-- Spoilers for Yakuza 0 and the first 3 chapters of Yakuza Kiwami/Yakuza 1 --
Over the last week and a half I played through Yakuza 0, and it was my first Yakuza game. I absolutely loved it. So many great characters, a script with a great localization, and so smartly designed in so many ways. It really was a tremendous experience. Aside from a dragging a bit in the middle chapters, I really only had one thing that rubbed me the wrong way, and that was what happened to the characters right at the end during the epilogue cutscenes. Now as I said, I had never played another Yakuza game before, but even I could see just how clumsily the game pushed Kiryu and Majima into essentially their starting positions for the beginning of the original Yakuza, complete with what must be their original outfits. Specifically:
- Kiryu's decision to rejoin the Dojima Family, despite them being the villains I just spent 45 hours trying to stop
- Majima's decision to leave Makoto
- Majima all of a sudden becoming 'crazy'
None of these things felt like the logical next steps for these characters given everything that came before. And sure enough, when I finally started Kiwami, the inconsistencies between the original game's story and Yakuza 0 only grew more jarring:
- Papa Dojima really out here snatching up women off the street by himself??
- Nishiki is not only a villain, but he also kills someone like immediately, despite Nishiki being the one at the climax of Yakuza 0 to talk down Kiryu from ending Shibusawa, despite all of the crazy evil shit Shibusawa has done
- Who the fuck is Yumi
- Majima also almost killing a dude but is stopped by Kiryu. Again, at the climax of Yakuza 0, Majima has every reason to kill Lao Gui and Dojima, but Sera talks him down. Again, this is supposed to be the line that once crossed, you can't come back from.
And this is all on top of the obviously more dated gameplay of Kiwami, which I assume hews fairly close to the original PS2 game, compared to Yakuza 0. But I think I'd have a much easier time looking past the dated gameplay if this story felt like a true successor to the story present in Yakuza 0.
Now, I know I'm comparing a game from 2005 to a game from 2015 (I believe these are the original Japanese release dates of the original game and Yakuza 0) and obviously games have come a long way since then. But what I'm hoping someone can tell me is whether the versions of the characters seen in Yakuza 0 are specific to that game only? Or, and this is what I'm hoping is the case - as the games came out over time, are these the characters that formed over time, as the Yakuza team grew as storytellers and fleshed out more and more of these characters and the world? In other words, if I push on and get to the later games in the series, will the characters eventually resemble their incarnations from Yakuza 0? Like, I believe Yakuza 5 was the last game before Yakuza 0 right, so how is the storytelling in Yakuza 5 compared to Yakuza 0? Much closer to Yakuza 0 I hope?
