Yakuza 0 Retrospective - The Definition of a Perfect Prequel 

The "never killed anyone thing" was a mistranslation. And only really applies to Kiryu. It was never killed anyone outside of self defense. As for Majima, there's a difference between taking a job as an assassin and killing someone you're in a fight with.

Having Majima in it was probably the smartest decision they ever made for the series popularity. Absolutely nailing his fighting techniques was just the icing on the cake.

I really love how when Majima meets Kiryu they both just recognize each or without knowing any physical traits. They just knew it had to be each other based on the looks

Yakuza 0 is one of the greatest comeback/breakthrough stories ever. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Nagoshi for sticking with his vision and with Lost Judgment being the last game he produced, I can only say: ‘Thank you for everything’

Kiryu’s not a member of the Kazama family. They specifically point this out with Nishiki asking why they joined the Dojima family and not the Kazama family. He’s called the Dragon of Dojima for a reason

Yakuza 0 was my introduction to the series at the lowest point of my life. Super depressed and one meal a day or sometimes no meals a day broke. But something about coming home after work and doing all the story, karaoke, disco and fighting was such a big deal to me. This game means so much to me that it’s one of the two games I’ve ever gone out of my way to get all the achievements in, the other being dmc5. Both of those adventures can be equally hellish, but I’m glad I did it. And It’s a little cheesy, but I’m proud of myself for committing to this thing simply because it was fun and it made me happy. When I didn’t have any money or friends, I had yakuza 0. This game could very well be solely responsible for me being here today, knowing that I was going to have a great couple hours at the end of the day kept me going. And yes my life is way better now and I still come back and start a fresh save every now and then

Nishiki is the reason I am so happy I started with 0 and avoided all potential spoilers like the plague. Heck I even save all future yakuza content to 'watch later'.

I wish all of you a happy Ishin Day tomorrow

I think what makes Yakuza 0 really special for me is the time period. There is something really kind of satisfying and analogue about everything, communicating through pagers and payphones felt novel. In a game set in current day when the family wants to call kiriyu in they'd probably send a text message but there is something more satisfying about getting a code on the pager, not knowing the clan wants him but not instantly why. The conversation carries on and at the end he physically walks to a payphone and calls the clan. There is something within the context of a video game that I like about that mechanically as opposed to navigating the menu of a virtual smartphone.

the yakuza series asks the bold question of "what if shenmue was good?"

The part where you mention the localization of Majima's kansai dialect is interesting; I hadn't really thought about it, but it's actually a remarkably good localization of the general "feel" of kansai dialect.

You're probably right about the bubble economy and the developers enjoying it. There's a substory in Kiwami where this young actress asks Kiryu what it was like during that era and he reminisces about it to her while she gushes about it to him. It's a great little story that feels deeply personal.

I read an article where the devs of Yakuza 0 say they believe the biggest reason for the western success was due to them finally learning their lesson on localization. Yakuza 1 has an English version, which is pretty bad since it's a full dub with sketchy translation. Devs said leaving the dialogue in Japanese and localizing only the text made it much easier to make the game accessible while not losing context or sounding out of place. Later they used the same recipe for Kiwami and it worked great as well. I do believe if they released kiwami in the west before 0, it would have a similar success story for the series as 0 had.

Really underselling the combat here. The gear system, four styles, wall bounds, counters and heat actions coupled together does not just provide plenty of variety but a lot of depth as well.

The tachibana part at the end of the game will always make me cry. Makoto’s reaction dude god damn.

Played yakuza 0 back in 2020, loved the game so much and ended up completing the whole series in the year. Got me back into the gym too because I wanted to look like kiryu and now in the best shape of my life!

The word of mouth and amount of streamers who gave this game a chance really spread around how good this series is

as an owner of yakuza 1 and 2 on the wii U, get ready to be hit by lightning twice tomorrow

Seeing Kamurocho change in every new game while still being familiar is so good. It adds a sense of time and place that i haven't seen (on the same level) in any other game. Ps: black panther 1/2 both have english patches (1 - only story & 2 - everything besides hostess)

First NieR and now Yakuza, two of my favourite game series! Keep up with the amazing work Brando!

“the combat system isn’t that deep” *proceeds to explain the depth of the combat system*

This is how you not only bring new life to the Yakuza series but also bring it to the West in epic fashion. As someone who has played EVERY Yakuza game, yep. This is what truly started it all and I love it.

Dude I fucking bawled my eyes out over the kiryu nishiki gun scene.

I had never played a Yakuza game but was told over and over how great they were. I picked up 0-7 and Judgment + Lost Judgment for cheap in mid 2022 and went on a spree playing them. Started at 0, played thru all the way to 7, then played J and LJ. Man they were fantastic. The only bad thing is that 0 was my favorite so nothing quite hit that high, but the rest were great for sure. Honestly 0 was great all around but I loved the bosses in 0. Kiryu’s final fight was my absolute favorite. I still listen to the battle music(Two Dragons) almost daily.

I came across the Yakuza series during the pandemic from game pass and started on 0 and beat the whole series including judgement. This series got me back into gaming

Yakuza today feels big enough to deceive any fan into thinking that it's a big series. Once you get swallowed whole by it you tend to forget that it's still, no matter what we say or do, a somewhat niche franchise. However I am happy to see it grow and it is undoubtedly going to keep on growing. I can't wait to see the dream fulfilled.

I finished Yakuza 0 about a month ago. After putting 81 hours in it, I took a small break to put 20 hours into Dragon Quest Xi but found myself missing the street fights, the drama, and the immersion of helping strangers around Japan. So I played Kiwami, then immediately Kiwami 2, and now I'm 9 hours into Yakuza 3. I'm totally obsessed. I have over 130 hours invested in this series as a whole and have felt very little burn out. Hopefully I can finish 6 by the time Gaiden comes out

Good vid but just one small mistake Kiryu was in the Dojima family not Kazama, the whole point of that flashback was to show why he wasn’t in the Kazama family since he wouldn’t let his adopted sons join the yakuza so they joined up with Dojima instead

one thing that everyone seems to miss: yakuza 0 came in a time where the 80s were all the rage with synthwave, a bunch of tv shows and shit. do yakuza 0 portrays that feeling for the west? no. but got that HEY ITS A GAME SET IN THE 80s with pagers and all and thats enough

Yakuza 0 put the series on the map for me. I felt in love with it. I immediately went and bought the whole collection from the remake Kiwami to 6. The lore is fascinating . Also great shout out to Shenmue. 👍

This man straight up visited real life Tokyo and bought a real life Stainman for the sake of cohesion. Respect.

Been playing thru Yakuza 0 over the past couple weeks. It's my first Yakuza game and I've been absolutely loving it, bought the rest of em on Steam so I can play chronologically. Gonna keep this bookmarked for when I finish 0

Honestly this is maybe one of my favorite games of all time

This was my first Yakuza game and is still (out of kiwami, 6, and 7 and also Judgement) is my favorite. So glad to see content like this!

Ooh Yakuza, one of my favorite game series. Time to clear a hour from my usual schedule.

You actually have a good singing voice! Excellent video on the series - glad I found you in my recommends!

Great video enjoyed the commentary on the gameplay as well as the recap of the story and especially enjoyed the karaoke at the end 11/10 worth my time.

jesus christ dude i love you. i remember seeing this in my recommended 2 days ago in the middle if algebra, i almost audibly yelped in excitement. i was like, of course he made a yakuza 0 video, its gonna be so good. I played 0 end of 2021 and it was wonderful, thanks for doing it justice. - btw your FF13 review got me to play it and i absolutely adore that game now, so thanks. love you Brando

Great video. Finally a Yakuza analysis video that isn't a story summary.

I have played 0 and then Kiwami and it did make the experience a lot more enjoyable with the references to Yakuza 1 Tachibana and the Lieutenants indirectly mentioning what Sunflower really was was a big kick in the teeth in Kiwami.

Yakuza 1 & 2 HD for the Wii U is honestly a phenomenal remaster and port. It puts all of the combat improvements that are in Yakuza 2 into the first game!

Big respect that you actually included a mini vlog, not many people do it

This video is awesome bro, thank you and keep up the content.

What a great video to watch while I'm completing the cabaret stuff in one sitting.

This video made me realize that Yakuza 0 is one of my favorite games of all time. Thank you

I really like the outdoor sections in this video, I could listen to them for an hour.

This game was so important to me at such a low point in my life. I had CPTSD and was dealing with the trauma from years and years of abuse. Majima's and Makoto's story blew me out of the water. Something about Majima rescuing Makoto from the same type of trauma he'd suffered from really resonated with me and gave me hope.

Yakuza games are sooooo good. And Zero was my entry to this series. Played them all. Wished i could wipe my memories anf start again.

An hour well spent, as always with your videos. Also, your singing isn't half bad1

28:04 Yes. We call them long battles.

To go all the way in Tokyo where Yakuza's city was inspired from ....Mad respect to you man..seriously..never seen a review this way being one with Reality !!! 😎👍👌

On my way to barrel through crowds in Kabuckicho just to simulate the real yakuza experience

awesome video, i liked it a lot! that being said as a haruka stan i cannot let this slight against haruka's story in y5 slide (53:30)... it's literally one of my favorite sections in the yakuza series!!! mostly because i felt like the whiplash between haruka's fun idol adventures to like crazy yakuza murder shit was really effective. i think at parts in the series its easy to be desensitized to mfs dying but like in haruka's story it really truly feels BRUTAL in a way that like, i don't know, yakuza 4 did. sure if you're not interested in haruka winning the princess league i guess it'd be boring but i found it to be a fun way to build haruka's character and get a break from the heaviness of other parts of the game. stan haruka for clear skin etc etc

This was a great video about a game from my Fav franchise. Yakuza 0 was my first game and I went and bought all the available games on the PlayStation and I'm glad I discovered this video and game series.

I just finished Yakuza 0, imagine my surprise when I saw that my favorite retrospective youtubers recently posted the same game I’d spent the past couple months playing! Great retrospective, no complaints here. You summed up the thoughts that I had while playing uncannily well. I also kept laughing every time I pulled a gun or stabbed someone with a broadsword, thinking about how these characters wouldn’t kill, but here they are cold-bloodedly moving from one poor target to the next. That’s why I kept the use of these weapons to a minimum throughout my play-through. Your point regarding the Yakuza series and open world design makes so much sense! Even despite the aforementioned gun thing, I never felt a sort of dissonance between the story and the character’s personal journey. And it wasn’t my own journey as the player, I was just witnessing Kiryu and Majima grow into the people they were meant to be. Now that’s how you make a prequel, like you’d already mentioned. P.S: was that you singing at the end? I expected you to sound horrible based on your assessment of your singing skills, but you didn’t sound bad at all! I was grinning while listening to the outro, haha.

I never knew about the yakuza series until yakuza 0 and pretty much have played every single one since then.. cant wait for new ones.

Yakuza Zero is legitimately one of my favorite games of all time. Great gameplay, great story, great music, great characters, great atmosphere, etc. It’s amazing. This was my reintroduction back into the series after having only played the original Yakuza on PS2 back in like 2006, which I liked, but thought was a step down compared to the Shenmue games. After playing this game I fell in love with the series and went back and played all of the other games. Yakuza is amazing man, it’s one of my top 5 favorite series of all time and I have Yakuza Zero to thank for truly getting me into the series.

This was the first Yakuza game I played and man was it a wild ride. Absolutely loved it and was so hooked on the narrative of the game.

Brando Yakuza? Been waiting for this.

Thank you ! I relived Yakuza 0 through this video , one of my favourite video games

12:44 trying to stop him? More like GOING DOWN WITH HIS BRO!

I a HUGE Yakuza Nerd Because of this Game and You ABSOLUTELY NAILED everything About it You Have Earned a New Subscriber

Oh your karaoke skills really aren't as bad as i thought they'd be when you said "you don't wanna hear me singing"

ngl your singing was better than I expected banger video as usual

I’m pretty late in the gaming world so I’m catching up, not I’m planing to play yakuza games soon so I had to stop the video 😢 I enjoyed every minute of it …I enjoy your narration so much I go back to watch old videos again .

Recently finished the game and loved it, this video only deepened my love for this game thanks!!

i started with 0 a few years ago and this series is one of my all time favorites now. im so happy its doing so well cause u can tell a lot love is put into these games

I first got into the Yakuza series this year with this game. I can't believe I never played it before but was a fan instantly.

Hey, I came across your channel recently and I'm impressed with the overall quality of the videos. I'd love if you could do a video about FFXII and Zodiac Age. Keep up the good work!

Love your videos! Looking forward to more

Loved your personal Karaoke bit as a fnisher. The perfect end...and a great relish, after multiple karaoke threats from you reaching certain viewer amounts. Now we want more! always end on it!

That outro was glorious. Majima would be proud.

Been watching your videos lately and I just love how you show some stuff makes more sense/meaning when you have more japanese language & culture knowledge (like you explaining the shimano eating tidbit). Also when you call shit localization out. Its inspiring for me whos been studying japanese. Thanks for making these videos. Cheers from brazil

1:01:21 I started with 0 about 2 years ago so when I went on to play Kiwami 1 after wards I didn't know Nishiki was the antagonist of Y1 but I love Nishiki in 0 and his relationship with Kiryu as brothers. When I started 1 you don't know the wave of disbelief and how much it hurt seeing Nishiki as the antagonist. I see a lot of people rank Kiwami 1 low I don't know if it's because maybe the first was better or the story or something but because I played 0 first Kiwmai 1 has one of my favorite stories in the series so far imo (I'm almost done with 5 currently trying to catch up before 8 comes out!)

Yakuza 0 was my first Yakuza but it felt like pure nostalgia. Walking the streets of the 80's with that exuberant atmosphere feels like "Every step I walk I see something that would be be illegal in 2024".

Amazing video and breakdown! I myself just dove into the Yakuza series (tho started with 7 and then got to 0 and the rest, that one is also an amazing introduction to the world imho). Also, i think the "Kiryu never killed a man" is kinda lost in context... i meeeean i am pretty sure it implies he never killed a man for his selfish interest and on his own volition just strictly in self-defence. (or i might be wrong here and it is for real stated canonically somewhere)

I bought this game for my friend back in 2019 and I've still been trying to convince him to play it... maybe some day

Over the course of 2020, when Like a Dragon released, Sega managed to get all the mainline games onto gamepass with a bunch of updated translations. They're doing a great job capitalizing on the spike in popularity and I can't imagine a better way to play through the entire series.

Yakuza 0 will ALWAYS be installed on my ps5 along with OG FF7 which i noticed u used the sound effects throughout this video haha. They are actually my most played games on ps5.

The internet pretty much saved this series. The series has always been solid with excellent character writing, fun quests and unexpectedly gripping cut scenes. So, when you couple that with youtube, 4chan, and reddit, it's a situation where even of you didn't know of the series firsthand, you're scrolling by those threads, and you're seeing videos in the side bar titled, "why yakuza matters". I had a vague idea what yakuza was until I watched a retrospective review on the series. Then I was like, oh this series is actually very unique and something I need to play.

Man, i love your videos

ex-dev here. Yakuza games of that era generally had prerendered cutscenes (the ones without the text boxes and press "x"/"a" to skip). The "cutscenes" or rather dialogue scenes are real-time in-engine with the RGG:K/3 engine. That engine wasn't able to handle the amount of facial blendshapes with the models used in the CGI cutscenes, i believe the cutscene character models had a range of a few hundred thousand polys (depending on the importance of character). RGG6 had a good mix of high quality cutscenes but that number was more or less 50% of real-time and 50% prerendered. The real issue for the initial version of the dragon engine was the perf/unstable frame rates (at least on the targeted platform at the time) as well as the rather not so impressive aliasing. It is rather hard to tell whether the cutscenes were real-time or not as they were made in the same engine as the game. But if you really look, you can see some compression artifacts (most noticeable the color gradient banding in the skybox, and obvious baked lighting on character models in the real-time rendering of the gameplay and the textbox cutscenes). The dragon engine got much needed improvements by Kiwami 2 and the first Judgement, and but then a large portion of the in-game cutscenes were done in-engine, and aside from more powerful hardware and better optimized engine, using in-game cutscenes saved a ton of space. With modern rendering techniques used in games and the improved frame buffers on modern GPUs, the assets/textures themselves are more complex and taking more space both on the frame buffer and the storage media (Disc or HDD installation) than the PS2/3 era. Making the cutscenes in real-time where ever possible with existing streamable assets with vector coordinate data of deformer bones beat out in space allocation compared to trying to store rendered cutscenes as videos in good quality compressed videos (1440p/4K) on a optical disc or as a digital download.

How I wish I could experience the whole series for the first time again. Yakuza Zero is one of the best game I've played.

I just finished the story of yakuza 0, I had never played any yakuza I discovered it by accident and I just fell in love with this game. I will definitely play the others!

I remember when I learned, much time after seeing for the first time, that Shimano was eating fugu in that scene. Literally opened my mind to another entire side of Shimano with a quick little shot.

I remember getting yakuza 0 for ps4 for about $20 and was blown away by how phenomenal the story was, walking around getting into fights for money or just walk around looking at the neon lights everywhere was just cool, of course the game not being like gta might not make it a perfect open world game but the amount of mini games it had was enough to satisfy me

Omg this is gonna be heavenly

I just started a first time playthrough of the series with 0 being the first game I played. I loved 0's hilarious juxtaposition of a deadly serious story interrupted by wacky hijinks in the side quests.

Haruka's section in 5 goes hard 😤

Your voice convinced me to sing good you don't need a good voice just confidence and it will come out great, so imma go to a karoke when i get the chance

Best outro of all time ngl

As a kid, I had gone to places that sold games, like a Blockbuster, Kmart, Target, or others, and Yakuza would catch my eye, but of course, never really got it because it was advertised as a Japanese GTA, and that never really got me to buy it. Many years later, 2018, I started Yakuza 0 and it got me hooked to the series since, but also had me regret always skipping the other games, until the years have gone by until today, where I own all of the numbered games, alongside Gaiden, Fist of the North Star Lost Paradise, and the Judgment games.

I haven't played Yakuza 0 but I always wanted to. Everytime I go and ask the game store they always say It's out of stock. I have other games on my list new, upcoming and retro games so It's not a must play but after this and other videos I hope to find and play it soon. Also I like the singing at the end and hopefully you do a cover of Baka Mitai. Cool video. ^_^

I played this game back in 2018 and I still can't get enough of people talking about how good the game is and people need to play it. I love it.

Ohhh, early video. I though it was going to be released on friday, but meh. First time I skip the spoiler section because I do actually want to play the Yakuza series, every other game in the video I either played it or really didn't care about it (like FF 13 - 3). Really enjoying your retrospective, I can feel the pasion in your work, mate. You bet your butt I will expect excited youe next video.

You can tell the tour of irl KAmurocho was filmed when One Piece Red was coming out because you can hear one of Ado's songs in the background lol

0 was my Second game i played, the First one being 7, and was such a joy, finish kiwami today and now 2

40:26 Hi. A "yankee" in Japan is a loud ne'er-do-well. You encounter them everywhere in Japan. Groups of youth hanging out on street-corners and such- those are yankees. Mind you, a group of loud tourists are yankees too, no matter where they hail from. Anyway, I was 18 in 1984 Sapporogaoka and I can't remember anyone in that time being strapped for cash. There's a fun urban legend that no one back then would bend down to pick up dropped coins. I was just graduated (Sapporo High School, class of '84) and was about to realise my dream, move to Europe and live the way an European would. I went from one of the richest economies ever to one of the most destroyed economies ever, the Dutch one at the time. Even though it was tough financially, I lived in (and still live in), relatively speaking, theme-park Europe. =)

holy shit i had no idea the map was modeled after that real place, seeing theater square and the parking lot is surreal

There are a lot of heat animations but many of them are so situational that i can't help but wish they'd done some alternate animations for your most common uses, like hitting someone on the floor and the grab.