This is my first Yakuza game. However, this review is revised by a me that is nearly done with Yakuza Kiwami, the next game chronologically.

A masterclass in storytelling with fun combat, a mountain of side content and a ton of cool moments. It’s a great prequel that fits itself into the timeline well.

What exactly is Yakuza? Something I thought to myself before buying the game, having been exposed to equal small samples of intense, serious action drama sequences and insanely goofy minigames and side stories, and something I STILL thought as I played. Somehow, everything just clicks. You can watch a character die on screen and hold back extremely masculine tears and then go and play the toy car minigame for an hour and a half and these two things do NOT collide and are EQUALLY entertaining.

The writing was perhaps the strongest point of the game series. The game features two playable characters who you swap between at different Chapters, that being Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima, who each have their own amazingly written stories with fantastic characters, unexpected twists, emotional moments and epic fights. Having been aware that Goro Majima is essentially a psychopath in the future games it’s interesting seeing the much more serene, serious version of him in 0 first- in many ways it helps show how he got to that point in future entries.

The combat is not very deep but is still fun. Landing special attacks and combos are awesome and the sheer amount of animations for said special attacks is staggering. They’re very context-sensitive and experimenting often yields badass (and / or hilarious) results. Having to actually unlock the styles is fun though it’s both strange and funny to think that both Kiryu’s iconic moves and outfit do not have a deep backstory and are instead just “Kiryu thought they looked cool”.

The one complaint I’d have about the game, which is more of just a me problem, is the upgrade system. There are skill trees (wheels?) for each moveset, meaning players will at least have 6 by the end of the game, and every move or bonus is unlocked via money, which you get quite a lot of in the game but I’d still much prefer some sort of EXP like in future installments over it as I always found myself asking “what if I need this later?” which lead to much of my playthrough having little to no upgrades whatsoever, even despite how cheap most items are.

Personally, though their stories were equally interesting, I found Kiryu to be far more fun in general. While playing as Majima, I was annoyed by how little money I found myself getting from fights despite playing the same way as I did Kiryu, which is probably on me. As well as this, Majima’s side job of running the cabaret club is more monotonous than Kiryu’s real-estate wars as it requires to actually put aside several minutes to basically play a tycoon game whilst Kiryu’s is just, go to this menu, maybe change something, come back later and make bank, repeat. Either way I did not finish either of them, the reward of a new combat style just wasn’t appealing enough and the story wasn’t all that interesting.

I’d heavily recommend Yakuza 0 to anyone looking to get into the franchise. It’s a thrilling crime drama, but it’s not just that- it’s an RPG, it’s a beat-em-up, it’s a dating sim, it’s a toy car racing game, it’s a lot of things and it’s brilliant, and it’s all bundled in an amazing story started by a teeny tiny piece of land (you’ll get what I mean).

All in all a thrilling game and I can’t wait to play more entries.

I played this several years ago and it may very well be one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Boring often broken gameplay, annoying mechanics, a lack of special abilities between characters (a staple of LEGO games), and an almost completely different story. Both of the major reveals of the movie are shoehorned in during the final cutscene, where they are introduced and immediately resolved in the same sentence. The presumed “antagonist” of the movie has zero relevance to the game at all and only appears in cutscenes and in a sidequest where you have to take a picture of her. An absolute waste of time and an awful LEGO game, do not play.