Yakuza 0: Director's Cut [Review]

Sega and RGG Studio tried their best to make Yakuza 0: Director's Cut a problem. Almost everything that was added or changed was for the worse. Still, underneath it all, it is Yakuza 0: a great game and a great starting point to the "Like a Dragon" franchise.

Yakuza 0 was my first experience proper with the franchise, back when it was released on PC. Originally a PS3 game, it took awhile to arrive in western markets. That was the hype train that got me at the time, so I was always supposed to like it, as finally the franchise was going multiplatform,

Fortunately, I did! Yakuza 0 is great. The story is not as over the top as it seems, with a greater focus on character growth and nailing the themes for both protagonists for the franchise to come. It is "foreshadowing: the game", as it teases events for many iconic moments that will happen in the future.

That's why I decided to play the Director's Cut. Released originally for the Switch 2 and now available on all platforms, it substitutes the previous version on most storefronts where it is available. It offers a paid upgrade path to current owners, with a physical release as well for all platforms but PC.

Alongside an English dub – that I really hasn't heard, as I can't dissociate the characters from their voices on my head – this version features new cutscenes and changes to the story and a multiplayer mode. That's all well and good, right? Not really.

Most of the new scenes are "recaps", really, of stuff that happened recently, like a catch up mechanic for the story. What is actually new is a series of changes that makes the story shallower and less felt: many consequences are promptly erased with corny and rushed dialogue that just dilute Yakuza Zero's great story.

Since it is a very character-centric narrative, these new additions don't make the game bad, of course. They just hurt a good narrative in the end. Since this is a paid remaster and new version overall, RGG Studio should have put their efforts elsewhere, for example, porting the game to their most recent Dragon Engine. In the end, it feels like one of those re-releases of Star Wars where George Lucas insisted on changing the most trivial things without a real reason other than hubris.

The other side of this package is the new multiplayer mode named "Raid". It is not with the bones of a 2015 game nor the limitations of the assets mostly related to the base game that a good online mode is made today. Really, the whole reason for this price tag is this mode and in the end is a hollow side game that is worse than most of in game activities. There's also a brutal dissonance between the single player experience and the multiplayer one, with the latter being way uninteresting and void of any narrative whatsoever.

On Raid, I could chose between many characters with preset abilities, and then it is a 4 player co op fight between waves of enemies in various locations of Kamurocho. While it is fun to play as other characters that weren't playable before (Nishikiyama my beloved), it is not nearly enough to be there. I'd trade this mode for better textures, draw distance and better menus or to have voice acted substories.

That's the thing: Yakuza 0 fully voiced would be awesome. Yakuza 0 without loading screens would be awesome. That should have been the Director's Cut goal. As a substitute of the original game, it just makes the experience a bit worse.

It is still good and, again, a great entry point for the franchise. It was super nice for me to replay it now with the context of the other games in the franchise. So I really liked replaying it. But this is a worse version overall, unfortunately.

8/10