Yakuza is a franchise I've been very vaguely aware of for a long time, but I never really knew anything about it beyond the title until one of the my best friends started playing this, and raving about how good it was, insisting every gamer she knew play it as well. That will be exactly three months ago as of tomorrow; she's now well on her way to completing
Yakuza 5 [龍が如く5 夢、叶えし者], having essentially hooked the franchise directly into her veins and mainlined the entire thing in chronological order. I will probably do the same.
I mention this because it feels both significant and incredibly fitting.
Yakuza 0 (and, from what I can gather, the
Like a Dragon [龍が如く] franchise in general) is that rarest of things: a big budget video game that is absolutely impossible to advertise, one whose appeal cannot be reduced to snappy tag lines or adequately outlined in a two-minute trailer. It is a AAA-title in scope, length, and production values, but it has the soul of an indie in the way it feels designed from the ground up to be a cult classic, a word-of-mouth sleeper, rather than an instant smash hit. More than any other game franchise I've ever played in my life, it has a tone, ethos, and personality built to attract not fans, but
obsessives.
And the frustrating thing is that, even now I probably count as one of those obsessives, I don't even know how to begin telling you what
Yakuza 0 is, let alone why it's so great. It's serious, silly, profound, criminally horny, hilarious, violent, playful, moving, and thrilling all at once. It has a beautifully crafted and thematically rich main storyline, rife with political intrigue and personal drama, played out by a set of characters that the phrase 'an embarrassment of riches' could have been coined to describe, and yet chances are high that you will spend the overwhelming majority of your time with it doing other things, because the sheer volume of side quests and minigames happening all around you is overwhelming. There is an incredibly addictive cabaret club minigame that could easily have been released as a fully-fledged standalone game; Kiryu's quest to become the real estate kingpin of Kamurocho is a whole extra storyline in and of itself; there is bowling, pool, darts, fishing, mahjong, shogi, karaoke, dancing, poker, blackjack, and model car racing, and many of them have mechanics better than some of the games I've played that are fully dedicated to those things; you can chat up women at a telephone club and watch FMV videos of actual real-life Japanese porn stars if you want to; it has a character creator right out of
The Sims that you can choose to dress the cabaret hostesses that work for you, and then a dating sim minigame where you can speak to them; you can get blackout drunk in bars if you want, and it has an impact on your fighting abilities in the streets and your vision during minigames; you can make friends with shop workers, sushi chefs, the only cop in the whole of Japan, and a delightful nappy-wearing gentleman by the name of Mr. Libido; and there is constant, unrelenting combat, seemingly the entire male population of Tokyo and Osaka running up to you in the street to catch some hands. It is not an open world game by any reasonable measure - both main characters are confined to small neighbourhoods - but so much is densely packed into those neighbourhoods that you're tempted to describe it as one anyway, simply because it feels like a game that lets you do this many things must be open world. It feels like five or six different games rolled into one - and it literally is in one sense, considering you can walk into an arcade and play
OutRun [アウトラン],
Super Hang-On, and
Space Harrier if you want to.
And as for why it's great....the simplest way to explain it is that
Yakuza 0 turns absolutely everything up to 11, all the time. It does not matter how significant or insignificant the events may be: the game treats all of them one and the same. When you start a model car race, your character goes into a battle stance; if you lose that same race, he will look like he's on the verge of tears. When you enter the telephone club and answer the phone, the unreasonably dramatic cutscene that plays makes the phone cord look like a chain whip; if you arrange to meet a woman and she turns out to be something less than your character expected, you will lose of a significant chunk of your health bar due to the emotional damage inflicted upon you. When you sing karaoke, you will enter a full-blown cheesy '80s music video. When you play the dancing minigame, your characters will absolutely cut the world's biggest rug, throwing down like a pissed-up dad at a wedding. And that's all before we consider the side stories, some of which have you taking down human trafficking rings, saving people from being brainwashed by cults, and reuniting children with their estranged parents, and some of which have you trying to buy a porno mag from a vending machine without being spotted, or training a dominatrix how to humiliate her clients more effectively, or helping the biggest pop star in the world 'Miracle Johnson' film his new music video, directed by 'Stephen Spining'. 'Restraint' is not in this game's vocabulary - and that is precisely what allows it to be so funny and so moving at the same time. By all rights, a game that does this much, and strikes at such a wide range of emotions, should be an absolute mess. It's not so much that
Yakuza 0 isn't a mess - more that it embraces its own ambitions and messiness, and goes at it with such force and conviction that it overcomes any contradictions through sheer bloody-minded will.
I cannot tell you that you will love this game, because there are some very reasonable reasons why a person would look at this and say 'not for me, thanks' - but I could tell you why *I* love this game for hours. That, I think, sums up
Yakuza more than anything. If you're one of the people who this will land for, it will land
hard.
"Q: What is the white stuff in bird poop?
A: That is bird poop, too." - Kurt Vonnegut