Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut Switch 2 Review

Going all the way back to Yakuza 0 feels like watching EastEnders from the very first episode. Kiryu Kazama’s epic crime drama tale has spanned an endless string of games at this point, even when he’s not the main star of the show anymore, with a whole host of new beginnings, satisfying conclusions and definitive end points that… well, maybe the comparisons to EastEnders aren’t all that far fetched.

But Switch players have got to start somewhere, and while Yakuza Kiwami was released for the original Switch last year, it was not the best-looking or performing version of the game by any means. Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut takes a second bite of the apple, with RGG Studio making life much easier on themselves by bringing it to Switch 2 instead.

Unsurprisingly, given what the Switch 2 has been able to do with much more modern and taxing games, Yakuza 0 runs very well on this console. It would be more surprising if it didn’t, to be honest, given that Yakuza 0’s original Japanese launch was across both PS4 and PS3 close to a decade ago, and was on a precursor to the current Dragon Engine, which debuted with Yakuza 6.

The late 80s rendition of Kamurocho is wonderful, full of lights at night, people milling around and unsavoury characters looking for a scrap. While you strip back some of the glitz and glam of the nighttime lights, it’s not much better during the day as a place to hang out… but it does feel a bit more appropriate to visit the arcade during daylight for some cutting edge (for the time) gaming.

Exploring the Kamurocho and Sotenbori districts through the game’s opening chapters, this definitely feels like an older game. It’s quite stilted in how the story is told with an odd blend of long cutscenes that are fully voiced, show off some good animation and honestly quite fantastic character detail in close-ups, but can then transition to more standard dialogue scenes with text boxes… but then there’s also plenty of dialogue that isn’t voiced, and there’s artsy scenes when chatting in phone booths, or for certain other character interactions. It’s an oddball mix, that’s for sure.

Where the Japanese voice acting is almost universally beloved, it does leave you with an awful lot of reading to do. Helping to lift some of that burden for a less text-savvy audience is the new full English dub. This has Yong Yea reprising his role as Kazuma Kiryu (backed up by Topher Ngo for singing), while Matt Mercer is in for Goro Majima, as the game’s second lead. Without being attached to the Japanese acting, I feel they’re generally pretty solid.

Speech Graphics technology gets prominent placement on the splash screens for lip syncing, but the results can be inconsistent outside of the main cast. There’s often unusual mouth movements to “Hmm” and similar exclamations, and for a lot of incidental characters and moments, the mouth moves with no other facial animation and some stilted canned actions. Of course, that factor will also apply with the Japanese dub, but from a Western perspective there’s something about having it be in a foreign language that helps, to my mind.

Of course, you can always fall back to the Japanese VO if that’s more your thing, but having localised audio makes this series more broadly accessible to a US and UK audience. There’s also some new and/or reintegrated cutscenes for the game. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what’s been added, to be honest, but I can’t imagine that these are a major draw to replay the whole story just for these moments – there’s far easier and cheaper ways of seeing them for anyone that’s already played the game.

While the crime drama of the main story is one side of the game, everything else just leans into just being a bit dumb, goofy and funny. One of this series’ joys is all of the nightlife and minigames that you can indulge in, from disco dancing to karaoke, but then there’s random river fishing spots, tons of arcade cabinets and more. It’s a quirky mix that goes well alongside the random street brawling and lightens the tone in a heartbeat.

The Switch 2 easily handles playing the game at 60fps and looks good doing so, whether playing docked or handheld. There is a lot of aliasing shimmer as you run around town, but this feels like a consequence of the age of the game engine and how depth of field is applied to the scene. The aliasing feels more noticeable to me in handheld than docked, but having this shimmer is true of the game on any platform going back to the PS4. It certainly doesn’t affect how playable the game is.

The interesting aside is the new Red Light Raid mode. This brings the brawling into the foreground and, each mission stringing together battle encounters in different parts of the game world, having you fight against the clock to try and reach a final boss fight. You can play it solo, local or online with up to four players, and AI buddies filling in if you have nobody to play with…. And that seems to be par for the course. I have had some real people to play alongside, but this is a niche within a niche within a niche, so expect mainly AI.

It’s also a bit of a grind. There’s something like 50 characters to unlock, they all want levelling up, and that means running these challenges many times over. I can’t see this being a big draw for long.