On Yakuza 0 (zero)

24 Jul 2017

Yakuza 0 has a lot to say about brotherhood, loyalty, and how difficult it can be to be an honorable person in an environment where vice is rewarded and encouraged.

The game conveys the vast majority of its message through beautifully-rendered cutscenes featuring prominent Japanese actors. The cast’s experience combined with incredible motion capture work gives the cutscenes a sense of gravitas that much of modern video game storytelling lacks.

High Contrast

The heavy moral weight of the story of Yakuza 0 is set in stark relief against what the characters do outside of these cutscenes. While under the player’s control, protagonists Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima run roughshod over Kamurocho and Sotenbori. Among other things, they collect telephone cards of notable Japanese porn starlets, play mahjong and shogi, and of course, beat up hundreds and hundreds of dudes.

This contrast makes Yakuza 0 a great game for sinking a lot of time into. Minigames like bowling and billiards are rendered to an intense level of detail. Sidequests are entirely disconnected from the main story but feature some great writing and animation. They also serve to add characters to the main subgames for each character: Kiryu manages and builds a real estate company, while Majima takes a struggling cabaret club under his wing. I spent just over 75 hours in Yakuza 0, and I enjoyed myself greatly.

There is clearly an audience for this kind of game, and the developers know it. A completion percentage is displayed after the final credits, and unlocking more powerful abilities requires the use of Completion Points. CP are gathered by performing different actions in the game; earning money playing roulette and beating up goons with a particular fighting style both aid in unlocking additional tools for the characters to use.

Murder in the Empty Lot

The story of the game revolves around Kiryu being framed for a murder.

The opening cutscene of the game shows our hero beating a man senseless in order to collect on a debt. Later that night, Kiryu and his sworn brother Nishiki overhear a news station reporting the death of the man Kiryu beat up. The only problem is that the murder is by gunshot, not from a beating.

This murder coincidentally took place on a prime piece of property called the Empty Lot, which creates a lot of problems for Kiryu’s bosses. Much of the game involves following the involved parties in their efforts to identify the Empty Lot’s owner in order to purchase or steal the property. It’s the last piece of a puzzle that would unlock billions of yen in profits for Kiryu’s yakuza family.

Majima’s story is more muted. He is being forced to stay in Sotenbori, a prosperous neighborhood in Osaka, in order to pay penance to his boss for a past transgression. A year of torture has left Goro with one eye and a bit of madness. Majima’s handler asks him to find and murder someone as his final task before being allowed to rejoin the Tojo Clan, and things move apace from there.

It gets a little convoluted, particularly in the last few chapters. The nature of being at a low level of a criminal organization leads to a large amount of information being withheld from the protagonists. As everything comes together, the pace quickens, leading to what feels like a rapid-fire sequence of revelations.

I loved the cast of characters and their tendency to soliloquize at length about the nature of being a yakuza, of being a man, of being honorable, but overall the story is kind of a mess.

Loyalty

A recurring theme of Yakuza 0 is the unerring loyalty of both men. Majima is fighting to rejoin his family in order to make a place for himself and his sworn brother, Taiga Saejima. Saejima only appears in the game in a flashback, as he is in prison for his part in the incident that led to Goro losing both his stature in the Tojo Clan as well as his left eye.

Kiryu exits the yakuza early in the game, believing that by taking the fall he can prevent his actions from impacting his loved ones. He is mistaken.

The men’s moral compasses lead them through great difficulty while pursuing what is right rather than what is easy. They encounter many who are loyal because they are expected to be, or give the appearance of loyalty while playing a separate game in the shadows.

Crime Stories

In the late 1980s, when the game is set, Kiryu and Majima are anachronisms among yakuza. They believe that power and honor are what make a great man, not wealth. While their superiors are chasing millions, the protagonists are merely chasing the truth.

This is the main juncture where the story missions conflict hilariously with the gameplay loop. Advancing Kiryu and Majima through the skill trees of their fighting styles involves money. Four giant men wander around Kamurocho and Sotenbori looking to beat you up and shake you down for cash. Coins and bills literally spray from your enemies as you defeat them.

For a couple of guys who proclaim eschewing material wealth, they sure do spend a lot of time collecting it.

Conclusion

In the end, Yakuza 0 ends up feeling a bit uneven. The incongruity of chasing the dollar for the entire game combined with long speeches about honor and power trumping wealth left me feeling a little empty.