A Look Back At Yakuza 0
Our protagonists, Kiryu Kazuma and Goro Majima.
Prepare for a whole lot of this.
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Yakuza 0, or Ryu Ga Gotoku 0: Chikai no Basho (roughly translated as The Place of Oath or The Promised Land), originally launched as a Japan-exclusive game in March of 2015 – this Director’s Cut could’ve just as easily been called the 10th Anniversary Edition. It was very popular in its native homeland, but the game’s true influence wouldn’t become clear until early 2017, when a professionally localised version was released in North America, Europe, and other English-speaking countries. The Yakuza/Ryu Ga Gotoku series has always had a passionate fanbase since it began on the PS2 back in 2005 – the original release of 0 was itself a 10th anniversary celebration, one for the franchise overall – but it was relatively small-time until Yakuza 0 came onto the scene. You can debate what exactly it was about 0 that that made it such a success, but it’s generally agreed that it wasn’t just the game’s overall quality – you can see the wealth of development experience from the initial 5 titles in the series all over this installment – but the fact that it’s a fantastic example of a prequel that serves as a great fresh start to a franchise. Many prequels seem to be built almost entirely around being watched or played as part of “release order” experience, paradoxically requiring knowledge of the “future events” of prior titles. Yakuza 0 certainly has references to the games released before it – more than I initially thought, in fact, something I’m only now clocking with my second playthrough for this review – but it is, broadly, an excellent starting point for anyone new to the series. There’s other things of course, like the large number of minigames or the money-raining “bubble era” aesthetic that probably held its own appeal for a lot of people, but it’s this main point that has led to the franchise becoming what it is today, even re-branding to Like A Dragon globally to match the Japanese title. It’s interesting, then, that the game hasn’t been retitled to Like A Dragon 0 in a similar manner to the recent remake of the Ishin spinoff, but no matter. This review will mostly try to focus on the new content found in the Nintendo Switch 2 timed-exclusive Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut, but I still have to give the game’s general qualities a couple of paragraphs.
Yakuza 0’s Main Narrative and Substories
The narrative can get very dramatic.
Much like most of the games in the franchise, Yakuza 0’s narrative elements exist in a charmingly bizarre binary split. On one side, you have the central story, set a full 17 years before the bulk of the original game, where protagonist Kiryu Kazuma and fan-favourite supporting antagonist/rival/lovable weirdo Goro Majima experience two perspectives of an occasionally over-the-top but at least somewhat serious crime drama. There’s emotional drama, there’s romance, there’s violence that even our criminal protagonists are shaken by – and the whole thing revolves around the property rights to a miniscule empty lot. Despite the dry-sounding subject matter, the whole thing is deeply arresting for both long-time fans and new players – you either get a deeper look into the backstory of your favourite characters or an extremely well-told introduction to some fantastic characters that will add greater emotional nuance to the following games despite being made afterwards.
On the other side, you have Yakuza/Like A Dragon’s goofy and bizarre “substories” – barely-optional sidequests that take Kiryu and Goro on oddball, low-stakes adventures that are frequently wildly out-of-step with the central narrative’s tone. Kiryu acts as a bodyguard-slash/co-star in a new music video for definitely-not-Thriller starring definitely-not-Michael Jackson and directed by definitely-not-Steven Spielberg. Goro helps a lovestruck idiot find a criminal forger to make a necklace for his girlfriend. Kiryu fights to recover a child’s new video game from a series of progressively more dangerous thieves. Goro goes through a litany of fetch quests to have the chance to use a battery-powered bag phone (one of several examples of cutting-edge-for-1988 technology featured in the game), and both characters get to train and develop their fighting skills (more on that later).. They are often very silly, many make no sense within the context of the game’s central narrative (to the extent that I once promised to fish for a budding chef who needed the fish for that night’s customers, did a main mission that involved me getting a good night’s sleep for the next day, then successfully brought her the fish), and I wouldn’t accept a Yakuza/LaD game without them. They add tremendous charm and variety to both this game and the series at large, are filled with memorable characters both likeable and… the other thing, and 0 goes especially far with them by including a larger, higher budget minigame for each protagonist. The Real Estate Royale and Cabaret Club Czar activities will take up a significant amount of your time but will reward you with both a flood of money and significant improvements to your combat prowess. Speaking of which…
Yakuza 0’s Combat and Minigames
Boss battles are a constant feature in this game, and some of the most electrifying parts.
Kiryu won’t take his enemies’ lives, but their dignity is not so safe.
Cutscene-like Heat Actions are a central and highly-damaging part of combat.
The combat in Yakuza/LaD 0 is another example of where this chronologically-first game comes across as more advanced and filled with variety than the games you may well be playing after it. It’s also very much like the narrative elements detailed in the above paragraph, in that there’s a major split between two halves of the gameplay. On one side you have the combat – critically important to any Yakuza/LaD game and a great deal of fun here. The variety on offer is immense – not only do you have 2 playable characters with their own takes on melee combat, but each one can swap between up to 4 different fighting styles. Each character’s styles are themselves quite different from the other’s, too – there are similarities for sure, such as Kiryu’s Beast Style and Goro’s Slugger style both having a theme of “high damage and focus on weapons” that they nonetheless tackle in wildly different ways, but what you effectively have is 8 different melee movesets, and that’s before you even get to the weapons you can briefly use (or not-so-briefly, should you invest time into making weapons with infinite durability). The result is a functional and engaging system that occasionally steps up into something truly energising, especially with the faster combat styles as you dodge and weave around attacks while unleashing your own combos from behind.
Then you have the other side, which is the minigames. These are wonderful for breaking the game up and stopping it from just being about beating the money out of people, but they’re also critical to something that makes the Yakuza/LaD series so special – the “Japan Simulator” aspect. As you wander the streets of Kamurocho and Sotenbori, you can play against NPCs in pool, mahjong and shogi, dance at the disco, win prizes in claw games, play arcade versions of Sega’s older titles in actual arcades, customise tiny cars in Pocket Circuit tournaments (for the real-life version, look up Mini 4WD), and generally engage in fun video-gamey versions of a lot of what you could do in a Japanese red-light district in 1988. Not just family-friendly stuff either – the game earns its mature rating with catfight gambling, telephone club minigames and videos of the real-life adult video actresses who also play the vast majority of the female characters in the game. The actual implementation of gameplay is variable – different people will probably appreciate different minigames and find themselves focusing on their favourites.
Director’s Visuals
Visuals can vary between different types of cutscenes, as well as gameplay.
The visuals of Yakuza 0 have been commented on before, but I think examining the Switch 2 implementation in Director’s Cut is important. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios’ older engine holds up well here – the original game’s careful art direction and smart technical choices combine well with the sharp resolution and 60 frames per second to create something that really does not look like it was built for the PlayStation 3 (despite being released in 2015, 0 was in fact a cross-gen game with a 720p 30fps PS3 version in Japan). It doesn’t max out the Switch 2’s display capabilities – even the docked mode clearly has too much aliasing to be the kind of “4K 60” resolution that was being claimed a few months ago – but the everything from the broad depiction of bubble-era Japan to the fine stitching on Kiryu’s clothing is still given all the pixels needed to shine. I don’t think it’s running to quite the level the Switch 2 is fully capable of, but it remains solid.
English? In My Yakuza 0?
Kuze’s English voice Keston John brings some intimidating mobster flair.
Yakuza/LaD has always been known as an extremely Japanese series right down to its bones – the commitment to the setting directly results in that “Japan Simulator” appeal I mentioned above, and as such the series going largely without any voiced languages other than the original Japanese wasn’t something I ever heard complaints about. If anything, it almost seemed like a positive for many fans, something that kept the games “pure” – with the rather goofy dubbing the English release the original 2005 game offered up being pretty compelling evidence against the concept. Japanese voice actors (or “seiyuus”) like Takaya Kuroda and Hidenari Ugaki are so closely linked with Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima – having played them in all of their appearances to date – that the idea of replacing them, even in a dub, seemed weird and wrong. But despite this, the series has transitioned to offering full English dubs in recent years, starting with Yakuza: Like A Dragon (aka Like A Dragon 7), and in Director’s Cut we have the first example of one receiving a dub in an updated re-release. This makes me wonder if we’ll see such dubs added to other earlier games in the series – let’s look it over then, shall we?
This was my first time playing Yakuza with English voices, and my short review is that it started as strange as I expected but grew on me over time. I’ve heard criticism of Yong Yea’s performances as Kiryu in prior games but I found him serviceable-to-good here – he does a good job making a largely stoic character like Kiryu compelling, and can bring out the emotion when it’s called for. Industry icon Matt Mercer seems like an odd choice for an often-unhinged character like Goro Majima, but he does a great job with this earlier and somewhat more subdued version. He also nails one specific line at the end that convinces me he’s good for Majima in the rest of the games as well. The rest of the cast put in the kinds of quality performances you’d expect from a lot of high-budget modern games, some fitting the characters so well I almost felt like I recalled hearing the lines before – despite only having played the game in Japanese. Risa Mei as a particular standout, delivering a wide range with a character that goes through serious emotional strife and changes in personal attitude over a few days, and Vic Chao’s Nishitani works well as a clear inspiration to Majima.
That said, despite the quality of the individual performances, the dub production itself gets a black mark for its surprisingly incomplete nature. While everything from major cutscenes and all dialogue from major voiced characters is covered, ambient dialogue is often left untouched in haphazard ways. You’ll walk around Kamurocho listening to people speak Japanese before getting into a fight and audibly speak to them in English. In Majima’s cabaret club quest, you’ll engage in intimate training conversations with the fully-dubbed Platinum hostesses (such as Erica Lindbeck’s delightful Yuki), only to then play the club minigame where those same girls revert to their Japanese voice lines… while Majima continues to speak English. While not everyone minds this – I have a friend who actually likes it – I really do think that any dub needs to cover every line. I also would’ve liked to see a “Director’s Cut” release such as this go to the extent of fully voicing (in all languages) the previously text-only lines in the various substories and other side quests, but that likely wouldn’t have worked without a wide range of animation changes to go along with them. Still, some of the more unhinged ones could’ve been gloriously entertaining. Overall, I do still recommend playing the Yakuza/LaD games in Japanese on your first playthrough, but if you’re going through the game a second time? This is an excellent way to spice up the experience.
(Director’s) Cut Content
Two of the best of the new cutscenes, in my opinion.
One of the headline features of the (temporarily Switch 2 exclusive) Director’s Cut is the inclusion of “26 minutes of new footage” – I thought these were deleted scenes but they actually seem to be legitimately new. Their quality is… mixed, if I’m being honest. I’m not as down on them as a lot of people are, but they do have a rather unfortunate focus on refusing to let dead characters stay dead. The first scene is probably the most egregious, with one especially outlandish survival paired with needless foreshadowing, but the rest are less offensive – despite the fact that they often present a strong feeling of being inserted, aren’t exactly critical to the plot, and have a different vibe to the rest of the game. I expect even a lot of players on their first playthrough may be able to recognise them as the new content. I’ll avoid going into detail, since they are filled with spoilers (readers should also note that they come very late into the game, I was tens of hours into my playthrough before even seeing one), but while I don’t think the extra scenes were needed, I do think at least 2 if not 3 of them enhance the game. The final one especially is outright entertaining.
Red Light Raiding
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The other major addition to this new Switch 2 release is Red Light Raid, a… co-op multiplayer mode? It’s a surprising choice for this series, as to my knowledge Yakuza/LaD has never dipped its toes into this field – until now? Is this a sign of the future? Is there a Like A Dragon live-service game on the horizon? Probably not, but stranger things have happened. For now, we get to beat up Japanese men with other Japanese men, and it’s some reasonably silly fun. It’s a classic “re-used assets” mode, but at least they’ve done everything they can within that framework – it seems that every character who participates in combat in Yakuza/LaD 0 has been included in Red Light Raid as either a playable character Kiryu and Goro’s different styles are separate choices, so no style switching here) or a CPU-controlled “helper” to fill out parties when you don’t have a full 4 players. The mode is plenty fun – it’s simply Yakuza combat with more players and enemies. It does feel a little weird due to the realities of needing to keep everything stable in a multiplayer game, but it’s a fun little “turn your brain off” distraction that pairs well with the Switch 2’s new GameChat function and was likely produced with it in mind. The wealth theme of the main game carries over to RLR (even if your literal money doesn’t, with the funds for the mode being distinctly separated), as you need cash to unlock and level up both your playable characters and your helpers. This gives you a basic feeling of progression, as does unlocking new locations by beating the stages you start with access to. This isn’t something I would recommend buying the game for or anything, but in this day and age of money-hungry live-service games I’m not about to turn my nose up at a fun little multiplayer mode being included in an already-beefy singleplayer game for free. More games should have these, not less, and any owner of Director’s Cut should absolutely give it a shot.
The Game-Key Card Discourse
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Since Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut is the only Game-Key Card I own, I thought I should briefly touch on this subject as well. Game-Key Cards, for the literally nobody who hasn’t heard the complaints by now, are “physical” versions of games that sadly don’t contain the game data on the disc. This sounds like the already existing practice of simply bundling a download code in the box (this has already been done on Switch 2, in the case of Split Fiction), but GKCs do actually have a minor advantage. Because the physical game card acts as the game’s DRM, it can immediately download the game without needing to be tied to a specific account, making it easy to lend to other people like a physical game. In comparison to proper “data-on-card” physical games, it will offer faster loading times, and generally be cheaper – though, often only for the publisher. On the other hand, it’s the only option to take up both your internal storage and your game card slot (Yakuza 0 weighs 47GB, and I have to wonder just how much of that is the high-definition bikini videos you can watch…), and acts as an incentive to developers to not produce proper physical games at all. Yakuza 0 COULD have been one – Cyberpunk 2077 contains the entire game and DLC on a 64GB card – and it’s a shame Sega didn’t offer this. Overall, the Game-Key Card experience hasn’t been particularly onerous yet, and the format does offer certain advantages over digital games, but overall I’m not a fan due to the way it threatens to wear down consumer freedoms even further. I would say not to buy them, and to support proper physical games on Switch 2, as difficult as that will likely be. Hopefully Nintendo’s commitment to using their own game cards results in prices being driven down fast.
Conclusion
Look, I’m not even gonna explain this one. You’ll have to see the context for yourself.
Overall, Yakuza/LaD 0 is a very worthy edition of one of the best prequels of all time, and brings it to portable console gaming in style. The compelling characters, great action and banknote-laden visual style evoking the wealthy Japanese bubble era combine to make a game whose original success is unsurprising and thoroughly deserved. The price is lower than some other Switch 2 games, though the original release on other platforms is cheaper still, and it’s currently unknown how the Director’s Cut content will be brought to those platforms in the future. Overall, I strongly recommend this version should you have a Switch 2 already.
