Yakuza 0 on PC provides you with excellent first impressions and leaves you begging for more.

While the well crafted story is a suspenseful, nerve-wracking wild ride that is full of satisfying tropes and plot twists, you're also greeted with a small, but densely packed district which offers you completely wacky events, tons of entertainment and even architectural eyecandy, which is something a lot of big open world sandbox games lack.

Combat offers variety of battle styles that are satisfying to use and which encourage experimentation. Heat moves add a lot of fun and never get old, especially since there's an overwhelming amount of them and each battle style has its own variations. Realistically, there are fun/gimmicky stances that will do the job and then there are more meta stances that will destroy hordes of opponents and wipe the floor with the bosses.

The story is enjoyable, sometimes predictable, but also filled with many plot twists. It's nicely presented and you can't get enough of it, making it one of the game's strongest features. The only thing left to say about it is that you should just go ahead and experience it.

The soundtrack is excellent. Substory themes will be burnt into your mind, boss battles are memorable because of their epic soundtrack presentation, karaoke tracks will make you want to sing along to some "JASTISU" and you'll certainly remember Queen of the passion from the disco. Each fighting style has its own theme, if you like variety then you won't be hearing the same battle theme over and over again.

The amount of side content is simply overwhelming. It's not just your typical collectible icon on the map, instead you stumble upon substories sometimes in a place where you'd never expect one, you get mini-games, actual retro games, gambling and the list expands as you progress through the story. All of this is optional, however, doing substories while is a nice break from the story also brings you closer to a bigger reward. All of the optional content counts towards completion, making this completionist heaven/hell.

Once the story is finished you unlock higher difficulty (where you'd have to start from scratch), but you still can continue exploring the world on your present save and you're given full control over the world, meaning it's possible to complete optional stuff at any given time. Climax Battles are also worth mentioning, as every time you finish an important sequence in the story you unlock separate challenges related to it. It's a nice and challenging way of revisiting familiar battles.

Combat lock-on while sounds good on paper doesn't exactly work as you'd want it to. Aside from its use to execute particular heat moves and attacks it's just more simple and convenient to use movement direction to decide whom you're going to attack. As long as you're facing the enemies your character's attacks will lock-on anyway.

If you're a completionist then you shouldn't focus on optional content for too long. This is one of rare cases when focusing on side content and its completion can quickly burn you out. To avoid that fate you simply switch back to the story and do activities which you enjoy.

There are times when you reload a save to redo a substory and you find yourself mashing "next" button because most of the dialogues in this game are unskippable. If you're a perfectionist and RNG has a field day with you then you might find yourself in this situation more often than you'd like.

The PC version of the game graphically is a tiny step above the console version. The assets are the same, so the only graphical boost you can get is in effects, LoD, resolution and framerate (note that you can unlock it for high quality cutscenes, which makes them much nicer).

The performance of this title is commendable, as it runs really well even on older systems and delivers framerates much higher than 60 even on "Ultra" settings. While it's not perfect there are plenty of options that allow you to tweak the game to your liking.

I experience a periodical bug where button layout switches from gamepad to keyboard for no apparent reason (the mouse is static). It reverts back to the gamepad layout as soon as you use it, but the timing of this bug can be extremely irritating, as I've had it happen during QTEs.

Before the patches there was an inventory corruption bug which replaced your inventory with unusable items. Fortunately, it didn't affect me much as I noticed it and reloaded a previous save before I overwrote it. It's a very serious issue that could've ruined the whole game experience. It's unclear if it was addressed or not, since people still keep reporting it.

Throughout 100+ hours I've experienced only one crash and that was during vanilla release. However, there are bugs like game freezing for a couple of seconds, textures going crazy in some particular locations and more if you browse the community forums. On the positive side of things there was a crash upon launch bug which was affecting my experience that was actually fixed.

If you haven't played a Yakuza game before then this is where you should start. You won't regret it.

Yakuza 0 on PC provides you with excellent first impressions and leaves you begging for more. [h1][b]Summary:[/b][/h1] While the well crafted story is a suspenseful, nerve-wracking wild ride that is full of satisfying tropes and plot twists, you're also greeted with a small, but densely packed district which offers you completely wacky events, tons of entertainment and even architectural eyecandy, which is something a lot of big open world sandbox games lack. [h1][b]The Good:[/b][/h1] Combat offers variety of battle styles that are satisfying to use and which encourage experimentation. Heat moves add a lot of fun and never get old, especially since there's an overwhelming amount of them and each battle style has its own variations. Realistically, there are fun/gimmicky stances that will do the job and then there are more meta stances that will destroy hordes of opponents and wipe the floor with the bosses. The story is enjoyable, sometimes predictable, but also filled with many plot twists. It's nicely presented and you can't get enough of it, making it one of the game's strongest features. The only thing left to say about it is that you should just go ahead and experience it. The soundtrack is excellent. Substory themes will be burnt into your mind, boss battles are memorable because of their epic soundtrack presentation, karaoke tracks will make you want to sing along to some "JASTISU" and you'll certainly remember Queen of the passion from the disco. Each fighting style has its own theme, if you like variety then you won't be hearing the same battle theme over and over again. The amount of side content is simply overwhelming. It's not just your typical collectible icon on the map, instead you stumble upon substories sometimes in a place where you'd never expect one, you get mini-games, actual retro games, gambling and the list expands as you progress through the story. All of this is optional, however, doing substories while is a nice break from the story also brings you closer to a bigger reward. All of the optional content counts towards completion, making this completionist heaven/hell. Once the story is finished you unlock higher difficulty (where you'd have to start from scratch), but you still can continue exploring the world on your present save and you're given full control over the world, meaning it's possible to complete optional stuff at any given time. Climax Battles are also worth mentioning, as every time you finish an important sequence in the story you unlock separate challenges related to it. It's a nice and challenging way of revisiting familiar battles. [h1][b]The Nitpicks and Tips:[/b][/h1] Combat lock-on while sounds good on paper doesn't exactly work as you'd want it to. Aside from its use to execute particular heat moves and attacks it's just more simple and convenient to use movement direction to decide whom you're going to attack. As long as you're facing the enemies your character's attacks will lock-on anyway. If you're a completionist then you shouldn't focus on optional content for too long. This is one of rare cases when focusing on side content and its completion can quickly burn you out. To avoid that fate you simply switch back to the story and do activities which you enjoy. There are times when you reload a save to redo a substory and you find yourself mashing "next" button because most of the dialogues in this game are unskippable. If you're a perfectionist and RNG has a field day with you then you might find yourself in this situation more often than you'd like. [h1][b]Details about PC version:[/b][/h1] The PC version of the game graphically is a tiny step above the console version. The assets are the same, so the only graphical boost you can get is in effects, LoD, resolution and framerate (note that you can unlock it for high quality cutscenes, which makes them much nicer). The performance of this title is commendable, as it runs really well even on older systems and delivers framerates much higher than 60 even on "Ultra" settings. While it's not perfect there are plenty of options that allow you to tweak the game to your liking. I experience a periodical bug where button layout switches from gamepad to keyboard for no apparent reason (the mouse is static). It reverts back to the gamepad layout as soon as you use it, but the timing of this bug can be extremely irritating, as I've had it happen during QTEs. Before the patches there was an inventory corruption bug which replaced your inventory with unusable items. Fortunately, it didn't affect me much as I noticed it and reloaded a previous save before I overwrote it. It's a very serious issue that could've ruined the whole game experience. It's unclear if it was addressed or not, since people still keep reporting it. Throughout 100+ hours I've experienced only one crash and that was during vanilla release. However, there are bugs like game freezing for a couple of seconds, textures going crazy in some particular locations and more if you browse the community forums. On the positive side of things there was a crash upon launch bug which was affecting my experience that was actually fixed. [h1][b]Conclusion:[/b][/h1] If you haven't played a Yakuza game before then this is where you should start. You won't regret it.