While I had first heard of the series decades ago, I wasn’t really interested enough to actually pick it up for the longest time, even though I actually like limited open world games that put more detail into smaller locations. A few months ago, I bought Yakuza 0 on sale and recently tried it out on the Steam Deck. I’ve played a couple of hours at this point, so these are more first impressions than an actual review.

It’s a bit of a trip, both good and bad.

Starting with the technical side of things, the best way to describe it would be that it’s highly inconsistent. It runs well on the Deck, even connected to a 1080p external display, but that’s to be expected of a PS3/PS4 cross-gen title. It still feels like a PS2 game with a thick coat of paint though, especially the clunky movement and combat animations. Characters look incredibly well-modeled and textured, equal parts stylized and realistic - but the moment they are starting to move, the illusion falls apart. At least early on, the open world is a series of corridors in a district of Tokyo, with some locations connected via taxi. There are many, but poorly animated pedestrians. It can look impressive at night, with its countless authentic neon signs, whereas the daytime segments are more dated. I was expecting it to feel more believable and less like a set filled with poorly directed background extras that bump into things and each other, but perhaps my expectations were too high.

What’s truly bizarre and off-putting though is how this game switches between several different types of cutscenes, ranging from completely fleshed out and animated (those look great) over less well-animated (but serviceable), to nearly completely static (but still voiced)= cutscenes with barely any movement. There are also segments that aren’t voiced at all. In some cases, cutscenes appear to randomly switch between two or even all three of these levels of quality right in the middle of the scene. Maybe it’s some holdover from the series early days, but to me it feels jarring and unfinished, as if the developers ran out of money and/or time and had to push out the bare minimum product that almost like a cheaply made Japanese visual novel at the worst moments. Not what I was expecting of a Sega game.

Voice acting, which is completely in Japanese, does sound excellent, the speakers clearly being masters of their art, but the script - if the English translation is accurate, which it seems to be - about a young, idealistic Yakuza that gets cast into a web of conspiracies, with it’s long and overdramatic conversations, the insane amount of pathos, even a cheesy black and white retrospective (I’m sure there will be many more of those) is a mess, taking away from the generally interesting intrigue of the overarching plot with meandering conversations that would have benefited from an editor cutting them to a small fraction of their original length (which would have also permitted those to be actually fully animated with the same budget). I have seen a few clips of this game and others that make it seems like the series is able to make fun of itself (the new pirate spin-off makes this more than obvious), but at least early on, there’s not much of that in Yakuza 0 and to me it feels like it takes itself way too seriously.

The first time I played this game, I made a mistake and didn’t save the game manually at the telephone booths. Yes, I know they are marked with an ‘S’ icon on the minimap, but since I visited a booth during a cutscene, I thought the game had saved there automatically. When I discovered that about 1.5 hours of progress had been wiped, I was more than a bit furious. Having no auto-save is anachronistic for a 2015 game to say the least. I was considering giving up on this game entirely at this point, despite some desire to find out where the plot would be going, but I decided to try it again. It was then that it truly became apparent just how much of the game, at least during the introduction, is spent on narration and how little actual gameplay there is. Skipping all of the cutscenes and “cutscenes” the game allowed me to skip, which was annoying, and running through the world to the destinations, those 1.5 hours and change shrunk down to less than ten minutes of actual gameplay, which I haven’t even touched on yet. Even compared to a game by Quantic Dream, who are making perhaps the closest Western equivalents to this series (I’m expecting angry disagreements on this), this is quite a striking ratio. I like narrative games, I enjoy games that take their time exposing their world to the player - but the best way of doing this is through ludonarrative means, not by shoving an amount of cutscenes into the player’s face that clearly exceeds both the talent of the writers and the coffers of the publisher footing the bill.

Anyhow, on to the gameplay. Since it makes up so little of the game, at least so far, and is clearly an afterthought, I won’t spend much time on it. Yakuza 0 is a basic arena beat-em-up with limited open world exploration and mid-fight quick-time events that can catch you completely off-guard (as well as other quick-time minigames, like karaoke). Solid, but unspectacular combo system that permits the player to get by with button mashing, hard to notice button prompts, slightly unfair mini-boss and boss fights, at least to the inexperienced player, terrible lock-on system, AWFUL camera (one more aspect that makes it feel 15 years older than it is), no AI to speak of and animations that are decades out of date, apart from the crunchy and satisfying finishers (unless you’re at at the receiving end). The developers tried to make up for this with a charge up system that adds particle effects to the presentation and expands the available move set, which is probably another series tradition, but feels completely out of place. This isn’t a modern fantasy game, at least not yet, so I don’t know what they were thinking. Not that I was expecting realism - one guy beating up a dozen in a single fight clearly isn’t - but this feels cheap. They could have just made the UI more readable instead of compressing important information against the edge of the screen and compensating for it with effects. I’m sure this becomes less of an issue the more experienced one has with these games, but still, it’s hardly ideal.

Overall, it’s a weird package. I’m equal parts intrigued and annoyed by this game. Yakuza is clearly its very own thing. The formula is successful and well received, both in Japan and internationally, so maybe I’m the odd-one out for not fawning over it. It’s like a dish with two dozen ingredients, some of which taste great, others do not and the overall impression is mainly that of confusion. Despite frequent claims that Yakuza 0 was a great entry point into the series, it feels like watching a random episode of an obscure TV show 25 out of its 50 seasons in that some friend has been pushing me to watch for years, telling me how great it is. It’s like a (barely) playable Japanese telenovela, if that makes any sense, even though the story isn’t actually that hard to follow. The unremarkable gameplay, dated tech, unfinished presentation and meandering narrative kind of sour an intriguing setting that is bursting with character and detail. I want to explore late 1980s bubble-era Tokyo and I want to know how this story ends, but at least the early parts of this game feel like I’m being dragged along at a pace that seems both too fast and too slow at the same time.

If you’ve read this far already (I’m truly sorry for making you suffer through this stream of consciousness - just like the writers of this game, I should probably hire an editor), are familiar with both this game and the rest of the series, would you say that it makes sense for me to continue or should I move on? Has anyone else felt similarly baffled by the whole experience?