide in THERE though - had to look up where he was with how specific his hiding place was.
But the silly substory tales [and the whole ass Golf game included for some reason] will have to wait for another day. Assuming that someone [you] is reading this in the first place and wants to see me write more about it…but hey, even if that doesn’t happen, that’s what a website is for, right? What other reason would I have to go on this massive cascade of words just to talk about this one boss fight other than being able to do it at peace on this site?
Anyhow, thanks for reading, and see you next time. Don’t let your Kazuma Kiryu run into Okinawan cars just because you can.