As one of the longest-running video game developers, Sega has a lot of classics under its belt, but none of them are as narratively dense and colorful as the Yakuza series. However, with over ten games in the series, including remakes and spin-offs all with staggered timelines, the franchise is one huge messy pegboard with a web of strings linking characters, maps, dates, and locations as well as strings of bewildering plot holes.
The upcoming release of Yakuza: Like A Dragon is one of the 20 most anticipated games of fall 2020, which will surely add to the convoluted drama. Here are some notable unresolved mysteries and plot holes in the Yakuza series.
10 Kiryu’s Pocket Racing History
Though Yakuza games are open world, the pocket racing mini-game is one of the most fun things you can do in Yakuza 0, and it’s one of the best mini-games in any video game period. However, it is the subject of some messy continuity. Kiryu explains in Yakuza Kiwami that he used to pocket race all the time when he was a child, but in Yakuza o, the game is completely new to him. Granted, Yakuza 0 takes place seven years before Yakuza Kiwami and Kiryu is younger, but he is still in his twenties and certainly not a child.
9 Yuko’s Heart Surgery
After suffering from an unnamed illness involving her heart in the first Yakuza, Yuko had to get surgery. The surgery then goes wrong and the surgeon asks Nishiki for 30 million yen in return for a heart from the black market. Nishiki follows through on the 30 million yen, but the doctor bails and is never seen again.
The events don’t quite make sense and the reason for the doctor’s disappearance is never explained. It isn’t even clear that he ran away with the money, which seems unlikely since no doctor would dare scam anybody affiliated with the yakuza.
8 The Mystery Killer In Bacchus Bar
In Bacchus, now called Bantam in Yakuza o, everybody in the bar gets murdered, but there is no explanation as to who did it or why. It’s easy to speculate that as Kiryu was looking for a different bar, Ares, he may have gone to Bacchus to ask where Ares is. In this case, Nishiki would have murdered everyone in Bacchus before Kiryu arrived. But there are a lot of presumptions that have to be made for this to make any sense. The mystery killer’s identity it will always remain a mystery.
7 Meeting The Florist For The First Time
With Yakuza Remastered now out, revisiting them after playing the new games will open questions about The Florist. In Yakuza 4, Majima explains that he saved Sasai with the help of The Florist just a couple of years after the Ueno Hit. But in the Majima Saga in Yakuza Kiwami 2, Majima meets The Florist for the first time… in 2006.
The timeline doesn’t make any sense, as they should have saved Sasai before 2006. It’s possible that saving Sasai could have happened later, but that would mean that Sasai was on the run for years.
6 Yumi’s Fake Identity
When she was hiding from the yakuza, Yumi forged an identity so she couldn’t be found. This makes sense, but she did it via the most backward logic in the whole series. Yumi does not create a brand new identity but steals her sister, Mizuki’s, identity. This means she can be tracked down easily, going against the whole point of creating a fake ID. Yumi also inadvertently gets an innocent girl who looks like Mizuki murdered, which could have been avoided if she forged an ID completely unrelated to her real identity.
5 Kiryu’s Missing Fortune
In the time between Yakuza 0, which is set in 1988, and Yakuza Kiwami in 1995, Kiryu somehow lost all of his money, though this is never once mentioned. After earning literally trillions of yen at the end of Yakuza 0, Kiryu starts off with just 100,000 yen in ‘Kiwami.’ The economic bubble burst in Japan in 1990, so it could very well be that Kiryu lost most of his wealth on the stock market and in real estate, but there is not one line of dialog to support this, so it could have been anything.
4 Tachibana’s Mysterious Black-Out Powers
Right at the start of Yakuza 0, when players are introduced to Tachibana, he shows off an amazing skill that allows him to cause blackouts in the city, though they only last for a few seconds. Watching this, players expect that his powers will grow or that it will become a major part of the narrative, but this never happens. There is no awesome ultimate showdown where blackouts are randomly thrown in. Instead, we are left guessing about this story’s purpose yet again.
3 Dodgy Timelines in Yakuza 0
Remaking the first entry of a long-running series is bound to create a slew of continuity errors. Though these pro tips might help you rifle through the game, untangling it is a bit harder. At the end of Yakuza o, Shibusawa explains that his father committed suicide to cover for his mentor, but as the game takes place in 1988 and Shibusawa was just a child when it happened, that would have been over 40 years ago. As Japan would have been under an authoritarian regime at that time, it would have been extremely unlikely that this happened.
2 Terada Back From The Dead
Close to the end of Yakuza 2, a shock twist reveals that Terada is still alive. This is after the player had seen him die in an ambulance at the beginning of the game. This must mean that he miraculously came back to life or the whole ordeal was staged and the paramedics were hired actors, but his heart literally stopped. Finding a valid excuse for the scene is a massive stretch, but it is better than thinking that the writers had already forgotten about the scene by the end of the game.
1 Haruka’s Pendant
Yakuza’s plot holes might need to be ironed out before they go ahead and adapt it into a Hollywood movie, as there are some glaring problems in even its simplest narratives. The pendant was what led to a payout of 10 billion yen for the yakuza in the first entry of the series, but there isn’t any reason given as to why. The only thing that was inside the pendant was a picture of Kiryu. And Yumi gave the pendant to her daughter, putting her life in pointless danger, but there was no point to even this. Nobody ever suspected that the pendant was also the key to the vault.
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