>>718403181
As someone who just played them for the first time on a PS3 after doing Kiwami 1+2 I can tell you that just saying "clunky" doesn't do it justice. Picking up the PS2 games after the modern ones, yes, they are showing their age but you can tell a LOT of effort was put in. Y3 is the opposite. It's a mess in ways that even in the 2000s they should have known not to do.
The graphics are ugly, weird shaped models with lores textures and lumpy normal mapping. transition to and from combat is slow for no reason as it was an HD installed game, no need for long transitions to mask disk reading. The enemies are horrible to fight where they'll just dodge around and block everything which is tedious enough on its own, but then out of nowhere they'll all start attacking at once and never stop so you get juggled and downed repeatedly. Certain bosses can get you in an infinite because of this. And then on top of that not only did they not fix it for the remasters they also added 60fps fuckups to the mix where stuff that actually was okay is now broken. The story is also just rough. It's shorter than prior entries, there's fewer substories and those that are there are boring and serve just to time waste.
Yakuza 4 cleans up a LOT of the fuckery. Sure, the combat still has deep flaws, but the game just plays better in general. I can imagine lots of people were upset that they spend 3/4s of the game playing as everyone but Kiryu, but I didn't mind. Though I would say that the combat engine is just not designed for Saejima's slow moveset. On hard you kinda have to cheese it too often to not get stunlocked every time you press a button. The cabaret missions are really tedious.
Yakuza 5 put Kiryu up front and did something about the slow fights. And while there's now more variety to the side content, it's a bit marmite. Out of the 3 it's the least worst.
