Virtual 100 #44: Yakuza 0
Man, oh, man. There is a lot to unpack here. I’m not sure how well I’m going to relay information here, and I know there are a ton of RGG and Yakuza fans out there, so hopefully I don’t ruffle too many feathers by mis-representing the story and the bajillion characters introduced in this game. Okay, maybe there weren’t quite a bajillion, but it sure felt like it at times, and my understanding of the Japanese language is about as developed as an infant’s grasp of quantum physics, so the vast majority of the game I was just kind of smiling and nodding. And there may or may not have been a few times when my eyes wandered from the screen and started watching some football during a cutscene… in which case I missed a few paragraphs of subtitles and subsequent story exposition, after which I just shrugged and ran toward the pink dot.
But before I go down this whole rabbit hole, I first feel like I need to fill in my own personal backstory; My past Yakuza experiences you could say, or lack thereof.
Before booting up Yakuza 0, I had only played a few hours of one other Yakuza game, that being Yakuza Kiwami, which I bought on sale for PS4 years ago. I had heard a lot about the series, and I figured hey what the hell, the game was about $15 on a Best Buy shelf so why not.
And it was fun… kinda. I liked the game well enough, and I will be completely honest and say I don’t remember exactly how much of it I played or why I fell off of it in the first place.
But I will take a guess.
I believe I put a decent amount of time into Yakuza Kiwami, but I don’t believe I got very far in the story. There are so many side activities and stories in the game, and I know I played a few of them. Then, and I know this for certain, the entire series got released on Xbox Game Pass. And I figured why not just play them there? But, I couldn’t just hop into Yakuza Kiwami and ignore Yakuza 0, I had to play that one first… and that’s where the series lost me. I played about ten hours of it, and then I was off to other things.
But… you wanna know something stupid? I own all of them. That’s right. I got Yakuza 0 through 6 as part of a bundle on Steam for stupid cheap. Then, as each subsequent game went on sale, I picked those up as well because why the hell not, I have the others. So at the time of this writing, I have Yakuza 0-6, as well as Like a Dragon, Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, and Pirate in Hawaii or whatever the fuck it’s called. I even have the spin-off, The Man Who Erased His Name. And I’ve never played any of them!
It’s a sickness, I’m telling you.
Well, I guess I could say I hadn’t played any of them, because I have now. Obviously, I have now completed Yakuza 0, or as I prefer to call it, Testosterone: The Game.
Okay, I’m being hyperbolic. But as a newcomer to the series, more or less, I started with Yakuza 0, and I am not quite sure if that was the best way to do it. The reason for this is that Yakuza 0 is a prequel. Yeah, yeah, no shit.
But it’s a prequel that came out several years into the franchise. It’s an origin story of characters I’m supposed to already know, and I’m almost positive there were moments in this game where I was supposed to say “Oooooooh, THAT GUY.” Or something to that effect. But as someone who is new to the series, I have no context for any of these people except for Goro Majima (who seems pretty fuckin’ normal in this game) and Kazuma Kiryu themselves, who are essentially the main characters.
If you want to know what I mean, imagine someone seeing The Phantom Menace without ever seeing a Star Wars movie and wondering why the hell they should care about some annoying little kid, or a beeping trash can. That’s me right now; I’m that person. And I might have done myself a disservice by playing this game first, before Yakuza 1-5. Only time will tell if I truly fucked myself for the rest of this story or not.
That said, Yakuza 0’s story is one hell of a slow burn. I even checked HowLongtoBeat.com to see if I was imagining things, and no, I wasn’t. The clock time for Yakuza 0 ran at an average of about 31 hours for the story, not including side stuff. That’s about twice as long as most of the other Yakuza games. In a way, I’m kind of glad. I don’t think I could sit through six games worth of 30-hour stories. As it was, this one had my eyes glazing over by the third act.
The reason for this is that this story has a lot of players. I mean, a lot. And if I had been a Yakuza fan for years by the time this game came out, I may have already known and recognized most of them, in which case the story would just be introducing maybe a small number of new characters, or maybe filling in blanks and time gaps for certain others. But this was all new to me, and it was a lot to follow.
For the most part, I did enjoy the story. It definitely takes its time to unfold, dropping exposition at key moments. But when I say that my eyes were glazing over by the third act, it’s because I was 20+ hours in and the game was still introducing new characters. It really did get to a point where I just didn’t want to know any more.
I will re-iterate— some of these late-game characters might be major players in later games and I just don’t know it yet, but while playing this game I really did have to scratch my head and wonder why they were still introducing yet more people when the story really should have been winding down by that point.
I’m going to give an extremely simplified version of the plot here, not just because I barely grasped all the details, but also for spoiler reasons; You don’t play a Yakuza game for the deep gameplay, after all.
The story starts with Kazuma Kiryu (due to Japanese tradition, I’m not really sure which is his first name, but I think it’s Kiryu) being a low man on the family totem-pole, collecting a debt for some low-rate thugs in the… neighborhood(?) of Komurocho. So is Tokyo like New York City, where nobody says they’re from “New York City” they say they’re from Manhattan, or Queens, or Harlem? I should note that I know nothing about Tokyo. He roughs up a guy and collects the debt, after which the guy he collected from ends up dead. Not only is this bad news for Kiryu, but the vacant patch of concrete in which it took place, known as the “Empty Lot” is a highly (repeat: HIGHLY) contested patch of real-estate, and the mcguffin for the entire story of Yakuza 0.
Kiryu’s story begins with a mission to clear his name of the murder on the Empty Lot, but then evolves into a plot to not only stay alive, but help his new boss find its owner, who is a mystery for a large part of the game.
At the same time, in a different… neighborhood, Sotenbori, we follow the story of Goro Majima, who is not only not absolutely batshit insane, but is actually quite a normal and a well-respected manager of a cabaret known as The Grand. He’s working to buy his way back into the Yakuza after he apparently fucked up somehow. His handler shows up one night with an offer he can’t refuse: fulfill a hit placed by the family, and he’s in. Of course, he accepts, until he realizes just who his target is.
To say any more of this would ruin 80% of the suspense the story keeps you in. Needless to say, Kiryu and Goro’s respective stories begin to overlap, and as the story progresses and the pieces begin to fall into place, everything starts to make sense. Mostly. Somewhat. There are honestly more double-crosses and “men behind the curtain” than you can shake a chopstick at, and before long the lines get so insanely blurry, once its all ironed out and the credits roll, I was just left saying “Well, ok then.”
The game assumes you already have a general knowledge of the Yakuza organization, and a relatively decent understanding of their hierarchy and chain of command. Well, I don’t. So every time someone was introduced as part of a clan or a family or they are subsidiaries of this or that, or worse yet— people who were related to other people, I was lost. I’ve seen Kentucky family reunions less convoluted than this.
After a while I just turned my brain off to it and punched at the people the game told me to punch at. Despite all the confusion, I was still pretty invested in the story, and I did like it, even though the writers really, really need to learn how to pace a narrative. There would be a moment where the tension was building and the story was really starting to gain some momentum, then they would yank the rug out from under me with some long, pointless exchange of dialog that not only explained things that didn’t really need explaining, but also re-explained shit they just explained. Complete with flashback images!
That’s not to say that the story needed to be pushing full-steam ahead at all times. I can appreciate when a movie gives the viewer time to breathe. But holy shit, there’s giving us time to breathe, and there’s giving us time to go down and grab a drink, cook some dinner, take a nap… A lot of the cutscenes went on for far longer than they should have, and I’m not against long cutscenes, as long as they’re serving a purpose. But a lot of times it was the typical over-explanation that this particular culture loves to cram into their RPG’s. Remember when I said earlier that I started watching football? Yeah, if I’d rather listen to Chris Collinsworth, you know something’s wrong.
I personally thought Majima’s story was way more interesting than Kiryu’s. Majima is more of a tragic character, where he is being manipulated both with— and without— his knowledge. Strings are being pulled by people whose strings are also being pulled, and poor old Goro is at the bottom of it all. The guy is repeatedly getting screwed over. The reason why he’s a psychopath in later games isn’t really sold on us here, other than a bit of dialog at the end when he’s just like “fuck it I don’t care anymore.”
Goro’s journey is still more impactful than Kiryu’s. To be fair though, Kiryu probably gets way more narrative attention in the later games. I might even guess that the entire reason for Yakuza 0’s existence is to flesh out Majima a bit more. I don’t know, maybe he gets his own arch later in the series (before he becomes a pirate), and at this point I’m just an ignorant Yakuza noob. I really liked Fushikiyama’s arch as well. Although the way they portrayed him in Yakuza 0 makes it a tad difficult to believe he turned shit around so dramatically that he became the head of a family by the time Yakuza Kiwami rolls around.
Look at me, I’m rambling. It’s contagious, apparently.
So I played Yakuza Kiwami a bit before I ever booted up Yakuza 0, and I had a pretty good idea of what the combat was going to feel like, and I remember it being… not the best. So for this game I put it on the easiest difficulty setting (I do have like, nine games to get through, after all), and I will admit it probably did the game a bit of a disservice. I never really needed to get good at the combat, since mashing the buttons was all I really needed to do to win a fight. As such, I never sought out additional training, never unlocked a lot of the more advanced fighting moves and techniques. Likewise, I didn’t really need to play any of the mini-games to earn extra money, and I never felt tempted to try my hand with Mr. Shakedown, or whatever the hell his name was.
A lot of the sub-stories were left undiscovered, which I get is a lot of the charm of the Yakuza games. I’ve done a few of them, but the problem with those things is that they’re either really good, or really lame. And unfortunately there’s no way to know which it’s gonna be until you do it. I did a few in a row that turned out to be pretty dumb, and after that I just started ignoring them.
I feel a little bad that I ignored a large chunk of what people consider to be the games’ biggest draw (that being all the mini-games and side stories) but for now I’m just trying to get through the story. I am looking forward to later games like Pirate Yakuza and Like a Dragon. For those I will likely put more time into the extra content.
Hopefully, the write-ups for the later games will be a bit more comprehensive, as I will likely have a better understanding of the characters and the Yakuza hierarchy itself. Also, as I already said, this game came way later in the series, and I’m assuming they felt all their fans already knew all this shit. Yakuza Kiwami will be the first game in the series (albeit a “remake”) and as such I’m assuming will be a bit more accessible. Hopefully.
For now, though, I will leave this as number 44 in the Virtual 100. I did have a little bit of an urge to hop straight into Yakuza Kiwami, but I feel like I need a little bit of a break. We shall see, I suppose.