A great number of Japanese games rest on the time-tested foundation of plagiarism; heck, who knows where Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima would be without the combined works of Ridley Scott, John Carpenter, and James Cameron? But there comes a point when imitation is more of an act of desperation than flattery; and in the case of Yakuza: Dead Souls, the flagrant borrowing seen throughout doesn’t come from a place of sincere affection, but rather, a desire to graft an undead angle onto a series desperately in need of a reboot.
Granted, it’s tough to innovate within the overplayed zombie game genre, but it’s equally difficult to forgive a game that offers up not one, but four distinct ripoffs of the iconic special infected from Valve’s Left 4 Dead within their own game. The Yakuza series is known for featuring an abundance of ideas borrowed from many different sources — which is why many refer to it as “the Japanese Grand Theft Auto” — but in the case of Dead Souls, Sega chose to pilfer concepts from a multitude of zombie games without thinking much about what these individual elements added to their respective packages. The result is an experience that provides the basic thrills of zombie-killing within the strangely addictive lite-RPG Yakuza framework, but one that never forges its own identity amid a sea of clunky combat.
