steam-834530.log
Oh, yeah, here it is.

Hello @noctis150, please add PROTON_LOG=1 %command% to the game's launch options and drag and drop the generated $HOME/steam-$APPID.log into the comment box.

System Information

• SO: Arch Linux
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
• Driver/LLVM version: Nvidia 418.42.02
• Kernel version: 5.0.1-arch1-1-ARCH
• Proton version: 3.16-8 (Beta)

Symptoms

Gamepad (DS4) don't work.
Can't manual save (the same goes for Yakuza 0) / only autosaves work.
The game freezes when closed. Have to exit with Alt+F4. (the same goes for Yakuza 0)

Edit: it seems that these 2 bugs only occur when you disable esync.

steam-834530.zip

I am also having the controller issue with proton 4.2.
Setting the steam input per-game setting doesn't appear to help. The best I can get is in-game the gamepad buttons will start registering as weird keyboard keys, such as the x360 left analog stick registers volume up and down buttons.
Here is the log with latest proton. I entered just the menu here then exited the game. The game crashes on exit but you don't notice it visually.
YakuzaKiwami_steam-834530.log

I notice in the log that there are many lines referencing dinput8.dll.

Here is a better log to look at after I added +dinput,+xinput,+hid,+hidp,+hid_report,+plugplay to the WINEDEBUG list:
YakuzaExtraInputDebugsteam-834530.log

This appears to be fixed in Wine with the following commit.
https://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/commit/085e58878f58c8e9fd03f8b56ac5489ab844b3e1

Yes with wine-staging 4.6.r4 my DS4 works.

It seems right. Wine 4.7 fix this problem.
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46998

Following the directions mentioned originally by Notocu here I finally got this working with a home cooked proton.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/834530/discussions/0/1679190184068161147/

Note that the sdl joystick option appears to break at least Yakuza again so I had to turn it off.

# Proton SDL Joystick support 
_sdl_joy_support="false"

In addition if you have never used proton-tkg before it can be a little confusing as there are many configuration scripts included. So I will include a working one here to build off of plain wine 4.7 that I know fixes the problem in this game.

Directions for building this on ARCH:

close steam
git clone https://github.com/Tk-Glitch/PKGBUILDS.git
cd ~/PKGBUILDS/proton-tkg
#replace proton-tkg.cfg with my attached version. (would clog up this page quoting it)
./proton-tkg.sh
Restart Steam
Right click Yakuza Kiwami > Properties > Force Steam Play version > Proton-tkg 4.7

proton-tkg.cfg.zip

Note that in the wine-tkg-git folder there is the customization.cfg that list all config options and associated notes, but it does not apply when cooking up the proton build.

The custom build is working for me! Playing Kiwami with a Steam Controller. I had to build in the home directory. Took about 30 minutes to build but was worth it! Hopefully Proton get officially updated soon. Cheers for the post!

System Information

OS: Ubuntu 19.04
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070
Driver/LLVM version: Nvidia 430.40
Kernel version: 5.0.0-23 
Proton version: 4.11

Symptoms

Game doesn't start at all. When I launch it through steam, the window saying the game is starting shows up, Steam is saying that I'm in-game, but nothing happens. The exe process still exists, but does nothing so I just kill it manually.
steam-834530.log

Edit: I found a workaround. Since I'm on a laptop, I had to specify the game to use the Nvidia video card using DXVK_FILTER_DEVICE_NAME. Not sure if it's the intended bahevior, that's the only proton game I have to specify this.

I have tried verifying game files and reinstalling the game before raising issue.

EDIT: I have fixed my issue. My game was installed on a different drive, I moved the install location to ~/.local/share/Steam and the game has started working normally.

I have to add DXVK_FILTER_DEVICE_NAME=NAVI to make the game run on my dgpu otherwise it runs on my igpu which results in low performance. This is the only game in my library which I need to specify gpu manually.

Unable to launch this game after playing it without issue for weeks. No updates to the game itself, have reinstalled the game and deleted my proton prefix.

Game will start, show the in-game FPS counter in the corner, then crash. Have tried Proton 7.0-6, 7.20 through 8.0-2, as well as 7-22-GE. All versions showed the same result save for GE being windowed.

Game launches without an issue on my Steam Deck

OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS
Kernel: 6.2.6-76060206-generic
GPU: Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB
Driver ver: 525.105.17
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
RAM: 32GB DDR4
Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.25
steam-834530.log

Steam Beta client enabled

EDIT: added log

EDIT 2: Addition troubleshooting: moved to the Flatpak build of Steam instead of the deb, but results have stayed the same

UPDATE: I have since posting this: Verified game file, changed proton version, uninstalled and reinstalled the game, moved the game between the same drive as /home and a 2nd drive (SSD). No change, and now trying to launch the game at all gives an error saying "Compatibility tool failed"

I'm adding another log, though I'm not sure if it's actually any different as I never saw the game crash this time
steam-834530.log

Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/2403#issuecomment-1327897910

I've seen people reporting this under windows, and it affects Yakuza 0 (638970) too (Both are using the deprecated ISteamController interface, maybe that's the problem?).

There's a workaround to it though, if you're connected via USB, you can just reconnect the controller to see the PlayStation prompts.
If you're connected via Bluetooth you need to alt+tab the game, go to the properties of the game on steam and disable steam input then go back to the game and repeat the same process to enable steam input, and you'll be able to see the PlayStation prompts.

As many others have reported, the game starts, a black screen is rendered for 1-2 seconds, then the game crashes. I've tried a ton of Proton Versions (Experimental, 9.5GE, 9.0.1, 8.0.5, 7.0.6, 6.3.8), I've tried with and without mangohud, I have tweaked nearly every setting in the graphics.ini file. I'm at a loss for what I could do next, so I am giving up for now.

OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS
Kernel: 6.8.0-76060800daily20240311-generic x86_64
GPU: Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti
Driver ver: 550.67
CPU: 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-11700K @ 3.60GHz
RAM: 32GB DDR4
Desktop: Whatever ships with Pop!_OS

yakuza-kiwami-1.log

I had no luck reproducing this launch issue with RTX 3070 on Arch Linux, at least. I tried 555.42.02 and 550.67, older and newer kernel (6.6.32-1-lts, 6.9.2-arch1-1), x11 and Wayland, Steam client stable and beta.

As many others have reported, the game starts, a black screen is rendered for 1-2 seconds, then the game crashes.

The game appears to have a bug with long install paths, causing it to crash at launch - it's likely the cause of your crash. The default library path when using Flatpak Steam can trigger it.

You can work around the bug by creating a new Steam Library somewhere with a short path (e.g. /opt/steam) and moving the game to that library.

That's definitely it! The game launches and gets to the menus! It was not able to come even close to properly detecting my monitors settings though, so the default resolution was horrendous: 1024 x 2880 instead of 2560 x 1440. I was able to resolve this by editing graphics.ini which is found in:

~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/834530/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Roaming/Sega/YakuzaKiwami

Thank you so much @rlac and @kisak-valve! I had no clue that could be an issue, or that PROTON_SET_GAME_DRIVE existed. I'm going to go make a post on ProtonDB.

@cache-rules Thank you for confirming! I'm going to add this game to the gamedrive override section in the proton script so that folks won't have to manually set it in the future :)

Thank god for these comments, I had this problem on linux with Yakuza 3 and also Yakuza 4 but one of these fixes you guys mentioned solved the issue. I used both the PROTON_SET_GAME_DRIVE=1 %command% launch option and I also adjusted my graphics.ini to be windowed and suddenly it launches now. Thanks a bunch, this was a struggle for me to fix lol

@Deamane I added Yakuza Kiwami to the list to enable PROTON_SET_GAME_DRIVE automatically, but I didn't add any of the other Yakuza games. It sounds like I should add Yakuza 3 and Yakuza 4 too?

Does anyone know if any other Yakuza games need PROTON_SET_GAME_DRIVE on their system so that I can add all at once?

Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/2403#issuecomment-2296945695

Maybe it needs to be added for Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 5, which share the same engine as Kiwami. (Yakuza 5 is known for having file system problems with the 8.3 filenames, but that's another story.)

Does anyone know if any other Yakuza games need PROTON_SET_GAME_DRIVE on their system so that I can add all at once?

I tried the rest of the numbered Yakuza games on the same setup that required PROTON_SET_GAME_DRIVE=1 for Kiwami to work (Flatpak Steam on Fedora Silverblue). All tests were done using Proton 9.0-2.

I can confirm that 3 and 4 need PROTON_SET_GAME_DRIVE=1 to launch - without it they crash immediately at launch the same as Kiwami.

The rest (0, Kiwami 2, 5, and 6) did not crash and were able to start a new game (which was as far as I tested).

Thank you for the responses! @rlac Thank you for the confirmation testing! I'll add 3 and 4 for now. If anyone has issues with any others, feel free to ping me and I will add them as well :)

@rlac This should now be shipped with the latest Proton Experimental, so you should no longer need to use Bleeding Edge.