Yakuza Kiwami – Useful Fighting Tips and Tricks

These are the strats that I used to make battles in Yakuza Kiwami go more smoothly.

Tips and Tricks to Battles

All credit goes to ezzypixel!

Basics

First off, in every fight you wanna make sure you defend yourself well! Don’t just rush into fights arms swinging or you’ll get your butt whooped. Defend and attack when it’s safe. If you’re blocking but the enemy can break through your blocks easily, then don’t block and switch to an evasion defense strategy by running or using rush style evasion.

Also, always fill up your inventory with healing items!

Chapters 1-3

For these chapters, there aren’t many side quests to gain experience points from, so just do all the side quests available and do your best with the skills you can acquire. Make sure you buy lots of food or healing items, you’ll need them!

Get to know the Fighting Styles

• Brawler style is great for blocking and attacking.
• Rush style is great for evading and when your opponent can easily break through your blocks.
• Beast style is great when there are lots of objects lying around (Kiryu automatically picks up the nearest objects when pressing the attack button and swings them at enemies).

How to Stop Bosses Recharging Health

Make sure you learn the essence of extreme abilities as early as you can. When bosses glow a certain color use the appropriate ‘heat actions’ on them to prevent them from regaining health.

You do this by switching to the appropriate colored fighting style and pressing the ‘strong attack’ button while near the glowing opponent while your heat guage is sufficiently charged.

Chapters 4 Onward

This is the chapter where many sidequests begin to open up, so you can begin to gain more experience and get much more powerful. Do as many sidequests as you can and also make sure to do the Majima Everywhere quests. Not only does beating him give you a ton of experience, but this is the only way to develop the Dragon style.

Here are my top tips for making battles much easier from this point onward:

Use your CP to buy items from Bob Utsunomiya (The clown dude)

You will be able to get some powerful items from this guy that will make your life a lot easier. Most notably are items like Trouble Finder (Shows where sidequests are on the map) and most importantly Yakuza Training Gear, Dragon Binding, and Dragon Mail which will increase your defenses dramatically, allowing you take less damage and survive longer in fights.

If your not a fan of grinding, don’t worry, I was able to get these items just playing the game normally and doing side quests without worrying too much about CP.

You can find Bob at Tenkaichi Gate.

Try to focus on learning the Essence abilities!

These are called ‘Heat Actions’ and can be used when the heat bar is filled up a certain amount. Not only do these moves look cool, but they are unblockable! This is a great way to do damage to enemies, especially bosses (Some heat actions may be difficult to perform on some bosses so find the ones that work in each situation)!

Learn the abilities that will help raise your heat more easily!

Abilities such as ‘Black Tortoise Spirit’, and ‘Swallow Spirit’ from the Soul skill tree and, ‘Extra Quickstep Distance’ from the Body skill tree will allow you to build up heat while you defend and evade, allowing you to keep a safe distance while you build up heat and then unleashing unblockable heat actions. Very useful for boss fights!

Depending on the situation you should build up your heat either by attacking or defending. For regular street punks, attacking should be fine, but for bosses and more relentless enemies, defending and evading may be the best way to build up heat.

Tip: Blocking in Brawler Style is a great way to charge up heat, but you can also evade enemy attacks in Rush Style to charge up the Climax Heat Gauge.

Always carry items that raise your heat energy

Keep a handful of heat increasing items like Tauriner ++ handy in your inventory for whenever you face bosses, or Majima. That way, whenever a boss begins to glow and recharge his health, you’ll be ready for it whenever. I always carry 4-7 of them, and fill up the rest of my inventory with healing items.

Use weapons for extra Heat Action options

I don’t normally like to use weapons because durability goes down too easily, but you can use weapons to perform heat actions easily with certain weapons. The reason it’s good to bring weapons is because once you do a heat action on an opponent, if you do the same heat action on the same opponent again, it will do less damage. Carrying weapons allows you to do more variety of heat actions, meaning more damage to your opponents.

Some notable weapons with easy heat actions are:

• Bat (enemy must not be attacking to activate).
• Knife (Heat action when using any style other than Dragon Style).
• Knife (Dragon style heat action once you learn ‘Essence of Mad Dog: Dagger’ from Majima.).
• Katana (Dragon Style Heat Action. Must learn ‘Komaki Swordsmanship’ in Chapter 6.
• Kali/ Dragon Sticks (Dragon Style Heat Action. Must learn ‘Kali Stick Mastery’ from Majima. Enemy must not be attacking).
• Umbrella.
• Blackjack.

There may be more, but these are just the ones I used. Some weapon’s heat actions are stronger and some are weaker.

Use your environment for extra Heat Action options

There are some heat actions which can be performed using your environment.

Remember, your heat bar must be filled a certain amount to do a heat action.

• Wall Grab an opponent and perform a heat action near a wall.
• Cars Grab an opponent and perform a heat action near a car.
• Trash cans Perform a heat action while holding a trash can.

Etc. Try out different things!

General tips when fighting large groups of enemies

When facing groups of enemies, they will usually attack you one at a time. Block one enemy’s attacks then immediately combo attack someone other than the person who just attacked you. This is because the person that just attacked you will usually not attack again right away after just attacking, so you can know your safe from that one guy for a little bit while your pummeling someone else.

When facing really really large groups of enemies, try your best to defend and evade while fighting but also try running around if things get too hectic. Of course make sure there are never enemies behind you.

Keep an eye out for useful items/ rewards in shops, etc.

There are lots of equipment in this game that will give you lots of advantages, keep an eye out for them and make sure you grab them if you think it’s useful. Shops also add new items in certain chapters, so check them out once in a while.

Enemies with Red Aura Recharging Health

You’ll need ‘Essence of Extreme Dragon’ in the Dragon skill tree for bosses that glow with a red aura. However, until you get that ability, you can also stop any enemy with any aura or glow (including red) from recharging their health simply by using any regular Heat action. For example, weapon heat actions or the ‘Essence of Sumo Slapping’ heat action from the Dragon skill tree.

How to Avoid Using a Heat Action

Sometimes you may have a full heat gauge and want to press the ‘strong attack’ button without doing a heat action. You can do so by holding the Left trigger while pressing the ‘strong attack’ button if you’re using a controller.