If Shenmue’s dead, it’s dead in the same way that Elvis is ‘dead’. It’s easy to look at the Yakuza series and draw the parallels with Sega’s last great indulgence, but there’s something very different about them. It’s as if someone got hold of Ryo Hazuki by the collar and shook him up a bit before it all went wrong, then made him get a proper job and stop looking for sailors.

In short, Yakuza is like Shenmue’s alpha younger brother. It’s got more purpose, more focus, and is much grittier. It’s hardly what you’d call authentic, however: Yakuza 2 is all about a bit of the old ultraviolence, and romanticising the gangster lifestyle. The first game’s protagonist, Kiryu Kazuma, returns to crack heads, glower moodily and jog around shops in no particular order, triggering hours of cutscenes and legions of minigames.

It flits mercurially between these activities: at any point you’re liable to be accosted by a group of thugs, while climatic moments are ridiculously huge fights through buildings stuffed with henchmen before a boss who’s trained in 20 martial arts, including the feared Massive Health Bar technique. Fighting’s a mixture of speed, clumsiness, solid connections and vicious finishers, and is as chaotic and satisfying as all of that suggests. Advanced techniques are quickly unlocked, and by the sixth chapter you’re a demented ninja in a sharp suit who only the aforementioned boss juggernauts can put up much of a struggle against. Unfortunately, the strange lock-on system of the original, which fixes on direction rather than specific enemies, returns. It can be worked around, of course, but feels a little wobbly in larger groups where enemies easily blindside Kiryu and he sometimes ends up punching thin air.

Between the bigger fights you end up in one of several towns, each crammed with restaurants, clothes shops, pharmacies, mah-jong parlours, hostess clubs, bars and arcades. These sections are exhaustively detailed timesinks, stuffed with ultimately useless but utterly hypnotic collectables, distractions and arcade machines. You’ll lose hours: the first time you find a bar it’s impossible not to get smashed – each drink comes with addictive tidbits of information about the manufacturer and taste. Buying trinkets for the hostesses, finding out the history of foods, pouring money into the UFO catchers and picking up experience points for half the things you ‘waste’ time on… It’s easy to forget about all of the organised crime Kiryu needs to get through.

He always get pulled back in, though, because the narrative is an expertly paced conspiracy story that twists in some surprising ways – with a sprinkling of charming lunatics of the sort at which Sega always used to excel. It’s all done through those lengthy cutscenes, however, which can grate a little when they pass beyond the ten-minute mark. On the plus side, the translation is simply subtitles this time around and is of a generally high standard. It lapses, but rarely, and maintains the series’ tradition of colourful language.

Yakuza 2 is another highlight of PS2’s astonishing Indian summer – at least from the perspective of western gamers (it’s been available in Japan since December 2006). Its flaws are downplayed in the context of its range, its humour, its oddities, and its alternately psychopathic and pandering NPCs. It’s as unusual as it is conventional. Most of all, it’s one of those Sega games that the company no longer seems so keen to make. It really is a Sega game, then, in the most complimentary sense of the term.

8/10