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Amazing, sharp narrative and writing; Fun combat and leveling system; Realistic recreations of Tokyo and Osaka that are cool to explore; Beautiful visuals that are an improvement over previous versions of this game
New story content is a mixed bag, some of it unnecessary; Red Light Raid is more frustrating than fun; Cities feel sparse on places to visit
There are great games, and then there are games that come around only once every so often and leave a serious impression on you. I became aware of Yakuza 0 when my husband was playing it years ago on the PlayStation 4. At first it was just background noise, and then I slowly started paying attention to the cutscenes, and then I started asking him to wait for me before triggering the next one because I became invested in the story. By the end, I was the one ugly crying at the final scenes while he sat perfectly composed.
In the years since, Yakuza 0 has skyrocketed into my top-three favorite games of all time, thanks to its intriguing story, well-developed and engaging characters, period setting, and addicting combat. You don’t have to twist my arm to get me to replay this game, so I went into Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut enthusiastically, especially when I heard about the game’s new content. And while the additional cutscenes are a mixed bag, the game as a whole remains a must-have for fans of action/brawlers (bonus if you like RPG elements) and great writing.
At this point, there are nine games in the mainline Yakuza series and a number of spinoffs, but 0 is the first game in the series, chronologically speaking. Set in both Tokyo and Osaka in 1988, it’s a time of indulgence, excess, and free-flowing cash — and the yakuza is swimming in it. Kazuma Kiryu is a young member of the Dojima Family, eager to prove himself worthy of being in the yakuza and, more importantly, worthy of the respect of his adopted father and Dojima captain, Shintaro Kazama. However, his world gets turned upside down when he’s framed for a murder that takes place on a tiny parcel of land in Kamurocho, Tokyo known as The Empty Lot.
Meanwhile, in Osaka’s nightlife district of Sotenbori, Tojo Clan yakuza Goro Majima is playing the role of cabaret club manager as part of his punishment for defying orders to not conduct an assassination of a rival clan chairman with his sworn brother. While his brother is left alone to do the job and gets life in prison, Majima is banished from the Tojo, tortured for a year, has his eye ripped out, and is then released by his patriarch, Futoshi Shimano, to run The Grand while under 24/7 surveillance and imprisonment in Sotenbori. While Majima works to earn his way back into the Tojo, he becomes tasked with finding and killing a Makoto Makimura, owner of The Empty Lot in Tokyo.
It quickly becomes apparent that The Empty Lot is about to spark one of the deadliest conflicts within the yakuza, forever shaping the paths of Kiryu and Majima. These are the events which mold them into the legendary men that their subordinates, peers, and superiors fear and respect.
One of the best parts about Yakuza 0‘s story is its pacing. From the first chapter to the last, something always happens and there’s no filler. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, but they’re introduced at reasonable intervals and just enough of them are part of the central story without making you feel overwhelmed by details. Each couple of chapters has you alternating between taking control of either Kiryu or Majima, and the game provides you with a succinct “the story so far” recap before returning to the other protagonist’s story. The writers knew they had to keep things neat and tight if they were going to tell two stories simultaneously — two stories which eventually merge into one — and the end result is nothing short of masterful. This is narrative writing at its finest.
RGG Studio’s recreations of Kabukichō and Dotonbori capture the life and bustle of Tokyo and Osaka, and while I can’t speak to what it was like in 1988, I can say it felt authentic to what it was like walking around those areas when I was in Japan two years ago. Shoulder checking people constantly while running around is a funny detail because if you were running around like Kiryu and Majima constantly are, you would be accidentally bowling people over given how many people are always out in the busy city centers. However, while there are lots of minigames, bars, and restaurants to engage with, it does feel like there could’ve been significantly more places for Kiryu and Majima to enter. Much of the cityscapes feel beautiful to look at but without much substance.
Kiryu and Majima each have three different fighting styles, plus their unlockable legendary styles which only become available by completing the Real Estate Royale and Cabaret Club Czar sidequests, respectively. Generally speaking, I found Kiryu to move a bit slower than Majima but to pack more of a punch (there’s a reason one of his styles is named Beast). Kiryu is a tank and his Dragon of Dojima legendary style makes him feel unstoppable. I really loved Majima’s styles and the feel of his move sets. He’s faster and flashier, with more jumps and flips, but a couple of his styles have a bit of a learning curve compared to Kiryu’s more straightforward power. Majima’s Mad Dog of Shimano legendary style felt perfectly unhinged, dangerous, and terrifying.
I played this game using the Pro Controller (which I play every game with). You can quickly switch between the three fighting styles anytime using the D-Pad, but the legendary styles can only be accessed by toggling them on in the start menu, which was unclear. I don’t understand why they weren’t accessible on the D-Pad, too, but they should’ve been.
The game’s RPG elements come into play in the skill trees available for both protagonists. Each of their four styles can be upgraded at a cost, with the cost of each upgrade increasing with every level up the tree. The most basic way to earn money is by fighting, and the better you fight, the more you earn. However, the sheer amount of expense required to continue leveling up reaches astronomical proportions — I’m talking abilities that cost hundreds of millions to billions of Yen. This makes playing Real Estate Royale and Cabaret Club Czar necessary, as it becomes easy very quickly to make both protagonists multibillionaires. However, investing in yourself is as worthwhile as investing in your businesses, as it’s the only way to increase your health bars, attack power, and to unlock abilities that make you much more lethal in combat.
If you’re not triggering Heat Action moves during fights, you’re missing one of the best parts of the game. Whether you’re fighting in the street or in a building, Kiryu and Majima utilize items in their environments to deliver savage beatings. These moves are incredibly brutal, trigger short cutscenes when activated, and are well worth the effort both for the damage they deal and the entertainment value. Grab a box of nails, shove it in a guy’s mouth, and punch him in it. Pour a bottle of “mystery liquid” down his throat that you found on the ground in the alley you’re fighting in. Or burn his face with a hot plate you found near a garbage can. Or break his ankles by bowling a bowling ball into them. Or grab one of the nearby restaurant’s neon signs and smash it over his head.
Each protagonist has unique Heat Action moves they can use when triggered near immovable objects, like walls, railings, etc., and some of them can cause even more damage if you hit the right buttons during QTEs. For example, both guys can smash enemy heads against walls, but Kiryu will do a single, strong, one-handed head smash and walk away while the guy slides down the wall, while Majima will grab an enemy, smash the back of his head repeatedly against the wall, before karate chopping him to the ground. One of Majima’s most satisfying Heat Actions is when you grab an enemy near the railing on the Sotenbori River, punch him in the gut, and then do a spin kick to send him flying into the water for an instant KO. I highly recommend experimenting with all of the Heat Actions you can — there are dozens of them.
Visually, Yakuza 0 looks gorgeous and just as good as it looked on PS4 if not, in my opinion, better. It touts a higher resolution and frame rate than its PS4 predecessor, running at 60 FPS and 4K while docked. It’s sharp, crisp, and I experienced no stuttering or screen tearing during my playthrough. The only time the visuals didn’t look their best was, ironically, during the new cutscenes. They had a strange blurriness at times, and at others some of the assets looked rough around the edges (literally). The colors also looked a little muted and muddled compared to the rest of the cutscenes, with darker lighting. But by and large, the game looks stunning throughout.
This game has one of my all-time favorite soundtracks. It was actually the thing that made me notice the game all those years ago when my husband was playing it, because some of the songs sounded really similar to tracks in F-Zero GX. That’s because Hidenori Shoji, Yakuza 0‘s composer, was also one of the composers on F-Zero GX. The mix of intense rock, dark and brooding techno/electronica, big band, disco, and sultry jazz and pop tracks all perfectly set the tone for this story. Listen to both the A Side and B Side of the game’s official soundtrack on SEGA’s YouTube channel and thank me later.
My biggest gripe — one of my only gripes — with this game is the new story content. From this point on, I’ll be spoiling some story elements. There are a number of characters who appear to die in the original version of this game, but the new cutscenes retcon some of those deaths. Kiryu’s voice actor, Takaya Kuroda, put it perfectly when he said that the scenes feel cathartic, because they do feel like they were meant to simply make the player feel better about some of the events of the original game. RGG Studio claims these story additions were made to provide more context, but they were totally unnecessary and, in my opinion, harmed one of the most meaningful moments of the entire game.
In one scene early in the game, when Majima is speaking with Makoto in the warehouse they’re hiding in, she tells him how much her watch means to her, but that the chime it plays on the hour has been broken for some time and no longer plays. She takes off the watch, calling it a silly thing that she should probably grow up and let go of. Makoto, experiencing temporary blindness, doesn’t see Majima quietly slip the watch into his inner jacket pocket. You don’t see or hear anything about the watch again until one of the game’s closing scenes, when Makoto goes to The Empty Lot to leave flowers for her brother, who died there.
Suddenly, she hears the chime of the watch coming from just beneath the dirt. She digs it up and finds it wrapped in a handkerchief, restored and playing the chime again. She sobs, clutching it, thanking Majima, who she never gets to say goodbye to at the end of the game before he disappears from her life. It’s one of the most tragic moments of any game I’ve ever played, and both times I’ve seen the scene it’s left me crying hard. It’s such a surprise moment and a touching display of deep love and affection for someone that Majima knew he couldn’t be with in the end, but wanted to show in some way how much he cared for.
One of the new scenes ruins this by saying too much where nothing needed to be said at all. A random man approaches Majima in the street and tells him that one of the characters who died a pretty horrific and unquestionable death is actually not dead, and that he’s also wondering what happened to Makoto’s watch. Majima pulls it out and says that she deserves to hear it chime again, so he’s going to fix it. This scene felt so unnecessary and totally kills the quiet, unspoken tenderness of that near-final scene. I can forgive the outlandishness of this particular character surviving his death, even if I think he should’ve stayed dead. Plenty of other unbelievable, outlandish things have happened in this series, including deaths or events that were retconned. What I can’t forgive is ruining an incredibly poignant moment just to explain the obvious to players who need their hands held and every detail filled in.
New content aside, when I said earlier that Yakuza 0‘s narrative is masterclass, I meant it. It touches on a number of topics I never would’ve expected it to, from the Japanese war orphans of WWII to post-war Chinese/Japanese relations and resentments, to the human cost of the yakuza’s actions and the toll that the nightlife industry takes on female employees. Characters who appear to be simply maniacs or sadomasochists are revealed to have more complex backgrounds and motivations that leave you conflicted on how you feel about them. And the two most-loved series protagonists are shown as very young men in their early 20s, grappling with understanding themselves and their places in the yakuza and beyond. Majima, in particular, has a fascinating character development throughout the entire game, and his steady transformation from cool and reserved to the Mad Dog had me deeply invested in seeing the outcome. The bond between Majima and Makoto is one of the best in gaming. Yakuza 0 Majima is one of my very favorite characters in any game thanks to this game’s stellar writing.
I also appreciated the number of parallels between Kiryu and Majima. While Kiryu works to release himself from the yakuza, Majima is fighting to get back in. While Kiryu is hunted by the Dojima Family and can’t leave Tokyo, Majima is imprisoned in Osaka by order of Shimano as part of his punishment. Both men are forced to work normal day jobs — Kiryu as a real estate agent, Majima as a cabaret club manager — as a consequence of being ousted from the yakuza. Real Estate Royale and Cabaret Club Czar both center around the protagonists using their businesses to better the state of Kamurochō and Sotenbori for the regular people who live and work there by eliminating the corrupt billionaires who use their money for harm. Given the tie between Kiryu and Majima throughout the rest of the series, this storytelling device is a nice way of showing how, despite their differences, they’re also similar in many ways.
This game, and series in general, is a fantastic exploration of masculinity and male bonds and what it means to be a good man versus a bad man versus a flawed man. Kiryu’s relationship with his adopted father is incredibly formative on his staunchly-held principles, while his bond with his sworn brother, Nishikiyama, helps them both grow and mature. Authority figures, like Osamu Kashiwagi, teach respect and temperance. Other authority figures, like the three Tojo lieutenants, are cautionary tales about how misguided ambition, greed, and hate can change a man. There are multiple moments where the game’s humor even pokes fun at Kiryu and Majima’s somewhat underdeveloped skills with the ladies, in minigames and sidequests where mixed signals cause confusion and comically unrequited attraction.
Yakuza 0’s minigames are the right balance of fun and weird and are easy to quickly learn and play. They all have different rules and control schemes, but are simple and explained clearly. There’s everything from various Asian and western gambling games to darts and pool, classic SEGA arcade games, slot car racing, fishing, adult entertainment, and more. Karaoke and disco dancing are some of the most entertaining because it’s so unexpected to see these serious, mean-looking yakuza grooving on the dance floor or crooning into a mic. Cabaret Club Czar provides some really interesting conversations between Majima and the hostesses in his employ, and the game’s myriad sidequests range from hilarious and bizarre to really touching and depressing. There are also some cameos from characters who will go on to be central figures in the later games.
This version of Yakuza 0 introduces an entirely new mode called Red Light Raid, which pits the player against waves of enemies in multilevel stages set in different locations throughout the game. You have a short amount of time to clear each level, and defeating certain enemies will put more time on the clock. You can either play online, couch co-op, or solo (alone or with three CPUs). There are dozens of characters to choose from, including a handful of versions of Kiryu and Majima, one for each of their fighting styles. Most of the characters are criminals that Majima fights in an underground fight club that becomes available late in the game. However, when you start the mode for the first time, you only have enough Yen to unlock one fighter. You have to earn the rest through combat, but it accumulates relatively slowly compared to how much you need to unlock most fighters (around ¥100,000,000) and to upgrade them (first upgrades start at ¥80,000,000, then ¥320,000,000, and up from there).
I started with Kiryu — Brawler Style. That didn’t get me very far. He was incredibly weak, and while getting through the intro stage was fine, getting through just the second stage was brutal. I earned enough to unlock Majima — Thug Style, which got me a little farther, but again, I got destroyed. I leveled up Majima, and while I started to see some improvement in my level-clear speed, I was still struggling. Finally, I chose to unlock Old Man Jing, whose strength stat is far and away the best compared to every single other fighter except the two fat yakuzas, who are close. Jing is practically broken; it was insane how fast I was clearing stages with him, doubly so once I leveled him up once. Then I got to the final boss of the second stage. Awano basically one-shot KOs you, and if he doesn’t get to you, the random, sudden explosions around the arena will.
Needless to say, while it’s a really fun mode and especially if you love mindless brawling and waves of enemies, I may have to take some time away from Red Light Raid so a cooler head will prevail. The character stats just don’t really make a lot of sense to me, and it’s especially strange to make the game’s protagonists and antagonists so weak compared to some rando you would only encounter in the game if you chose to do one of Majima’s minigames. This mode needs some tweaking.
Overall, Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut is mostly the Yakuza 0 us longtime fans love. While the new cutscenes definitely change some of the story, it honestly didn’t feel like that big of a deal to me given that it doesn’t change the outcome of the game’s ending. They were really just added for a bit of fan service and to provide some unnecessary context and clarity for people who can’t handle death or ambiguity. They didn’t need to be added and the narrative is better without them, but some of the scenes were genuinely good and I was happy those were added in. It’s not the controversy some fans are trying to make it out to be.
If you haven’t tried the Yakuza games yet, definitely start with 0. This is a fine example of what strong game narrative and character development should look like, and it’s just simply a darn fun game to play.
Nintendojo was provided a copy of this game for review by a third party, though that does not affect our recommendation. For every review, Nintendojo uses a standard criteria.
