| Main character(s) | Kiryu, an absurdly powerful former officer of an organized crime family who absolutely refuses to die, raises orphans on the beach, and has been trying to retire for 7 games now. Also a loanshark with a heart of gold, a huge guy who escaped prison multiple times, and a wacky dude who thinks life is an RPG | A mute player-cipher, a loudmouth mobster, a west coast gangbanger, an ambiguously Slavic man with an unclear criminal past, a guy from a motorcycle club, a prizefighter/club bouncer, another west coast gangbanger, a retired bank robber under witness protection, and a wacky dude who is the worst person anybody will ever meet |
| Action scenes | Brutal martial arts film setpieces pitting one man against hordes of goons with his bare hands and whatever is lying around, rarely overtly lethal and somehow more impressive for it, heavy emphasis on cinematic finishing moves and epic, emotionally charged boss fights | Highly scripted car chases where the player is actively punished for missing their "stage directions," awkwardly controlled shoot-outs with whatever guns are on hand, maybe some wobbly melee combat in early game before it forgets your punch button even exists and hands you enough machine guns to outfit an army |
| The world | Roughly 9 square city blocks, jam-packed with random people, where about 30% of the buildings can actually be entered and patronized, and about half of those might actually have story content associated with them | Roughly 10-15 square miles of city, painstakingly designed to look like real-world photos of an American city where you can't really tell what any of the buildings are for, and if you're lucky, you might be able to walk into 2 or 3 of them if it's relevant to the story, or press a button to buy them but it doesn't really matter beyond there being a number hovering over it now that represents how much money it's making you whenever you walk over the icon |
| Food and drink | copious product placements of real-world restaurants that are all too happy to describe the ingredients of their health-restoring meals and the histories of all of the booze brands on offer. you are actively rewarded for trying every item on the menu and sometimes it boosts your stats too | fictional brands that sound similar to real-world food, drink, and restaurant brands but are unsubtly jokes about how unhealthy they are for you, or sex puns, or unsubtle jabs at other companies' games. buying a bucket of fried chicken will sometimes cause clerks to say "hope you choke-a-doodle-doo!" |
| Minigames | Video arcades with fully emulated sega classics, fishing, the driving range, an entire golf course in a couple of games, slot car derbies, kart racing, fast-paced noodle cooking, watching cheesy movies with your buddies and trying not to fall asleep, pac-man except the ghosts are homeless guys on bikes, at least 6 different ways to gamble, pachislot machines, karaoke, and oh yeah, drive people around town in a taxi | maybe one video game, play golf, surf the internet for no reason, steal a police car and kill criminals, steal an ambulance and drive people to hospital, play cards with the guys, and oh yeah, drive people around town in a taxi (that you stole) |
| Dating and nightlife | Multiple girls per game based on real-world adult performers and actresses with their voice and likeness, with branching conversation trees, side missions, and storylines. this is relevant to the main story exactly twice | Maybe a couple of girls, who don't really talk to you much, judge you based entirely on what you are wielding in your hand when you walk up to their door, and invite you to play one of the 3 or 4 existing minigames sometimes. or you can throw money at strippers or have dubious health-restoring sex in your back seat. also the one the game requires you to date in a tutorial mission winds up being a plant who has been ratting on you to the feds the whole game, which is treated about as sensitively as a political cartoon |
| The main story | Grim, but emotional, dark, but hopeful; tales of men who cling to life from the fringes of society, and just how hard it is to leave the criminal life behind. treatises on how society is failing the people living at its bottom-most rungs, homelessness, the myth of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, even if a lot of this largely leads to people getting punched a lot | We watched a lot of movies like Scarface, Heat, Falling Down, and American Psycho and we decided they'd make really fun video games and it also informed our entire point of view about what crime fiction is meant for, with copious references to current events because we feel that satirizing it is our right and duty as video game designers no matter how much it pisses people off |