Posted By :
liamjtolentino
7 Feb
Kiryu’s Bizarre Adventure
WARNING: Spoilers for Yakuza 0 and possibly other Yakuza games as well as most of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.
Okay, this may be my most unhinged post yet, but hear me out: the Yakuza games take place in the same universe as Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. There isn’t really much connecting the two franchises, but it is fun to find the connections between them. This all started with a conversation with a friend of mine when I pointed out that Yakuza 0 and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure part 3: Stardust Crusaders both take place in 1988.
As I thought deeper into this connection, I noticed that Kazuma Kiryu, the main protagonist of Yakuza 0 (and most of the other Yakuza games) is only three years older than Jotaro, the main protagonist of Stardust Crusaders. They both live in the Tokyo area, which to be fair is quite big, but it isn’t reasonable to assume that they might have interacted at some point in their lives. My theory is that they either went to the same elementary school or just hung out with similar groups as kids. We know from a certain episode of Jojo that Jotaro was already a strong fighter at around 7 years old, so I’m thinking that a 10 year old Kiryu became friends with Jotaro and taught him how to fight after seeing him get picked on by other kids. This would explain why Jotaro yells “ora” when he punches since Kiryu sometimes does the same thing when punching, so Jotaro likely picked up on this and integrated it into his own fighting style.
There’s also the bit with Kiryu’s charged attack in Rush style in Yakuza 0 looking like Star Platinum’s punch barrage. This led me to think that Kiryu might be a stand user like Jotaro, but overall, I’ve decided that doesn’t really work into this whole theory. I thought at first that Kiryu’s cartoonishly superhuman strength might mean that he’s a stand user, but then that would mean a lot of other characters in the games have the same type of stand as Kiryu’s which just doesn’t make much sense, especially when you consider that in Jojo, stand user’s will always eventually be drawn to other stand users by fate, yet Kiryu has never encountered another one. Besides, it’s not exactly unusual in the Jojo universe for regular humans to achieve the kind of superhuman strength we see in Yakuza, like when Jonathan in part 1 fought vampire Dio in a burning mansion before he even learned Hamon, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that Kiryu is just a regular human, at least in the context of the Jojo-Yakuza universe. Ichiban is a whole other story, but I won’t get too deep into that here, mainly because I haven’t played Yakuza 7 or 8.
Now, another small connection I noticed is that in Yakuza 0, there is a substory where you meet the boss of an Italian mafia group and JJBA part 5: Golden Wind centers around a large Italian mafia group. There are no other connections to be made here lol but I like to think that the mafia boss you meet is probably a predecessor to Diavolo since he chooses to leave the mafia about a decade before the events of Golden Wind.
It’s hard to make more connections past Yakuza 0 since the next game in the timeline takes place in 1995 and 2005 so JJBA parts 4 and 5 take place during the time Kiryu is in prison and have no connection to events covered in that 10 year gap. Part 6: Stone Ocean takes place in 2011 which is close to the events of Yakuza 4 and 5, but I’ve decided that Yakuza takes place in the Irene universe since the whole world was affected by the events of the original universe and would have to been acknowledged in Yakuza (also, Yakuza 5 would straight up not have happened at all in the Jolyne universe since the universe was literally reset 💀).
I have noticed that JJBA part 9, Yakuza 8, and the upcoming Pirate Yakuza all take place in Hawaii and around the same time, but I am not caught up on any of these to really say anything conclusive. Firstly, part 9 takes place in a completely different universe to parts 1-6 so it would not connect to the headcanon I’ve come up with. Also, Hawaii is kinda big, so it’s reasonable that even if they did coincide somehow, they wouldn’t cross over. I mean, even the Judgement games take place in both the same universe and the same areas as the Yakuza games yet they’ve never directly crossed over. Who knows, maybe I will eventually find a funny way to connect them and I’ll do a follow-up to this post.
Finally, I’d like to point out that Kei Ibuchi from Yakuza Kiwami 2 is voiced by the same actor who voiced Dio Brando in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. There is no in-universe connection here; I just thought that was funny to point out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my unhinged rant about how the Yakuza games take place in the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure universe. If you didn’t, that’s fair. This was all just the insane ramblings of a madman.