Being a North American fan of the Yakuza series of games is like chasing after a fickle mistress. First there is the year long wait normally to get the latest game over to North America from Japan, and then we are always wondering if Sega decided to remove or change content fearing that North American residents may not be able to handle sexual content or concepts that are foreign to us. All of that said, it was nice to sit down at the Sony booth at E3 2016 and play about 15-20 minutes of Yakuza Zero, which is confirmed for an early 2017 release in North American.
Yakuza Zero is a prequel, setting our adventure back in a 1988 version of Kamurocho, a fictionalized version of the seedier parts of Tokyo. At the show, two characters had playable arcs available. As I had already watched someone else play the Kiryu content, I decided to play Goro Majima as he resides in Shinjuku area of Japan.
Yakuza Zero keeps the general formula that makes up the core of a Yakuza title at this point, as you have about 50 stories to uncover and solve for each character, combat encounters to beat and then there are the extra activities. For Majima, I had karaoke or dancing available to me along with some food establishments and bars. For my time, I decided to perform a bit of karaoke and then head over and solve the story of a man that is acting like a statue but needs help attracting crowds. The karaoke timing seemed to have an extremely tight window for the button presses, which I do not remember being so tight in past Yakuza titles. The story on the other hand, kept the humor that you have come to expect with these side missions, requiring me to provide a humorous distraction while the fake statue man used the bathroom.
Combat has received a big overhaul in Yakuza Zero. Instead of having a light and heavy attack, you now have three different attack styles you can use, which is completely new. Kiryu has a standard style, heavy style and quick style, whereas Majima has a standard style, a breakdancing style and then a footwork style. Switching between styles is easy enough by using the d-pad, although I will admit that I found myself defaulting to the breakdancing combat style if only because it looks so dang cool. I have a feeling in the final release, we will see certain enemies requiring you to switch to different styles, but at this point, I could stick with a style and roll with it.
It was interesting to see both Majima and Kiryu looking so young in this game, but I have to admit that the game did not seem a graphically groundbreaking as I thought it would on PS4. Within the last six months, we have had Yakuza 5 finally release here in the US and in playing that recently, I can’t say that I saw a huge graphical leap from Yakuza 5 to Yakuza Zero. Again, we are seeing a game that could be anywhere between six months to a year away from its final release, but it seemed odd that it did not look better.
As referenced earlier, Yakuza games can sometimes end up being a bit censored here and there, for our more prude ideologies on sexuality here in North America but I can attest that the censors might have taken an afternoon off while Yakuza Zero passed through the office. I mean, one of the stories that you can participate in with Kiryu has to do with training a woman to become a better dominatrix for her new S&M business. This mission somehow ends up with you ridiculing a man in front of a bunch of schoolchildren. Yeah, it got real weird, but it is all there, completely uncensored for the North American audiences.
It was hard to get a true grasp on the larger story concepts to be had in Yakuza Zero. While all the side stories and activities are fun, the deep narratives that have become famous in Yakuza titles was unavailable for us to check out in the demo. But right now, I will say that Yakuza Zero is shaping up to be a great release in the Yakuza series on the North American content. Sure, I would like to see a bit more graphical fidelity but there is time to kick it up a notch. Look for Yakuza Zero sometime in the first or second quarter of 2017 only on PlayStation 4.
