Enter The Dragon

The weird and wonderful YAKUZA 0 finally arrives on PC.

- Phil Savage

The first thing you do is beat up a gang of street thugs. The second thing? Before the crime drama unfolds, before a real estate turf war earns you hundreds of millions of yen, before you battle your way through the Japanese underworld, you sing karaoke. You tap your way through a rhythm action minigame; the dingy bar transforming into a concert stage as series lead Kiryu imagines himself rocking out to an ’80s power ballad.

Welcome to Yakuza 0, ostensibly an open world action game, but one that blends arcade-style brawling with a visual novel’s languid conversations, throws in a selection of weird and wonderful minigames, and wraps it all up in a world where the sublime meets the ridiculous and the ridiculous is sublime. Where one minute you’re fighting for your life, and the next you’re teaching a rookie dominatrix how to humiliate perverts. Where, when you tire of trying to foil the callous plots of the rich and powerful, you can pop over to the arcade for a game of OutRun. Where you’ll sit at a bar and wax poetic about what it means to live outside of society, only to leave and run into a man wearing nothing but his underpants gyrating his hips.

This is the sixth game in the Yakuza series, which primarily tells the story of the Dragon of Dojima, Kazuma Kiryu, a man for whom being good at punching people is both the cause and solution to all of life’s problems. It’s also a prequel, making it the perfect entry point for new players—handy, as this is the first game in the series to be ported to PC. Yakuza 0 is set in the ’80s, making it the start of Kiryu’s long story, and, other than a few veiled references to the future events of previous games, it does a great job of introducing the characters and the world.