We're breakin' the world. Kowase!
There's something special about a game which manages to make real estate into a high drama emotional rollercoaster, no? I mean don't get me wrong, I'm sure that there's a special sort of thrill attached to flipping properties for a profit, but somehow I can't see myself cheering, laughing and bawling over signing a deed to ownership. (Actually, I guess it depends on the property.) Yakuza 0, on the otherhand, manages to ride that premise into one of the most action packed exhilarating action adventure crime dramas that I've ever played, and I'm happy singing it's praises even though you've probably read me doing it before. But whereas then I was there talking about the special details which make that virginal playthrough unforgettable, now I'm talking about the systems which kept me hooked in to come back for a second playthrough and to shoot for completion; which I am close on.
Firstly I must say that after finishing Yakuza 0 it wasn't long before I was jumping into legendary difficulty, and as far as hardcore modes go this particular one wasn't too bad at all. Legendary Mode bills itself on the model of a hard difficulty spike alongside absolutely no retry points, meaning that the second you die you'll find yourself booted back to the startup screen. But that's fine by me, as I'd cut my teeth of Persona 4 and the punishment for death on that game's hard mode is twice as prominent and twice as punishing. Yakuza provides enough saving opportunities for me to never feel left in the lurch and instead made me excited for big upcoming showstopper moments because I knew I had to complete them all in one sitting or face a full restart. (Of the event that is, manual saves still function) In particular this ramped around the Chapter 1 finale, the Tojo Clan HQ sequence and the extended finale scene which I only managed to scrap by in succeeding. (I forgot it was three boss fights straight, I though it was only two!)
I loved the extra challenge because it forced me to take advantage of literally every single feature in order to get ahead, from the meta-games that grind money for skill upgrades to the Staminan Royales which can only be found in pharmacies, I was stocked and trained for every encounter and the game bought the peril to make each fight feel like an adequate test of all I'd acquired. Of course, nearer the end of the game, as I started to max out, I began to surpass even the game's lofty skill requirements to a frankly ridiculous degree. And then for the finale I pretty much took the cowards way out and armed up my protagonists to the gills in order to not have to worry about burning out before the credits. (That being said, I still nearly ran dry as Majima, even with experience I was still caught off guard by how overwhelming his scenario gets.) So as far as second playthroughs go, and I didn't think this would be one I'd enjoy given how for some reason Yakuza 0 wouldn't allow me to go New Game + for Legendary, I had a total blast. I will say, however, that I'm not really sold on why Legendary difficulty had to be unlocked, it's honestly my preferred way to play the game and I understand that it helps to know the ins and outs of the game before putting yourself on the line like that, but I prefer for those sorts of decisions to be my choice. (Let me be the author of my own destruction, that you very much Sega!)
And it's here where I circle into the desire to 100% the title, because it's a testament to how well the design is woven for me to be able to tie them so closely. The various shops, activities and restaurants all weave into the overall completion percentage of the game in manners ranging from small to essential. Restaurants merely want you to taste at least everything on the menu once in order to reward you with those neat completion points, shops can have tools and items which assist with activities or just plain staying alive and the activities themselves often tie into side stories and or the metagame. Of course then there are the metagame's themselves; either managing a Cabaret club as Majima or a Real Estate firm as Kiryu, which are practically the only way to make the ludicrous amount of revenue needed to max out each character. Everything I mentioned is ostensibly 'side content' but none of them is so far removed from the core experience that you feel like you're wasting your time for pursing them. It's not like the various collectables in Ubisoft games that don't mean anything and burn a hole in your time for no reason whatsoever. (Why am I chasing after pages across rooftops? No good reason? Okay then.)
Whatsmore, some of the completion tasks themselves are actually pretty challenging propositions, as opposed to just quests of attrition. The Sega arcade quests in particular ask you to be semi decent at old School Sega games and honestly that just isn't really in my personal wheelhouse. My personal bane of existence was the 'get 5000000 points in Outrun', something which would feasibly require me to reach about level 5 of an Outrun playthrough. Level 5? Are you insane? I can barely make it to level 3 on a good run, let alone persevere through it! Super Hang On is strangely much easier with that same challenge. But who'd have thought that mastering a Yakuza game meant grabbling with Sega's classic back catalogue? I certainly didn't.
The actual playing through of all the side quests was some of my favourite moments, as Yakuza 0 has a tendency for offering surprisingly meaty and well developed side quests with memorable plots to them, so I remember practically every single one. I remember the truly standout quests such as the one where you infiltrate a wacky cult owned by a Japanese hippy in order to rescue some girl, (Shooreh Pipi) to the much more contained quests like the one in which you have to sneak around a surprise gaggle of women in order to buy a shrink-wrapped magazine for a small boy. ("Don't hide it under you bed, it's not as safe as you think") That doesn't even cover how just about every single questline ends with some sort of heartfelt message which, whilst undeniably sappy, is always genuine and sometimes quite sweet. Or maybe the entire quests ends up being a hilariously off-the-rails dive into insanity. (The latter of which is becoming increasingly more embraced by subsequent Yakuza entries.) 
Of course there are the hangups, that which made my completion objective teeth-grindingly tedious at times, and I'm not talking about the frankly scandalous price of the top tier abilities. (1 billion yen each? Are you high?) One line of substories that have to be completed in order to hit that 100% is a series of dates, 3 good 6 bad, that Kiryu can earn from the Teltel telephone club. This basically requires the player to go through a small fun, if highly provocative, minigame in the promises of a date on the otherside, with one small problem; the results are entirely RNG based. There are small tells to predict which date you're heading towards (the most prominent being the colour of the imaginary girl's underwear that Kiryu is imaging.) but for the most part unless you're good with memorising voices you'll just be doing these quests over and over until a new one pops up. (I got the 'Sakura' misdirection quest 5 times straight) Then there is the slot car racing which becomes increasingly RNG based the further you head down the storyline. Not that the opponents abilities are RNG, but rather the insane physics that rule your car. The final race took me 15 attempts and I changed literally no components on the car itself, it was just all down to whatever the physics engine decided it wanted to do that run. (I hope that's somewhat rectified when I start Kiwami)
But despite my hangups there's so many fun activities in Yakuza 0 that I could keep coming back to this world for ages. The coliseum, in particular, was ludicrously fun for what pretty much works out as a gauntlet of unique bosses and mismatched rulesets. All I would have to critique is the reward for the 100% journey, or at least the substory portion of it, which is two battles against the super bosses So Amon and Jo Amon. Now I know that super bosses are meant to be ridiculously tough, but they're at least usually fun and rewarding to fight. Both those fights were slogs, with So Amon's being nigh on unbearable for the first half. But even then I cannot complain as fully as I want to because Majima made a JJBA reference and that forgives all sins. It's just fact.
No comments:
Post a Comment