Handsome Devil with the Cigarette

When i first saw the japanese box art of Yakuza 3 revealed, i immediately thought of John Woo's Hard Boiled. Some one on the Yakuza 3 team must be a fan of the John Woo classic as there is a scene in the film where Tony leads his head back lost in his thoughts, the same manner as kazuma does here. Sure it could be a coincidence as i'm sure there are many other similar pose of one smoking but here's another coincident for you, when Hard Boiled was first released on DVD in Japan, it featured the same iconic shot of Tony Leung on the cover of the DVD box art. While i don't have the DVD in my possession to show or any reference for that matter, i certainly remembered it well enough. I also remember watching my Criterion Collection of WKW's In The Mood for Love and inside, Kar-Wai casually referred to Tony Leung as the handsome devil with a cigarette when they first worked together in Days of Being Wild.

Yakuza 3 is scheduled for release in February next year and i haven't even finish playing Yakuza 2 or heard anything of the Kenzan spin-off getting localised. If there is ever a reason to feel proud as a PS3 owner, this is it. Third-party exclusive doesn't get any better than this.

Stranglehold Scores

Stranglehold as a game alone is such a hard-sell seeing that the whole campaign last for roughly less than ten hours. Sure Midway could have made it a bit longer but there is really no point to it as the whole game is rather repetitive and any longer would not have serve the game any good. In the end, the whole John Woo experience feels unfulfilled because while the game does play like a John Woo film, it lacks that cinema flair of it's silver screen predecessor. The cutscenes in Stranglehold are just plain bad and i found myself wishing that there were less cutscenes in the game, it was that bad.

Thankfully the Hard Boiled movie which inspired the game is also included on the Collector Edition, making the purchase worthwhile at its current price which is about the price of a blu-ray movie alone. Hard Boiled isn't just any movie, if you have not seen it i strongly urge you to watch it if you have any love for action films.

Enemies defeated - 1264
Highest style combo - 32
Style point earned - 2857
Paper cranes found - 110
Damage to world - $ 146,048,617

Overall ranking - C -