Yakuza 0: The best place to start the crime saga

Yakuza 0 released in Japan in 2015 and reached the West in January 2017, and it did the single hardest thing a long-running series can attempt: it became the recommended entry point into a franchise that was, by that point, six mainline games deep. Set in 1988, at the height of Japan’s bubble economy, it’s a prequel to everything that came before it in release order, following a young Kazuma Kiryu and a young Goro Majima years before either becomes the character longtime players already knew. That structural choice does the onboarding work for free — nobody needs six games of backstory to understand two ambitious young men navigating the criminal hierarchy of a boom-time Japan that’s about to collapse under its own excess.

Dual protagonists, deliberately mismatched tones

The game splits its runtime between Kiryu, framed for a murder he didn’t commit and dragged into a dispute over a patch of Kamurocho real estate implausibly valuable for reasons the plot slowly reveals, and Majima, running a cabaret club in Osaka’s Sotenbori district while working off a debt to the Yakuza that requires him to fake being a lethal assassin-for-hire. Kiryu’s half plays straighter — a wronged man clawing back his name through a fairly conventional crime-thriller structure. Majima’s half is stranger and funnier, built around a nightclub management minigame and a running joke about a man who is, in fact, a genuinely lethal fighter, forced to pretend at incompetence to protect his cover.

The tonal whiplash between the two — often within the same afternoon of play, since the game lets a player switch protagonists at save points — is the series’ defining trick, and Yakuza 0 executes it as cleanly as any entry before or since: a devastating late-game revelation about Kiryu’s mentor sits comfortably alongside Majima accidentally getting roped into a small-time hostess’s revenge plot against a scam artist, and neither register undercuts the other because the game commits fully to both.

Combat styles as character, not just move-lists

Each protagonist can switch between multiple fighting styles mid-fight — Kiryu alternates between a balanced Brawler stance, a crowd-control Rush style, and a slow, devastating Beast style that trades speed for the ability to pick up and swing environmental objects like bicycles and vending machines. Majima’s styles run from a breakdancing Breaker stance built around unpredictable spinning attacks to a pair of trick-knife Slugger and Thug styles that reward aggressive positioning. None of this is cosmetic: certain enemy types are specifically tuned to punish the wrong style choice, so switching mid-combo in response to what the fight is doing becomes the actual skill test, rather than mashing a single optimised combo string.

The environmental brawling — grabbing bar stools, traffic cones, whatever happens to be lying around a given Kamurocho side street — gives every fight a scrappy, geography-specific texture that a more sanitised beat-em-up would iron out. It’s a similar philosophy to the environmental interaction Divinity: Original Sin 2 builds its combat around, just translated into a real-time brawler register rather than a tactical one — the world itself is a weapon, not set dressing.

The substories are where the writing actually lives

Yakuza 0’s main plot is a fairly conventional, well-executed crime thriller about real estate fraud and organisational betrayal, but the substories — dozens of short, optional side vignettes triggered by wandering Kamurocho and Sotenbori — are where the game’s genuine strangeness and warmth show up. A grown man crying because he lost at rock-paper-scissors to a child; a disco-dancing tutorial delivered with complete sincerity; a subplot about teaching a shut-in how to rebuild his confidence through a series of increasingly bizarre life lessons. These aren’t filler in the way open-world checklist content usually is — they’re tonally load-bearing, establishing that Kiryu and Majima are, underneath the crime-thriller plot, fundamentally decent people who keep getting pulled into strangers’ problems because they can’t walk past someone who needs help.

That’s a genuinely different comparison point to how Persona 4 Golden blends small-town melodrama with a central mystery — both games use a dense roster of optional social content to build empathy for a cast the main plot alone wouldn’t have time to develop, but Yakuza 0 does it through pure environmental incident rather than a scheduled calendar system, which suits its denser urban setting.

Business minigames that could be their own game

Kiryu’s real estate management subplot and Majima’s cabaret club management subplot are both substantial enough to function as standalone systems, complete with their own progression, rival businesses to defeat, and dedicated storylines for the recruitable staff. They’re optional relative to the main plot, but skipping them means missing a meaningful chunk of what makes each protagonist’s half of the game distinct — Kiryu’s real estate war reframes 1980s corporate Japan as its own kind of turf battle, while Majima’s cabaret club puts him, a man play-acting incompetence to survive, in charge of teaching hostesses to read a room, which becomes a sharp bit of character work disguised as a management sim.

The minigame density is a genre argument in itself

It’s worth being specific about how much of Yakuza 0 isn’t combat or story at all: karaoke, disco dancing, a fully playable version of the arcade game Out Run, a hostess-training minigame, a full slate of gambling activities from mahjong to shogi to a working pachinko-adjacent slot experience. Most open-world games of the same era treated minigames as brief novelty diversions; Yakuza 0 builds several of them to a completeness that would be a reasonable asking price as standalone products. The disco dancing sequences in particular are staged with a sincerity that could easily have played as parody and instead plays completely straight, which is exactly the tonal commitment that makes the series’ comedy land rather than curdling into cynicism.

This density isn’t padding in the way a modern open-world checklist can be, because none of it is required to progress the main plot, and the game never nags a player to engage with it through markers or completion percentages. It exists because Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio built a version of 1988 Japan detailed enough to support genuine leisure activities, and then let the player choose how much of that leisure to actually experience — a very different relationship to open-world content than the objective-marker economy most Western open-world games settled into around the same period.

Kamurocho and Sotenbori as characters, not backdrops

Both game’s two main districts are fictionalised stand-ins for real Tokyo and Osaka nightlife areas — Kamurocho for Kabukicho, Sotenbori for Dotonbori — rendered dense enough that the same handful of city blocks support the entire game without ever feeling like reused space. Neon signage, specific convenience-store chains, arcade cabinets, and a soundtrack of era-appropriate bubble-economy pop all combine to make 1988 legible as a specific, over-leveraged moment in Japanese economic history rather than a generic period setting. The series has returned to a version of Kamurocho in nearly every subsequent entry, and Yakuza 0 is doing the work of establishing why that four-block radius is worth revisiting at all: because the game populates it with enough specific, memorable incident that the geography itself becomes a character the player recognises on sight by the campaign’s end.

Where the pacing tests patience

For all its strengths, Yakuza 0 is a long game with a plot that occasionally slows to accommodate its own side content, and the main story’s midgame stretch — heavy on cutscene exposition about corporate real estate maneuvering — asks for more patience than the combat-forward opening promises. A player expecting a lean action game will find the cutscene-to-combat ratio front-loaded towards dialogue more than the genre framing suggests, and the game’s insistence on fully explaining every faction’s motives before a fight can sometimes slow momentum exactly when the story most wants urgency. It’s a fair trade for the substory density elsewhere, but it’s a real pacing cost worth naming rather than waving away.

Spoilers below

The central mystery — who really killed the man Kiryu is framed for murdering, and why an empty lot in Kamurocho is worth enough for the entire Tojo Clan hierarchy to go to war over it — resolves around a buried Tojo Clan slush fund and a succession crisis within the clan’s leadership, with the eventual reveal that Kiryu’s own mentor, Shintaro Kazama, has been protecting him from a conspiracy reaching into the clan’s chairmanship itself. The reveal recontextualises the entire first half of the game: what looked like a straightforward frame-up was actually several factions manoeuvring around Kiryu because his mentor’s protection made him a useful, deniable pawn.

Majima’s arc ends with him abandoning the Mad Dog persona he’s spent the whole game performing, choosing to fully embrace his own capability rather than continuing to hide it — a choice with real weight for players who know how the character develops across the rest of the series’ timeline, since it marks the moment the “Mad Dog of Shimano” identity that defines him in later entries actually begins. The game’s final act brings both protagonists together to confront the true architects of the land dispute, and the resolution deliberately leaves Kiryu poorer, more isolated, and less trusting of the organisation he’s spent the game defending — an unusually bittersweet note for a game about to be followed, in release order, by six more entries chronicling exactly how much worse that isolation gets.

The empty lot at the centre of the plot turns out to sit atop land the Tojo Clan’s founding chairman secretly deeded away decades earlier as collateral against a debt nobody in the present-day organisation remembers, which is why its true value never shows up in any official record the rival factions can simply seize by force. That buried-history structure — a present-day crisis rooted in a decision made a generation before any of the played characters were adults — becomes the series’ recurring device for tying its yearly instalments together, and Yakuza 0 sets the template cleanly enough that returning to it after playing later entries only deepens how much weight the 1988 setting was quietly carrying all along.