After his time outside, it's time to go back to serving his time and paying his debt to society. Taiga Saejima is a man of his word.
But before that, why not go see his kyoudai?
Of course Majima makes us fight a bunch of his goons, that's just his thing, but I found this fight to be exceptionally easy - that's just Saejima for ya'. A tough ass guy.
The chapter is aptly named Ends of the Earth because Saejima is sent all the way up north to serve his sentence in the freezing cold of Hokkaido, near a town known as Tsukimino.
Once in prison things don't really get that much easier to now 'almost-bald' Saejima.
Because of this scary looking son of a bitch known as Kugihara, Saejima has to endure constant torture to shield his mates from it, and he can't throw a punch back so as to not make his parole get delayed.
Things are kind of chill - if you ignore the constant physical torture because he has his mates. And with them he does some crazy stuff such as an exercise in imagination, basically making him spend a day as a one of his mates before they were imprisoned.
I really liked this "exercise in imagination", it gives you a taste of Tsukimino, the town you'll be spending time at later as Saejima and even lets you play karaoke and hang out with a hostess.
This is also the first time in the Yakuza franchise that Baka Mitai can be played as far as I know, so this is where the memes were spawned. But c'mon, it's a great song.
Kodomo nano ne...
After his friend is suspected of hurting one of Kugihara's men, he finally lets the tiger in him loose and smacks Kugihara, playing right into his hand.
It's fine though, the main guard is friendly and helps you and your friend Baba (the one who was suspected of doing the hurting) escape because a bunch of Yakuza are being transfered in to the prison in a plot to kill Saejima.
The escape sequence is fairly insane, as you make your way down a mountain on a snowmobile.
Baba gets hurled off the snowmobile and hurts himself, you get confronted by a giant bear and have to fight it - I'm not making this up.
Yakuza/Like a Dragon... the franchise that keeps on giving.
In the end you're rescued by this mountain hunter and with his help, you and Baba head to Tsukimino. You can actually stay in this area and hunt, it feels like Monster Hunter mixed with Yakuza. It's quite fun.
After arriving in Tsukimino, you and Baba have to hunt down Baba's boss and ask him some questions regarding the plot which I won't spoil, but I'll say something: even if Tsukimino is a bit repetitive, it's a really pretty place.
Hell yeah, AMD. The guys who made my GPU and the APU on the console I'm playing this on (Xbox Series S).
More silly digital tourism.
Baba's boss is in a festival, and when the planes come flying, you two kidnap him and some real crazy stuff goes on. Again, not going to spoil it, I just thought this scene was really really cool.
The chapter ends with a flashback to Okinawa's Asagao run by Kiryu, with a mysterious woman trying to convince him to let Haruka, he's adopted daughter into showbiz.
I think that's a great way of setting the next chapter up.
Overall, Saejima's chapter was pretty damn crazy and filled with emotion, I loved it.
This game has been delivering some great moments.
I'm not sure if I'll post more about Yakuza 5, because I haven't captured too much content of the chapter that goes on after this one and I don't like to rely much on Google Images, but we'll see. Right now I'm at over 20 hours of gameplay. At the end of Saejima's chapter I was at around 13 hours. Meaning Saejima's part was way shorter than Kiryu's part, but that's probably because I didn't do much hunting and decided not to go after the big bear.
But yeah, that's pretty much it for Part II. Part III has been real fun so far, so I'll see what I can do for it.
Thanks for reading!