Welcome to the cabaret
Goro Majima shows us the customer is king in Yakuza 0
FORMAT PS4 / PUB SEGA / DEV RYU GA GOTOKU STUDIO / RELEASED 2017 / SCORE 9/10
This Yakuza prequel is set amid the glowing neon of 1980s Japan, drenched in cash thanks to the booming economy of the period. After about six hours we’re introduced to the game’s second protagonist, Goro Majima, an antagonist in the first game and a bit of an antihero in later entries. Exiled to Osaka by his clan, he’s ended up becoming the manager of Sotenbori’s number one hostess club.
Emerging from his office as a drunk customer harasses his staff, this Majima is quite different from the familiar self-titled ‘Mad
Dog Of Shimano’. He even has a shirt on (not to mention a fancy tux). Reserved, he calmly asks the customer to stop and refuses to fight him as “the customer is king”. Even as champagne is poured onto his head he deflects the man’s anger, showing him up in front of the whole audience of other customers.
With a flourish he has the house band start a jazzy number, and we enter Majima’s fighting tutorial. As he’s unable to strike back, the game teaches us how to dodge on a dime, filling our heat meter to unleash uniquely animated hospitality moves where we make the customer flustered by disappearing, then reappearing behind him to offer him a towel, or suggesting he might have had too much to drink.
This unexpected, punchy, and glitzy welcoming to the Cabaret Grand is also Majima welcoming us into the game proper, and for the first time in the series inviting us to finally get to know him. Humiliated, the customer is escorted out, but not before Majima slyly blackmails him into paying the evening’s tab for every customer. Hey, we’ll drink to that.