Yakuza 0 is a widely regarded game by pre-teens, quirk chunguses and people with a lot of spare time on their hands. Its plodding pace and irreverence quickly led me to immense disappointment and I found most of my time playing it was spent going to the arcade and playing Outrun instead.

The tone of the game is varied and schizophrenic. It opens with a typical mafia melodrama about someone saving face and an inter-syndicate squabble immersed in hokey babble about honor, guilt and the rest of it but when you're out and about in the open-world you are met with strange cartoonish characters like Mr. Shakedown, a 9-foot tall man whom you are tasked with avoiding should you not wish to have your face caved in.

The game's main story is often sidelined and hidden away behind an invisible quota of side activities that must be performed for it to progress again and I just found this grating since most of them descend into the same repetitive beat-em-up scenarios the game's story mission presents. The game's setting of 80s Japan feels neither realised or complimentary given the game's shifting tone and the side-activities frequently capitulate into busywork to raise those ever-present "RPG mechanics" so many games feel so limited by nowadays.



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