Update Two Hundred and Fifty-Two: 20 November 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

There are games you play and have a decent enough time. There’s games you play and enjoy. There’s games you play that move you, that leave a lasting impression, and maybe even change you.

And then there’s Yakuza 0—somehow all of that and then some.

A new installment of the long running Yakuza series, Yakuza 0 is a prequel set in 1988 during Japan’s bubble economy. Series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu is a fledgling yakuza and barely an adult when he gets swept up in machinations far, far, far beyond what he can control. The other half of the game’s split story stars Majima Goro, a young man trapped in a gilded cage, very different from how he appears in the other Yakuza games. He’s given an opportunity to step back into the world he was exiled from… if only he has the guts to take it.

I found it a perfect place to step into this rich universe—while Yakuza 0 has a lot of references to later games, they don’t feel out of place. It’s the right amount of foreshadowing, planting the seed that will eventually bloom into characters you run into and meet later. The overarching stories, starting separate and becoming entertwined, was awesome. Dramatic as fuck without ever really going too far or feeling like an asspull, the game’s able to balance the unraveling of several plots and establishing interesting characters with emotional depth. Majima Goro ended up being far and away my favorite character in this game, and possibly for this entire year, and it’s a really fun and unique position to be in to get to know him from a very different starting point than long-time fans did, and to see how he turns into the man he’ll be in the future games. This incarnation—relatively good-natured, kind to children, underdog ponytail Majima—will probably always be ‘my’ Majima, though. Him cleaning up well and being absolutely fucking smokin’ helps, too.

Oh yeah, did I mention? Everyone in this fucking game is a knockout. Everyone’s in suits. Everyone’s handsome. Dudes get roughed up and rip off their shirts to reveal their cut bods and huge tats on the regular. The models are gorgeous, able to be so realistic without falling into a strange uncanny valley I find with a lot of other games shooting for realism (like, for example, Horizon: Zero Dawn). It’s amazing, and it’s helped incredibly by the absolutely crazytown bananapants animation. I can’t overstate just how lovely the facial animation is in the FMV cutscenes in particular, able to get tiny nuances that make the performances REAL as hell and magnetizing to watch. The characters in-engine are expressive enough, but, man alive, those FMV scenes are a real joy to watch.

And watch them you will! What I wasn’t prepared for was just how many cutscenes this game had. It’s routine for me to not touch a controller for twenty or thirty minutes during the ending of a chapter and the beginning of the next one, and everything past the point of no return probably took a good five hours to get through, with not that much of that time fighting. I love that kind of shit, it just surprised me! I did like the combat in this game—it’s fluid and fun and full of character, between the different fighting styles you learn and all the different hardcore heat actions you discover as the game progresses, stylish and silly and sick and everything in between. The fighting was able to be a kind of background thing that didn’t get in the way of the shit I wanted to focus on.

There is a lot to focus on. There’s so much shit to focus on I literally don’t know where to begin, except: the side/optional stuff tended to be the perfect light, sweet complement to a heavy, dramatic story. If you wanted to just play your drama straight, you could—there still would be some laughs, but it’d be overall pretty somber. What makes the game shine, though, is just how perfectly balanced the absurdity is against the serious drama. It’s an amazing, endearing, earnest mixture that captured my heart from the word go, from the very moment early on in the story when Kiryu stepped up to sing karaoke with his sworn brother… and halfway through the song, it became a music video starring the two of them, singing and playing electric guitar in full rock star getup. Yakuza can be serious, but it doesn’t take itself seriously, and sweet fucking jesus does it work.

It’s been a while since I’ve been so wholeheartedly swept up into a game, and it’s a really, really uplifting feeling. I was also lucky enough to have someone come along with me for the ride—BLAEO user Shax was there from minute one answering my questions and taking in all my reactions and goofy jokes. He’s been so passionate about the game and the series, which helped me get more into it in turn. It was so wonderful to have someone to talk to in depth about it as I was playing through it, culminating in him watching the ending again along with me, a huge distance apart and right there at my back all at once. It was awesome.

Are there flaws? Yeah. I would’ve liked to have had the protagonists (especially Majima) be more proactive than reactive. The game has just as many sexist qualities as you’d expect for what it is. There’s some quality of life things that would have made playing different minigames less aggravating. But consider also:

It runs like a dream. It’s funny as hell. I wasn’t expecting there to be romance in it, let alone a romance that punched my heart out of my chest and shot it into the sun. Oh my god I haven’t even talked about the substories, or the music. I want to play it again immediately but with Madison this time so I can watch this game put her in the fucking ground. We’ll get on that after the Missing, which we are actually playing.

Play this game.

Next up: It’s currently 7:31 am and I haven’t slept and god I hope this review makes sense I tried really hard to make it coherent and I think it’s time to take an abrupt 180 turn to switch things up. I’m going to be focusing on games that came out in 2018 until December, when I’ll be tackling all my SG wins for the year!

See you soon!