#Yakuza 0
#Yakuza 0
by Don (@opobjectives)
The Yakuza games are well known for being part neighborhood simulator, part highly dramatic hypermasculine gangster fantasy. On occasion, that mix includes an oddly thorough representation of meeting strangers, playing darts, and getting drunk.
Just about every entry in the series offers a few bars with dart boards, with bar staff offering a small variety of minigames like 501, Cricket, or Count-Up. If you play a few rounds, then side characters start to crawl out of the woodwork to offer some competition. That’s par for the course across the series.
Only in Yakuza 0, however, does that competition lowball their skills, liquor up protagonist Kazuma Kiryu, and hustle millions of yen out of him.
by Omar (@siegarettes)
For all its distractions, Yakuza is a romantic series. There’s a certain nostalgic feeling towards its city, its characters, and its ideas of masculinity. So there’s no better time to set one of its games than in the 80’s, when Japan’s boom economy created in atmosphere of prosperity and excess. Of course, within excess breeds corruption, and so in the midst of this new prosperity rise the machinations of ambitious men. Enter Kiryu and Majima, two inexperienced yakuza caught in the web of a conspiracy. A conspiracy they’ll have to untangle by punching a lot of other men until they give up the truth.
In practical terms, this means roaming the cities of Kamurocho and Sotenbori, hitting up bars and brawls on your way to the next story beat. Yakuza’s dense cities often get it compared to open world games, but its rhythms and pacing are distinctly JRPG. Cutscenes are lengthy and frequent, often accompanied by excellent voice acting and theatrical facial expressions. Naturally, plenty of these escalate into violence.