Conclusion

Yakuza 0 finally introduces the epic series to PC gamers. Gameplay is not dissimilar to Grand Theft Auto with a smaller map (there's actually two of them: Tokyo and Osaka). Combat is melee most of the time and requires you to learn combos for maximum effect, like in WB's Batman games, for example. Yakuza 0 does feature some RPG mechanics, like multiple skill trees, inventory, and gear that can be equipped. The biggest selling point of it is without a doubt the story line and side quests. For example, in one quest, you run into an extremely polite girl who's trying to make a living as an S&M domination maid with little success due to her being too nice to customers. Lucky, you are around to show her how she's supposed to teach her clients some manners. In another side quest, you run into a boy who's wondering why his still-in-school girlfriend has a ton of money lately and why she's buying so much underwear. Is she a hooker now? While investigating, you find out that the girl is selling her used panties to weird Japanese men and your mission becomes to gently make her see reason to reunite her with the boyfriend. The main story is equally entertaining and full of surprises, dark humor, and plot twists. At a later point in the story, you also get to run your own (shady) business to rake in the cash for these skill tree upgrades. Lots of entertaining mini-games are included as well to keep you busy if you want to slow down the pace of the main story a bit.

Graphics are weak by today's standards, which isn't surprising given this is a several years old title that was originally designed for Playstation 3. Looking at the screenshots on page two, it becomes evident that Sega hasn't improved the resolution of textures, which means low details are visible everywhere. Models, too, are made up of relatively few polygons only, and no Tessellation is available to improve their quality. Characters are rendered much better, though, especially the faces. Controls are good when using a gamepad and decent with mouse and keyboard, which is a bit handicapped by the self-aligning camera. Combat mechanics are fluid and easily learned. I have to applaud Sega for including unlocked frame rates, so we PC gamers don't have to deal with this "30 FPS cinematic experience" BS. Unfortunately, the game is not voiced in English; the characters speak Japanese, so you'll be reading subtitles most of the time. Not a dealbreaker, it is not optimal either.

We tested the game using actual gameplay with the latest drivers for AMD and NVIDIA. Generally, Yakuza 0 is very light on hardware requirements and should run well even on older systems. Nearly all the cards we tested were able to deliver 60 FPS at 4K, and Sega was kind enough to include Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing in the settings, which lets you dial up the internal rendering resolution for smoother edges. When paired with a high-end graphics card, the CPU often becomes the bottleneck at lower resolutions despite Ultra settings, so enabling SSAA results in a relatively small performance hit compared to other games because the effects of the CPU bottleneck are mitigated. NVIDIA graphics cards are doing much better in Yakuza 0 than their AMD counterparts, but all these cards will give you a great gameplay experience. VRAM usage is laughable for PC standards because of low-poly models and low-res textures. The game does make use of multiple cores, but beyond four threads, the differences are negligible. Unlike many other titles, a dual core processor is sufficient for a good gameplay experience.

In closing, I have to say I can fully recommend Yakuza 0 to gamers who are actually interested in gameplay and not just graphics. The storyline reeled me in quickly, and I can't wait to finish this article to get back to my game. The game is selling on Steam for $20/€20, which is about a third of what they want for today's AAA games—definitely worth it if you have time to spend this summer.