It's a Yakuza game, alright, but it's not one of the best of the series. The remake shares a lot of assets and mechanics from Yakuza 0.
Combat is mostly the same - you have your 3 standard fighting styles from Yakuza 0 that work almost exactly the same as before and the Dragon style, which starts off weak but gets stronger and stronger as you complete certain encounters.
The story is okay for today's standards and not as good as the rest of the series. In contrast to the other entries, Yakuza 1 was made more like a normal action movie with little to no room for a sequel.
If I had to pick the best thing in Yakuza Kiwami, I'd say the Majima Everywhere system. Early in the game, Majima notices that you're in pathetic shape and he decides to harass you until you get better. He's on a constant lookout for Kiryu and you can meet him literally anywhere. You may bump into him while he's patrolling the streets, he may surprise you from a hiding spot and he can also go Roman Bellic on you and challenge you to a game of bowling! Every win against Majima brings Kiryu one step closer to his former strength by giving you an upgrade or a new move for Dragon style and as you fight Majima more, encounters with him get funnier and more ridiculous.
As for differences between the remake and the original… I would say the remake is very faithful to the original PS2 version. Cutscenes are exactly the same, with the same animations (which are so well done, it's hard to notice that the anims were reused) and same camera angles. Dialogues were rerecorded and some parts of the game that weren't voiced are now voiced in the remake, however there is no English dubbing this time (the original English dub is hilariously bad, though). The English translation was redone and now matches the Japanese script closely.

Shortly put, Yakuza Kiwami might not be as impressive as Yakuza 0, but it's still a good game. As a remake, it does its job very well as it improves on the original in many ways.

A platform action-adventure game about digging in a mine.

This game reminds me of Motherload, a old, awesome Flash game I used to play back in the day. This game hooked me just like Motherload. While it's a short game (4-6 hours long), it's well-polished, beautiful and addicting. The final boss fight is a bit of a dissapointment, though - it's forgettable and too easy. It's a good choice if you're looking to play something that you can finish in one weekend.

A point-and-click game.

This game is full of dark, British humour. Dialogues are sometimes hard to understand due to British slang but usually it's hilarious. Puzzles are quite easy, but if you do get stuck, there's a in-game hint system that'll help you out.
This is nowhere close to games like Day of the Tentacle, but it's fairly decent. It's worth a shot if you enjoy British humour.

A Papers, Please style game about being a beat cop (police officer who patrols a specific territory).

This one's interesting. This game was inspired by 80s cop shows and movies, which I like to watch myself. Writing parking tickets isn't really that fun but there are unique, interesting events each day, which will keep you playing. Some of those events are searching vehicles, helping the mafia deal with other gangs or solving weird problems for the community (like finding an actor for a porn movie). While I had fun until the end, the endings themselves are underwhelming, the game just goes "so this and that happened to you and the antagonist, k thx bye". It's also incredibly easy to skip dialogue by mistake if some pops up while you're trying to run, at least that's what happened to me on the mobile version. It's a nice game, too bad that they didn't put much effort into the endings.

A third-person shooter.

This is a game made by the same people behind the Yakuza series. I was curious to see how they would handle a game that has very little to do with Yakuza. The story kept me intrigued, the gunfights are pretty fun and the locations you visit in this game are nice-looking. This game also boasts that you can use your voice to issue orders to your squadmates, but honestly it's just a gimmick that doesn't have much impact on gameplay. The PC port is good, it's stable and with no performance issues. It runs at 60 FPS and 30 FPS in cutscenes. However, some work is required to get controllers to work properly. In the end, I'm surprised that they handled this game quite well! It's not amazing, but it's good and it should keep you entertained for a while.

A third-person shooter with live-action TV show episodes.

In my opinion, the story, cutscenes and TV shows are the best points of the game. Those are really good, I felt like I was playing (or rather watching?) a Hideo Kojima game. There's also tons of collectibles (like e-mails, posters, radio podcasts) that add depth to the world and the story. Gameplay isn't really special, just a TPS with a couple abilities you can use, but it's pretty good. Great game, now I'm excited to see what Remedy will do with Control.

A detective visual novel with Ace Attorney-like gameplay.

You can see right away that the game is trying to be like the Ace Attorney series. It takes a lot of features and traits of that series, however it does change up some things. The story is fairly good, the artstyle is charming, while the dialogues are interesting and funny. It's short though, and the court cases end way too quickly in my opinion. I would recommend to play the Ace Attorney series instead, but if you already completed the series and are still looking for more, this game will help you fill the void.

A 2D action RPG with inspiration from the Zelda and Diablo series.

This game is incredible. Wonderful artstyle, hard, but very fun gameplay, top-notch soundtrack and a wordless story that lets you interpret it any way you would like. It's almost perfect. Gameplay is hard to master, but satisfying. This game is no cakewalk - I sucked at it at the beginning, but as I played more, I had less problems avoiding attacks and slashing enemies. No one will hold your hand, not much is explained, except for controls and few mechanics. If you're up for a good challenge then I would absolutely recommend this game.

A 3D puzzle game.

The puzzles in this game are amazing! I suck at puzzle games and I usually get stuck halfway through, but in this game, I was able to figure out almost all of the puzzles on my own. Solving a hard puzzle always took me a while, but hot damn, I felt so satisfied when I finally solved it! The story gives you a lot of food for thought and the graphics, while not important, look very good. The Road To Gehenna DLC is great, too. It has less, but harder and more complex puzzles. I liked how I could talk with other people on a forum board through terminals and play short text adventure games.
I can easily say this is one of the best puzzle games I've ever played. I would recommend this game to any puzzle lover. If you suck at puzzles, consider playing the free demo first.

Oh boy, here we are… After over a year and a half, I finally managed to complete CSD2 and get true 100% completion! That took really long, but I'm very proud of this incredible achievement.

First, I have to say that I'm one of the beta testers for this game. My point of view is slightly different as I had a chance to play the game and every update before their release. I gotta say, the game right after release and right now feel completely different. The developer wrote a nice article about CSD2's hectic launch and sales, here's the link if anyone is interested. It's a interesting article to read if you're curious about the game development career.

This game is CHALLENGING. You have to make the food exactly as the order specifies, placing the correct ingredients and making sure that the food cooks/bakes/fries/freezes/whatever for a proper amount of time. There's no such thing as undo - screw up just one order and you can say goodbye to the gold medal. The first few moments are easy, but later on the game gets much, MUCH harder. Fortunately, the game has drop in, drop out co-op to let your friend/partner help you out with orders and zen mode available for those who wish for a calmer experience.

During gameplay you get to see all those incredibly appetizing food you make. The food looks so good, you could basically rename "Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!" to "Food Porn: The Game", and there's over 200 different foods! It's a shame that you won't be able to pay much attention to how mouth-watering the food is during tense situations or when you learn to prepare orders super fast.

Also, for a game about cooking and running a restaurant, it has some seriously deep lore, hidden in e-mails, food and restaurant descriptions. Did you know that in the CSD universe, World War I was actually an unsuccessful attempt to combine several cuisines into one, most of the western part of USA was either destroyed or turned into a nuclear wasteland and tea is used to treat existential crises? At certain times it felt like a goddamn cooking game had better writing than some visual novels.

I have to praise the well-done soundtrack that matches the game very well. Chill songs will play in the evening when the day is about to end and intense music will play during rush hours when the starving, impatient mob charges into your restaurant to get some of that sweet, swell-looking delish grub.

Honestly I would be hesitant to recommend Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! shortly after release. It was still good at that time, but considering how many features it was missing, I would tell others to wait for the patches and then buy. But after all those updates that added lots of new content, modes, features, improvements and fixes, I can safely recommend it to any player, casual or hardcore. Supposedly there's even more stuff coming later this year. Oh, and by the way… don't play this game on an empty stomach.

WOW. I was completely surprised that this game got released on PC so early - almost 3 months after Kiwami 1's PC release!

Yakuza Kiwami 2 runs on the new Dragon Engine, which is a massive improvement. Kamurocho and Sotenbori both look marvelous and there are no loading screens during fights and when entering buildings!
Compared to Yakuza 1, Y2's story is much better. It introduces new, more interesting characters (including Kiryu's best rival in the series). Gameplay is radically changed due to the new engine. Fighting is very similar to Yakuza 6 with some improvements. You only have one, new fighting style that combines the features of all Kiryu's styles. Some moves are now gone and some new ones were added. The only issue here is that Kiryu feels overpowered in this game, upgrade damage too much and you'll defeat pretty much everyone with no challenge at all, even on hard difficulty.

When it comes to minigames, Kiwami 2 has a pretty low amount of them, compared to other Yakuza games. Outside of the staple minigames like gambling minigames, mahjong, karaoke, darts, baseball and UFO Catcher, you can also play driving range, Clan Creator from Yakuza 6, Cabaret Club from Yakuza 0 and there's also a toilet minigame for some reason???
As for the soundtrack, while Kiwami 1 remixed most of the old songs and added a couple new ones, Kiwami 2 did the opposite - most of the songs are new and only a few of them are remixes of the original songs. The new songs are average, but all of the remixes surpass the originals. The 2 licensed songs made by Crazy Ken Band are also gone and replaced by songs made by SiM, but those songs don't fit the cutscenes they play in as much as CKB songs do.

Last, the port. The only issue I had with the port is the mediocre performance, but this isn't much of a surprise considering that the PS4 can barely handle this game as well. Some users report frequent crashes, however I did not get a single crash on my PC.

Yakuza Kiwami 2 is definitely a huge step forward compared to Kiwami 1, and one of the better games in the series. Amazing plot, great fighting mechanics, beautiful graphics and fun minigames are hurt by low difficulty and poor soundtrack. I recommend installing this mod to restore the licensed music from the PS2 version of the game.