I've never played a Yakuza title before. That being said...
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...Where do you even start with this?
This game is enormous, but not in the way that, say, an open world game like Breath of the Wild or Cyberpunk 2077 is enormous, where it's a handful of gameplay mechanics spread evenly over a huge area. The amount of completely distinct, entirely optional things in this game is staggering. I fell down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, wasting hours on disco dancing, karaoke, real estate investments, hooking up with telephone girls, playing arcade games, and on and on. Not only that, the game is constantly adding NEW side games, each somehow weirder than the last. By the time I was watching bikini babes wrestle in a secret underground arena, I had to take a step back and think about what I was doing, but that's not even the strangest minigame.
On this front, I suppose I'll just say the minigames are good. Some definitely interested me more than others (there's so many you really can pick and choose), but only a couple seemed like they could've been better implemented. The baseball, for example, suffered from somewhat awkward controls, I still have literally no idea what is going on with the darts, and the catfight arena was just a mechanically boring idea, but most were surprisingly engrossing little time wasters.
The main minigames are the cabaret club on one side and the real estate investing on the other. There's not much to be said about the real estate; it's significantly more profitable, but it never amounts to much more than busy work. The cabaret mechanic is much more fleshed out and much more fun, reminiscent of something like Diner Dash (I'm sure there's a more contemporary reference out there). Cycling out your team to get good stat compositions, shuffling girls around to different tables to keep everyone happy - none of it's super deep, but it's engaging. I also wasted an embarrassingly long time on customizing the girls' outfits to get just the right stats. The only aspects I would complain about are that the special training is insanely tedious, and another problem that both minigames share. In Yakuza 0, they seem to have a very specific idea of the order you should do everything that they just don't tell you. If you're like me and you wander into the side businesses when you feel like it, you will end up pretty far off completing them by the time the game is coming to a close. At that point, you either ruin the flow of the story grinding at them incessantly or you just say "forget it", which I unfortunately chose to do. These minigames should probably either be introduced earlier or progress faster.
On to the last of the side content, the "substories", as they're called. Most boil down to either conversations or some basic combat (which I'll get to later). That may not sound like much, but the writing on these is mostly pretty great. I'll get more into the writing a little later, but the characters you meet and interactions you partake in here are bizarre, funny, endearing, and, if you can believe it, sometimes inspirational. I know the lack of facial movements is a technical limitation, but Kiryu holding this constant scowl in every interaction makes so many of the humorous scenes so much funnier. Maybe my hardest laugh in the whole game was during the side quest where Kiryu has to get a dirty magazine for a small boy. Getting caught by these old women and having Kiryu stare at them with the most serious expression possible, not saying anything, before running away absolutely killed me. Your character just unflinchingly wandering into these unbelievably weird situations, even while in the middle of a life-or-death struggle, was great. I had intended to complete every substory until I learned doing that requires defeating a secret boss who is actually total bullshit and the least fun part of the whole game.
Before I move on, I'd like to take the chance to mention that the music is phenomenal. From the exciting action music to the goofy disco / karaoke music, there are so many earworms here (I see and hear 24 Hour Cinderella every time I close my eyes).
OKAY. That's FINALLY all the side content. The main core of the game, similar to the substories, is divided between combat and lots of very long cutscenes, something I am usually strongly opposed to. That being said, the writing here is phenomenal, the story is super compelling, and the characters are all memorable and endearing. Kiryu's plot is absolutely the weaker of the two; especially towards the end, he sort of just feels like an "also there". That being said, he does have some fantastic moments, and the bulk of the interaction with the great cast of Yakuza bosses happens on his side. Majima's story is where the real emotional arc happens. His character growth over the course of the events of the game is as incredibly done as it is heartbreaking. His side doesn't have quite as many strong side characters, but even they grew on me. It's probably not hyperbolic to say this game has more than a few of my favorite characters I've ever seen in a game. Nishikayama is such a lovable guy, Awano is surprisingly nuanced, Kuze is a big ol' meme (if Kiryu so much as uses the bathroom, he must look over his shoulder in case Kuze is hiding in a urinal), Majima and Kiryu need no introduction, and I could really go on. The one weird wrinkle was Nishitani, who I loved, but who felt like he was supposed to have a bigger role at some point? Same thing with Billiken, actually. That aspect of the game somewhat felt weirdly truncated.
The greatest praise I can give the story is that every time it switched characters, without fail, I was upset, because the game had managed to engross me so much in what was happening on that side. I really only have two criticisms of the story. The first is that I was not a fan of the degree to which Majima and Kiryu's stories are written to parallel each other in terms of plot progression and plot beats. Multiple times I found myself a little frustrated when I was watching conversations that felt near identical to conversations I had just watched on the other side. Criticism #2 is that both stories sag somewhat in the middle, with perhaps a slightly too long period of "we need to run and hide and wait to be contacted". Trimming that section would've been reasonable.
On the combat side of things, there's a lot going on, but much of it kind of boils down to a fairly samey experience. The combat is very fun, and I enjoyed using most of the different styles (even if some are clearly worse than others), but many of the upgrades you get don't add that much. On top of that, the late game upgrades became so obscenely expensive I can't imagine anyone unlocking them all. Heat actions were very fun to use for a while, especially with how over-the-top violent they often were (all the combat is hilariously excessive with the violence), but by the end of the game I was yearning for more variety in them. With only a couple exceptions, pretty much every heat action boils down to "beat up a guy until you get enough meter to beat him up even harder". That being said, I'll re-emphasize how much I really liked the combat for the first 60+ hours, which is pretty damn good, in my opinion.
This game is so huge and overwhelming I can't imagine picking up another Yakuza title for a little while, but it's also very very worth it. There's so much quirky humor and addictive time-wasting wrapped around a genuinely moving and powerful story. This game gives the full spectrum of emotions, and I feel like I could write even more than I already have about it.
And I didn't even mention the Dame Da Ne.
...
...
...Where do you even start with this?
This game is enormous, but not in the way that, say, an open world game like Breath of the Wild or Cyberpunk 2077 is enormous, where it's a handful of gameplay mechanics spread evenly over a huge area. The amount of completely distinct, entirely optional things in this game is staggering. I fell down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, wasting hours on disco dancing, karaoke, real estate investments, hooking up with telephone girls, playing arcade games, and on and on. Not only that, the game is constantly adding NEW side games, each somehow weirder than the last. By the time I was watching bikini babes wrestle in a secret underground arena, I had to take a step back and think about what I was doing, but that's not even the strangest minigame.
On this front, I suppose I'll just say the minigames are good. Some definitely interested me more than others (there's so many you really can pick and choose), but only a couple seemed like they could've been better implemented. The baseball, for example, suffered from somewhat awkward controls, I still have literally no idea what is going on with the darts, and the catfight arena was just a mechanically boring idea, but most were surprisingly engrossing little time wasters.
The main minigames are the cabaret club on one side and the real estate investing on the other. There's not much to be said about the real estate; it's significantly more profitable, but it never amounts to much more than busy work. The cabaret mechanic is much more fleshed out and much more fun, reminiscent of something like Diner Dash (I'm sure there's a more contemporary reference out there). Cycling out your team to get good stat compositions, shuffling girls around to different tables to keep everyone happy - none of it's super deep, but it's engaging. I also wasted an embarrassingly long time on customizing the girls' outfits to get just the right stats. The only aspects I would complain about are that the special training is insanely tedious, and another problem that both minigames share. In Yakuza 0, they seem to have a very specific idea of the order you should do everything that they just don't tell you. If you're like me and you wander into the side businesses when you feel like it, you will end up pretty far off completing them by the time the game is coming to a close. At that point, you either ruin the flow of the story grinding at them incessantly or you just say "forget it", which I unfortunately chose to do. These minigames should probably either be introduced earlier or progress faster.
On to the last of the side content, the "substories", as they're called. Most boil down to either conversations or some basic combat (which I'll get to later). That may not sound like much, but the writing on these is mostly pretty great. I'll get more into the writing a little later, but the characters you meet and interactions you partake in here are bizarre, funny, endearing, and, if you can believe it, sometimes inspirational. I know the lack of facial movements is a technical limitation, but Kiryu holding this constant scowl in every interaction makes so many of the humorous scenes so much funnier. Maybe my hardest laugh in the whole game was during the side quest where Kiryu has to get a dirty magazine for a small boy. Getting caught by these old women and having Kiryu stare at them with the most serious expression possible, not saying anything, before running away absolutely killed me. Your character just unflinchingly wandering into these unbelievably weird situations, even while in the middle of a life-or-death struggle, was great. I had intended to complete every substory until I learned doing that requires defeating a secret boss who is actually total bullshit and the least fun part of the whole game.
Before I move on, I'd like to take the chance to mention that the music is phenomenal. From the exciting action music to the goofy disco / karaoke music, there are so many earworms here (I see and hear 24 Hour Cinderella every time I close my eyes).
OKAY. That's FINALLY all the side content. The main core of the game, similar to the substories, is divided between combat and lots of very long cutscenes, something I am usually strongly opposed to. That being said, the writing here is phenomenal, the story is super compelling, and the characters are all memorable and endearing. Kiryu's plot is absolutely the weaker of the two; especially towards the end, he sort of just feels like an "also there". That being said, he does have some fantastic moments, and the bulk of the interaction with the great cast of Yakuza bosses happens on his side. Majima's story is where the real emotional arc happens. His character growth over the course of the events of the game is as incredibly done as it is heartbreaking. His side doesn't have quite as many strong side characters, but even they grew on me. It's probably not hyperbolic to say this game has more than a few of my favorite characters I've ever seen in a game. Nishikayama is such a lovable guy, Awano is surprisingly nuanced, Kuze is a big ol' meme (if Kiryu so much as uses the bathroom, he must look over his shoulder in case Kuze is hiding in a urinal), Majima and Kiryu need no introduction, and I could really go on. The one weird wrinkle was Nishitani, who I loved, but who felt like he was supposed to have a bigger role at some point? Same thing with Billiken, actually. That aspect of the game somewhat felt weirdly truncated.
The greatest praise I can give the story is that every time it switched characters, without fail, I was upset, because the game had managed to engross me so much in what was happening on that side. I really only have two criticisms of the story. The first is that I was not a fan of the degree to which Majima and Kiryu's stories are written to parallel each other in terms of plot progression and plot beats. Multiple times I found myself a little frustrated when I was watching conversations that felt near identical to conversations I had just watched on the other side. Criticism #2 is that both stories sag somewhat in the middle, with perhaps a slightly too long period of "we need to run and hide and wait to be contacted". Trimming that section would've been reasonable.
On the combat side of things, there's a lot going on, but much of it kind of boils down to a fairly samey experience. The combat is very fun, and I enjoyed using most of the different styles (even if some are clearly worse than others), but many of the upgrades you get don't add that much. On top of that, the late game upgrades became so obscenely expensive I can't imagine anyone unlocking them all. Heat actions were very fun to use for a while, especially with how over-the-top violent they often were (all the combat is hilariously excessive with the violence), but by the end of the game I was yearning for more variety in them. With only a couple exceptions, pretty much every heat action boils down to "beat up a guy until you get enough meter to beat him up even harder". That being said, I'll re-emphasize how much I really liked the combat for the first 60+ hours, which is pretty damn good, in my opinion.
This game is so huge and overwhelming I can't imagine picking up another Yakuza title for a little while, but it's also very very worth it. There's so much quirky humor and addictive time-wasting wrapped around a genuinely moving and powerful story. This game gives the full spectrum of emotions, and I feel like I could write even more than I already have about it.
And I didn't even mention the Dame Da Ne.
DJSCheddar
9 months ago