The Yakuza series, as I’ve come to understand it, is quaint and funny, incredibly stupid, has wonderful characters, and is awkward as shit. This is my first. It all started with a 2005 game for the PS2, which is interesting, because when I started playing this one, my first impression was, “This feels like a janky PS2 brawler.” It looks a lot better, but I’d wager a guess the core mechanics haven’t changed much over time.
I’m not sure what the first impression came from — maybe the awkwardly fast movements while you move around the town, or the way your inputs can start to feel out of sync with your character’s actions during an elaborate combo move. But there’s no shortage of jank. It’s in the long delays when some street thug flags you down and you transition into combat mode, without the ability to just seamlessly start some shit by punching someone. Or how your camera switches to an exterior view of any important building you run past, causing your control stick direction to suddenly reverse on you. Or it’s the way that you can’t craft a piece of equipment without an empty slot and you have to run across the street to a pay phone to access your item box, or how it takes five goddamn minutes in the menu to upgrade your Legend skill tree by a full rank. And what is it with Japanese games that make you reload saves over and over until the RNG cooperates…? I could go on.
I think it’s necessary to give a brief proper introduction, so: you play as two protagonists, Kiryu and Majima, both of whom are, sort of, part of the Yakuza. As far as the story goes, neither of them have committed murder, a line that’s still significant to cross in the Yakuza 0 version of 1988 Japan, but both use violence to solve roughly a thousand problems per day. I say “as far as the story goes” because it’s got that Arkham Asylum thing going on in gameplay, where Batman might non-lethally break someone’s spine and leave them face-down in a pool, in obvious need of medical attention and none coming. Hell, in this game you can even obtain guns and shoot people. They just get back up after the fight is over, too injured to keep threatening you, but apparently not too injured to walk away. You’re not supposed to worry about it.
Combat
In some ways, I do like the combat system. I like the heat actions, which are kind of like the environmental attacks in Sleeping Dogs, where you can hit a button when an enemy is next to a car and slam their head in the door. I don’t like how common some of them are — ones that don’t require anything special in the environment to perform, especially when they run several seconds long. But some are really funny and require some really niche setup, like hitting someone while having a mandarin orange in your inventory: you won’t get sick of that one unless you set out to do so. Some would also be better served by requiring some directional input, such as when I intend to do one that would take out three enemies, but the game decides I’m too close to a wall and I end up burning my whole heat bar on one guy who was already half-dead.
It’s more than just button mashing — managing your heat bar can be interesting, and there are counterattacks and so forth — but I found that it can be incredibly frustrating as well, when you take one hit to the back and no amount of mashing the block or dodge button will do anything while you’re exposed to the rest of an enemy’s combo. Fighting big groups of enemies sucks the most, as all it takes is one guy in the rear shooting you with a gun to put you in a long stun animation. While there are really cool fighting styles, and it feels great for a bit to unlock Majima’s Mad Dog style and start ripping into crowds like a fucking vampire, I find most enemies to be pests that aren’t deserving of my time, and typically dealt with crowd fights in about one second with a shotgun. I tended to prefer the 1v1s, my favorite being the boss fight against Nishitani, but probably mostly because I liked the character and I didn’t get stun-locked too much there. There are also QTEs, but they tend to just be surprise attacks where you take a lot of damage if you’re too slow — no instant game-overs. They don’t require a lot of rapid button tapping, and they have really cool animations whether you win or lose them. I’m philosophically opposed to QTEs, but as they go, these ones are pretty good.
Perhaps it’s just not to my taste, but I think the combat would be better off if it were a little slower paced and more dodge and counter-oriented. The fights against Mr. Shakedown could be a step in the right direction, in that you pretty much have to dodge everything, but his attack patterns are a little simplistic and he blocks too often for you to whittle him down with regular attacks, so it mostly comes down to bringing powerful weaponry and using items and heat actions.
The way money is earned per battle never really sat right with me either. Although this ceases to matter at all in the latter parts of the game when you’re rich, big battle payouts require big heat finishers, which caused me to settle into a routine of using the same high-reward group takedown move in every fight early on, even though this was kind of boring. I think this reward system should be connected more to your speed or skill in avoiding damage. Or better yet, for a game with 8 combat styles and more moves in your skill tree than I can keep straight, it should disincentivize repetition, by rewarding less money for taking out enemies through means you had already used in the last few encounters.
Open world and side-content
I like that Yakuza does away with a bunch of driving gameplay that a ton of other games would have done better anyway, and instead scales its traversable world down to a few city blocks explored entirely on foot. (If only it would cut away its pointless and expensive excess elsewhere.) It’s a nice bonus that these few blocks are densely packed with story and sidequest destinations, as well as restaurants and convenience stores with modelled interiors, rather than painted-on doors you’re expected to be driving past at 60 km per second.
What I’m less thrilled about is what a stroll through these streets entails: packs of gangsters every two steps, who carry nothing of value for you, but who want to kick your ass for unexplained reasons, as if they’re random battles in an old-school JRPG world map with its encounter rate set too high. But what’s worse are the gangsters who are content to ignore you, because they’ve already got some poor woman surrounded, and are loudly declaring their intention to drag her off to some hotel room against her will, as long as no badass steps up in the next minute or so to cave their troglodyte skulls in. Like, I can’t look the other way from that. But are you seriously putting random encounters in your game that occur like every five minutes, provide next to no reward, and would make me feel like shit for skipping them? It’s like emotional blackmail and boring at the same time.
I’m generally against the philosophy of filling a jank game with miscellaneous poker and bowling activities to try and justify its value, but there’s some good side content here. None of it is perfect. Equipment searches are RNG hell. Real estate property management is rather slow and pointless when you can earn trillions of yen by fighting Mr. Shakedown. Pocket Circuit racing is pretty cool early on and in principle, where you mod little cars which drive themselves on-rails according to your specs, but it unfortunately hides a lot of equipment stats, and turns out to be pretty RNG-based where you’d think it would be straightforwardly deterministic. As for “Catfights,” an awful Rock-Paper-Scissors game, don’t even get me started — I never even tried to get the achievements or completion points for it.
The best of the major expressions of side-content is Cabaret Club management, which involves Majima recruiting women and raising their levels to better suck money out of men’s pockets, during friendly conversation abetted by overpriced alcohol. The sessions involve directing your hostesses to the customers according to their tastes (cute, funny, etc.), as well as getting glasses and replacing ashtrays according to their hand signals, although the minigame starts to get old before you’ve maxed everything out. The women also have their own stories and sidequests, and are quite fun to chat with in your training sessions with them. An interesting thing to learn was that these hostesses are modeled after and voiced by Japanese porn stars… with the exception of the one I liked most, Yuki. That’s no slight against the others or anything, but it probably shouldn’t shock anyone that a professional voice actor can bring more life to a character.
The usual bowling and pool games are here, and not bad, but not much to speak of (I do enjoy 9-ball). There are arcades with actual ’80s Sega arcade games, which I can’t say are any more fun when you have infinite quarters. Dice games and card games like blackjack and baccarat are shitty in real life, and aren’t any better in Yakuza either.
Mahjong is the real winner, because it’s very complex, a little exotic or at least rarely seen, and a lot more fun in a single-player video game than Texas Hold’em, where bluffing is rather meaningless against an AI that makes its decisions apparently randomly, at least when you don’t have the character faces and interactions that you’d get in Poker Night at the Inventory. Unfortunately, the game provides almost no clue whatsoever about how Mahjong (and specifically Riichi Mahjong) is actually played, forcing me to find guides online. But this was honestly one of my favorite parts of the game, going for those Mangan and Haneman wins.
There are various sidequests (or “substories”) which can involve anything from pulling toys out of a crane machine for a little girl, to disco-dancing with a Michael Jackson parody, or just beating up a lot of people. These can be where the real humor of the game shines through, or just tedious busywork, depending on the substory in question, but any of the ones with multiple-choice dialogue options are unfortunate, since you risk fucking them up. Usually, it doesn’t matter what you pick, and the “wrong” answers often make things funnier, but sometimes it affects your reward or causes you to fail (I got pretty ticked off when I was doing one of the “telephone date” substories and found out I’d have to initiate the quest from the beginning). The only way to know if it’s one of the ones that requires a guide is to check a guide each time anyway.
Story
I like the characters of Yakuza 0, I like the jokes, and the overall story is really compelling at its best, if awfully roundabout. Sometimes it’s earnestly sweet, and other times it’s eye-rolling melodrama. There’s definitely a stereotypical male power fantasy thing where the women never have any agency, but it’s more the clumsiness that really gets under my skin if I’m being honest.
The pacing and scene direction can be truly torturous. Cutscenes stretch for hours, barely advancing the plot. Everything takes whole minutes longer than it should. Characters stop and chat with the worst timing, or take so long to capitalize on an opportunity in front of them that I feel like shouting or throwing my controller. It’s not like things are running in Prince of Tennis time either, where people can spend five minutes discussing a character’s tennis serve before the ball crosses the net: People fucking die while the protagonist lounges around like a dipshit listening to someone’s backstory. Even in a substory where the stakes are certainly going to be low, I got pissed off about this stuff, like when one of Majima’s cabaret club rivals kidnaps a hostess and he goes on like it’s business as usual, getting her back by challenging the guy to see whose club can make more money in a night. He just kidnapped your fucking girl and you have no idea what condition she’s in! You have a baseball bat! Hell, I gave you a gun! Stop fucking talking and break his kneecaps!
Yet there are also poor justifications for combat at every turn. Because you’re playing a brawler, you constantly have to stop and fight someone, even if they aren’t opposed to your goals, because Kiryu can’t take five seconds to explain himself, or because the character wants to “test your resolve” by having you send thirty-five dudes on their payroll to the hospital. It’s the only thing to break up a million hours of cutscenes during the main storyline, but the game would have been better served by cutting out scenes and characters entirely.
There’s plenty of dissonance to be felt all around. For one thing, you make money far too easily in gameplay. You’d think it might affect the situation when you have more money than all the bad guys combined. I honestly began to tell myself my money was fake Monopoly money, a sort of scrip currency accepted by local restaurants and used in the casinos, but which couldn’t be used to buy land or employ a private army. That was the only way to make sense of things. There’s no such answer for why that gun in your inventory vanishes during a cutscene, though. Not to be the guy who says “Why don’t they use a Phoenix Down on Aerith after Sepiroth kills her?” or anything, but it does make it harder to take things seriously.
The bigger issue with the whole “our protagonists don’t kill anyone” thing are the contrivances it requires in a world where cops are apparently non-existent and all problems are solved through violence. Whenever someone really needs to die, and the writers can’t dirty Kiryu’s or Majima’s hands, someone else is there to kill them for you. Cheap, convenient shortcuts.
As a prequel to a long-running series of games, while I haven’t played the others, it’s plain to see that the writers have had a bit of work cut out for them in coloring within the lines. A lot of excellent original characters tend to die in this game, which can really suck, but I think it’s no coincidence that it neatly explains their absences from Yakuza 1, Yakuza 2, or Yakuza 5 for that matter. I was happy that one character in particular avoided this fate, but generally, once you realize the framework the story is operating under, things become a bit more predictable.
Conclusion
This shitty game drives me fucking mad and I hope to play the next one!
Well, maybe. In all seriousness, I am a bit torn. It speaks to the quality of the characters that I still want to see where Kiryu and Majima’s “real” stories start, continuing with the remakes of the Yakuza 1 & 2, which followed the release of this prequel. For all the nitpicking I’ve done, I’ve probably undersold how good the Majima-Makoto scenes are, with voice acting and animation doing most of the heavy lifting. Those will probably stay with me longer than anything else I’ve discussed here, even if they were subject to the same frustrations as the rest of the story. But when I think of how this game was probably ten times longer than it should have been — even after giving up on 100% completion — I don’t think I could do another like it anytime soon.
I’m down for more Mahjong though anytime, that’s a good game.
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