My Abandoned Completionist Attempt to 100% ‘Yakuza 0’
It’s no secret that I am a die-hard fan of the Yakuza series, but Yakuza 0 remains my favorite entry in the franchise. Considering that it was my starting point for the series, it was initially one of the hardest games to become invested in, yet I couldn’t stop once I hopped on the roller coaster. I played Yakuza 0 for the first time completely uninterested in the optional content or substories. I simply wanted to hit the credits and experience the main story. But over the past few years, I’ve felt the itch creep up to replay the prequel, so this past summer I decided I would do the impossible: platinum Yakuza 0.
My baseless confidence in my ability to overcome this nearly unachievable endeavor was inspired by the fact that I had completed all of Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s achievements, of which the True Final Millennium Tower challenge nearly killed me. But I figured that, if I could platinum one Yakuza game, I could platinum my other favorite as well. A headache though it would certainly be, it seemed reasonable to expect that I could earn all of the in-game achievements in roughly the same 100 hours that Like a Dragon took me. I was completely mistaken.
At the time of this writing, I have spent 160 hours in Yakuza 0. 35 of these hours were racked up in my initial playthrough on the easiest difficulty. The subsequent 130 were spent working my way through the game again on Legend difficulty, the hardest difficulty in the game – a required second playthrough for anyone seeking the final achievement. Along the way, I finished every substory I could find, visited every restaurant and bar, played at every machine in every arcade – and I was nowhere close to being done.
Revisiting the Strengths of Yakuza 0
One of the brilliant conceits of Yakuza 0 is its decision to offer two playable protagonists, each with wildly different fighting styles and storylines that barely intersect. This split nature of the storyline kept the game feeling fresh on a replay, and just when I was starting to feel fatigue from one character arc, the other character would powerslide in and save the day. And since I was after all of the achievements, there was plenty to do if I ever wanted a break from the melodrama.
For Kiryu’s character, the real estate mini-game ate up dozens of hours of my time on the replay. Whereas I had barely touched it before, feeling confused and annoyed at how it worked, I went all in on the replay. In the real estate mini-game, you take over surrounding business properties by purchasing them, assigning them security guards and property managers, and then watching your profits soar. You must rotate out your staff and pair them up in key places throughout Kamurocho’s various districts, and eventually there is a boss battle of sorts that involves taking on the spending power of the current district’s “king.” If you play your real estate cards right, you will eventually overtake the entire city, eliminating all competition, and giving you a reliable avenue for cash in the rest of the game.
Majima’s mini-game is quite different, but it results in the same fashion: providing you with oodles of money to quite literally throw at your enemies. In Sotenbori, Majima takes over a cabaret club, which features hostesses who charm rich guests and swindle them from their vast piles of cash. This cabaret club has a similar property expansion focus where you cut advertising deals with local businesses to promote your club, eventually pissing off another club manager who runs another venue in the city, resulting in another boss battle scenario where you are challenged to outraise money compared to your toughest competitors.
Majima’s mini-game is ultimately more in-depth, as the club’s hostesses have customizable fashion choices that greatly change how pleasing the guests find them. You recruit them in a similar fashion as Kiryu’s mini-game, by completing substories and speaking with people you find roaming the streets. But on top of the staff management component of Majima’s cabaret club, you also need to be quick on timing, rotating out hostesses that best pair with the richest guests. There is an additional hand signal code of sorts that you must learn in order to interpret what the hostess has identified that the guest best needs: a warm towel, a refill on their drink, a menu, etc. This learning curve was much steeper – but also more rewarding – for me.
I genuinely loved completing both of Yakuza 0’s main mini-game segments, as it brought me closer to both overall completion and my appreciation of the characters in this world. Completing these mini-games also enabled me to simultaneously work on the Pocket Circuit storyline, which requires you to track down customizable race car parts – some that cost tens of millions of yen to purchase. In some brain expanding sense, I felt the overall structure of Yakuza 0’s game design come together as I invested more into these systems; that is, as I completed the mini-game storylines, I was better equipped to tackle other, more out-of-reach games and storylines.
Yakuza 0‘s Intimidating Completion Points List
But after you have played every substory, exhausted every major storyline, completed every mini-game, there is still a laundry list of completion points (CP) to unlock. Some tasks to accumulate CP are mundane, like eating every food item on a restaurant’s menu. Other tasks are more tedious, like needing to wait until a character sobers up to have another drink, thereby completing the drink menu somewhere else. The game transforms from an adventure to a checklist, and I felt my enthusiasm temporarily slip as I realized how many unchecked boxes remained in front of my final few achievements.
Some of these unchecked boxes involve simply defeating 200 enemies in a specific fighting style. It was thus no factor to tick them off, even if I was running from repetitive encounter to repetitive encounter. But then I discovered the underground fighting arena’s checklist, which involves reaching a certain rank in one-on-one bouts, and that grind takes a considerable amount of time on its own. Luckily, however, I could somewhat unify my efforts by pairing these completion tasks together. It was initially slower to pair them than bouncing around the backstreets looking for encounters, but it was overall quicker than doing them separately.
Some of the trickier or more annoying bits of completion involve Majima needing to collect seemingly every material and weapon in the game. This task involves a sort of roulette where you send out agents to scout areas around the globe for rare weapons and materials, an effort that rapidly becomes dramatically expensive. I forked out something approaching 100 billion yen to simply complete the list, aided by the most thorough guide imaginable.
Worrying About Burnout When Aiming For 100%
I started to feel a bit of burnout around 150 hours of total playtime, which is the length of several games combined. I had completed all of the fun bits – or at least the things I wanted to see and do. All that was left were some tedious tasks and the intimidating promise of having to play games that I would never touch in real life: poker, darts, mahjong, and other forms of gambling. I’ve never enjoyed gambling in games (or in real life for that matter), but realizing that my next hurdles were all contingent upon me not only learning how to play these tedious tabletop games, but successfully bet on them as well, I deflated. I went to something else, putting off the task yet again.
So I navigated myself over to the catfight arena, something I hadn’t even touched in my initial playthrough of Yakuza 0. Aside from its unsavory, voyeuristic element of having scantily clad women fight for the pleasure of the male gaze, the actual mechanics in the catfight are intensely frustrating. There is simply no reliable method to win these rock, paper, scissors style battles. The only strategy is to pick Jennifer, a woman whose stats bear the greatest likelihood of success. Even the most detailed of guides refer to this mini-game as a complete pain where luck and finger crossing are as good a currency as any.
The mechanics of the catfights are unbelievably frustrating, encouraging you to rapidly button mash. After taking years off the lifespan of my hand’s joints, I belatedly realized that my efforts might as well be for naught and I was just as likely to win by doing nothing once I had selected which method of attack – rock, paper, or scissors – I intended to use in the fight. Not only do you have limited control over the outcome of each round in the fight, in order to finish the required completion components, you have to wager money in a bet. Your earnings never compound in the way that the real estate and cabaret club mini-games do, and so it feels like gaining momentum is impossible.
Overcoming Amon After Yakuza 0‘s Substories
Discouraged, but not completely giving up, I decided to tackle the two final substories that are unlocked for Kiryu and Majima once all other substories have been completed: the secret Amon fights. It’s a Yakuza tradition to leave a quasi-impossible boss called Amon at the end of each game, a final wall for completionists. In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, for instance, I repeatedly got crushed by Amon’s essence of orbital laser attack that would one-shot my max-leveled party members. Having done this before, I squared off against Amon in the bullfighting arena.
Majima’s final boss, Jo Amon, was tough as nails and I repeatedly died at first. However, I found a combination of items that, if used strategically, could completely cheese the fight and make Jo Amon a cakewalk. I threw my dagger at Amon and he died instantly, revealing that this fight was never about my skill as a player but rather my investment in its systems.
Kiryu’s final boss, So Amon, was far tougher – and, at the time of this writing, I have not been able to overcome him. So Amon has a cannon that not only releases flaming cannonballs in an incessant area-of-attack barrage, knocking you down to receive more damage, but deploys a laser beam that will wipe you out no matter the status of your health or accessories. Once the laser cannon comes out, the fight is over. One touch and Kiryu is vaporized.
I have attempted the So Amon fight about 50 times, with no exaggeration. It has gotten to the point where I can muscle-memory my way through the dialogue exchange when Kiryu arrives at the arena without even looking at the screen. The fight, though quick in nature, takes so long to initiate that So Amon’s fight truly feels like a grind in the way that the catfights did. And it eats me alive to know that, despite reading guide after guide, watching video tutorial after video tutorial, I haven’t gotten remotely close to So Amon’s final healthbar. I am truly conflicted on whether this singular fight is more punishing than the entire True Final Millennium Tower from Like a Dragon.
Once I hit the wall with So Amon, my discouragement dissolved into apathy. Unable to make progress that I was happy with, I couldn’t find the motivation to launch Yakuza 0 to finish my journey. I had overcome the impossible, and yet the impossible had proved the mettle of its name. I knew that, if I continued my quest for 100%, I would burn out on the game – hard – and it would sour my remaining feelings of adoration and reverence for Yakuza 0 as a whole. I didn’t want that.
Setting the Controller Down
But it wasn’t a conscious decision to put the controller down. In fact, Yakuza 0 is still installed in my Steam library. It’s even on my SSD where I keep the games that I’m actively playing and desire reduced load times for. But now three months have passed since I launched Yakuza 0, and I think my attempt to 100% the game has reached a definite end. I don’t expect that I will continue any further. The prospect of getting flattened by Amon, by scrambling my way through catfights, and learning Japanese board games is just too much for me. Maybe I don’t have what it takes to prove that I’m, for lack of a better phrase, like a dragon. But I pulled the parachute at the right time, lest I tarnish the otherwise golden reputation that Yakuza 0 has earned in my gaming pantheon.
To anyone teetering on the edge of taking the same completionist journey that I did with Yakuza 0, I would advise caution but still encourage you to go for it. Who knows? Maybe you’ll flatten So Amon in one try, or you’ll be able to ogle your way through tedious catfights and gambling excursions. In any case, Yakuza 0 is a game I loved living with for a second time. It consumed my gaming time for hundreds of hours and I now feel closer to Goro Majima and Kazuma Kiryu than I ever have before. Even after facing defeat, I love Yakuza 0 more now than when I just focused on the story years ago. Experiencing nearly all of what this beloved game has to offer was worth it.
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