Asleep Dogs

I never expected to be more critical of a game than both Dunkey and Yahtzee, but, here we are.

Maybe they have a pre-existing attachment to the Yakuza franchise that I don't? At any rate, where they found Yakuza 0 charming in spite of its flaws, all I found was a bunch of slow, dull bullshit.

It's not quite the same situation that I recently lamented regarding Grand Theft Auto IV -- although Yakuza does have more than its fair share of uninteresting bowling-style minigames. Yakuza's dullness is more an artifact of its agonizing dialog pacing and verbosity.

Characters reiterate themselves in dialog, often multiple times, for seemingly no reason. They digress into unrelated tangential backstories way more often than is appropriate. And their speech is melodramatically slow and halting, which just compounds the issue of dialog scenes taking forever.

And the game doesn't use these slow storytelling tactics lightly -- of the game's opening 100 minutes, I would say 90+ of them are non-interactive, or barely-interactive (i.e. press A to continue). The overwhelming majority of Chapter 1 is in underwhelming cutscenes.

The inexplicable transitions that Yakuza 0 will make between low-, mid-, and high-detail cutscene rendering - often in the same scene - are just bizarre icing on this cake. Yeah, I get that the game is trying to tell a hard-boiled Japanese gangland thriller; but it's so slow and so poorly-told that I cannot stay interested in where it might go.

There are other things I could complain about in my relatively-brief time with Yakuza 0, but even the clunky controls or losing 40 minutes of progress (because I assumed there was an auto-save, before the game introduced its save-point phone booths) aren't as big of a deal as how sluggish and boring the storytelling is.

Other reviews seem to forgive Yakuza's extracurricular shortcomings because they dig the story. So for me, when I can't muster interest in that story... this game doesn't really stand a chance.

Progress: Got to Chapter 2