Updated
: Sep 1, 2026 4:26pm UTC
This is an IGN opinion piece and love letter to Yakuza 0, from Justin Davis, who has worked at IGN for 15 years, and now runs the Editorial Team.
Can I be honest with you all for a second? Running the IGN Editorial team is a very fun job, but it’s also very stressful.
I'm not complaining. There are far worse things than getting to drink tiny beers in a fun German town at night, while playing unreleased video games during the day. I can’t imagine doing anything else for a living.
But when you’re dealing with very tight deadlines, loud conventions, and the once-a-decade reveal of a new GTA game, I’ve recently felt the pull to return to some “comfort food” experiences when the work is done for the day and it’s time to unwind.
Sometimes this pull toward more comforting experiences reveals itself in really obvious ways. Work freaking you out? Time to spend some time with captain Picard and crew while they respect one another, generally display excellence at their jobs, and solve a moral crisis. Or solve a murder mystery on a sex planet or something. Feeling a little bit out of control of your life? Time to water some crops in Animal Crossing.
But this time around, I found myself sucked back into Yakuza 0 as my "comfort game” of choice. It wasn’t even a conscious decision. At no point did I think to myself “Man…. I want to get back to Kamurocho and go bowling / play darts / engage in the most hype-as-shit sewer brawl possible with a high-ranking Yakuza sworn-brother-turned-enemy.” It just happened. My brain turned off, the Steam download was queued, and Yakuza 0’s now-iconic mood-setting prologue video was playing mere minutes later.
Some of my Yakuza 0 playtime took place on my flights to and from Gamescom and I can only imagine what the man sitting next to me in a full navy business suit was thinking. Then again the game is now 11 years old, so said man in said suit could have easily been a much younger IGN fan when Yakaza 0 came out. So maybe what he was thinking the whole time was was “KUZE!!!!!!!” - same as I was.
This is now my third time through Y0, and not every aspect of this replay has hit quite like I expected. I had forgotten how incredibly slow, talky, and heavily tutorialized the intro is. It just goes on forever. This isn’t helped by those weird sepia-toned non-animated VO-driven cutscenes that are occasionally peppered in. So a few of Y0’s awkward bits have been a little hard to go back to.
But sometimes Yakuza’s lower-budget nature works in its favor. Fans sometimes (affectionately!) call the series “asset reuse: the game” and this practice is partly what cements Yakuza 0’s position in the “comfort game” hall of fame. Since most of the Yakuza games take place in Kamurocho or one of a few other fictional Japanese neighborhoods, you get to see the city decay and modernize from game to game. This city is a character - one I feel compelled to check in on once in a while. I know this place, just as well as I know my own downtown. It’s strangely satisfying to walk through this small set of city blocks again to soak up the atmosphere.
Future Yakuza games feature better graphics, more complex combat systems, and more well-rounded side activities. But a huge part of what makes Yakuza 0 a highly replayable and legendary “comfort food” game - at least for me - comes back to its 1980s aesthetic. This was the peak of Japan’s real estate bubble, where land prices jumped by as much as 5,000% in just a few decades. Neon lights, flashy suits, decadent nightlife. Dancing, karaoke, fancy cabaret clubs. Everyone is flush with Yen - literally - as you beat it out of your opponents as if they were cash pinatas and money literally serves as your high score. I’m far from the first person to make this observation, but Yakuza’s special sauce is it somehow perfectly walks the tightrope between its ultra-serious, earnest Yakuza soap opera main plot, with the most absolutely ridiculous side stories possible.
Ultimately, I’m a simple man. I can overlook some awkwardly long cutscenes when I get to mess around with a combat system that lets me smash a bike over a rival’s head one minute, and then hire a chicken to manage part of my real estate empire the next.
I reached that scene where Kiryu and Nishiki tear off their shirts, incomplete (for now) back tattoos gleaming in Kamurocho’s neon lights, fueled by righteous fury and a deep and unbreakable (sad face) bond to one another, and that was it. I knew I had to write something short to get Yakuza back onto IGN. It’s as simple as that.
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