Halo 2 and Yakuza 0: Converging Paths of Two Protagonists (plus a lot of extra thoughts)

As of writing this part, I finished Yakuza 0 a few weeks ago and am now on the final chapter of Yakuza Kiwami, only putting it off because I want to finish the Jo Amon fight before the final chapter. With my new context, I want to add a bit more to my previous thoughts.

First, I want to cover something I said in the second paragraph (third paragraph of the overall post): “Kiryu initially struggles to properly hand out a business card at the beginning of the game.” As it turns out, if you make the right choices and quicktime events in that part of the game, Kiryu executes all the business tasks perfectly and he only messed up because I messed up all the choices. I personally think my outcome was canon since Kiryu had no formal business experience at this point since he was just a debt collector for the Yakuza before that, but it could honestly go both ways. What really surprised me after beating the game was how much more money Kiryu makes from his real estate business over Majima’s Cabaret Club. Previously, I thought Majima’s business minigame was more profitable to reflect that he is the more experienced businessman, and that was the case at the beginning, but once I had completed both minigames, Kiryu was easily earning over a billion yen per collection while I could only get barely over 100 million from Majima’s business. I guess it makes sense considering the game takes place when the real estate market was booming, but it still kinda ruins my original point about the gameplay reflecting their business skills.

Now I want to talk about the combat. This is where things get a bit more interesting. I said before that the game’s combat reflects the difference in experience between Kiryu and Majima with Majima having access to a lot more health and damage upgrades near the start of the game since he’s an older and more experienced fighter. Even the story shows how much stronger Majima is than Kiryu in 1988 with Majima taking down Awano and Lao Gui, the deadliest assassin in all of Asia, back-to-back. However, when both characters have all upgrades unlocked, including their respective Legend styles, I think Kiryu ends up being stronger than Majima, especially with how ridiculously overpowered the drunk upgrades for Brawler style are (you can easily cheese some of the coliseum tournaments by choosing the sturdy knife and instantly winning with a single heat action while drunk and at full health). Majima still ends up being a lot better for multiple enemies, but for one-on-one battles, Kiryu ends up being stronger. This makes sense after having played Kiwami because it’s clear that in later years, Kiryu rivals Majima in fighting ability which is why Majima sees Kiryu as such a worthy opponent.

The thing is, I beat the main story after having unlocked both Legend styles, so the difference in strength was not reflected in the gameplay for me. However, I’ve heard people say that the business minigames canonically happen after the ending of the main story which makes a lot more sense, especially considering how the game does not indicate how much time has passed between Sera becoming chairman and Kiryu and Majima meeting, so I can see how they could have done all that in that span of time. With all that in mind now, I think the final chapter still does reflect their strength differences if played before getting the Legend styles. If memory serves me right, most of the overpowered upgrades for Kiryu are locked behind the real estate minigame while Majima has a lot of the damage and health upgrades from the start so if you max out both characters with the limited skill trees, Majima still ends up the stronger fighter which makes sense for this point in the timeline.

Now I want to talk about the training missions since I only briefly mentioned them in the original text. I think this is where Majima and Kiryu’s different personalities really stand out, so I’ll go even more in depth for them.

Kiryu’s training missions are about him learning techniques under his masters, but never using it against them. A lot of times, he’s either sent to fight someone else to use a technique for the lesson or he unlocks it after finishing a task. I believe this is to reflect how at this point in time Kiryu has not surpassed the level of his teachers since he never gets to fight them. I guess you can argue that he surpassed Miss Tatsu since he beat that one guy she lost against or that he couldn’t fight Bacchus since he’s old, but I still think he’s supposed to be a beginner fighter at this point. He is only 20 years old in this game, so he is nowhere near the legend status he achieves in later games, and I think that’s reflected well with his training missions. He is just a young man with a mind open to all these new techniques.

Majima, on the other hand, approaches his training missions differently. He is already an experienced fighter being 4 years older than Kiryu and already achieved a bit of a legend status being Sotenbori’s Lord of the Night and known throughout the Yakuza as the guy who survived a year of imprisonment and torture for refusing to carry out an assassination. Because of this, all his lessons have him beating his teachers in combat. With Fei Hu, he learns the different weapon styles by beating him with his own baseball bat style. With Komeki/Komaki, he ends up inventing new techniques to counter the moves that Komeki tries to teach him. With Areshi and his crew, he learns their techniques similarly to how Kiryu does with his training missions, but unlike Kiryu, he ends up far surpassing his teachers (most likely because Areshi and the others dance for entertainment but Majima is actually using the moves for combat).

Now I also want to mention the Komaki training in Yakuza Kiwami (spoilers for that game obviously lol). In this game, Komaki uses his real name (apparently Komaki and Komeki have vastly different kanji when written out so it makes more sense in Japanese why he chose such a similar sounding name for his fake name lol) and is training Kiryu this time. This Kiryu is a much older and stronger fighter than before, so his training actually involves fighting the master. However, he still ends up learning the intended techniques like before, unlike Majima who developed his own techniques from the lessons. On top of the Komaki training, the game also features the Majima Everywhere system for Kiryu to relearn some of the Dragon style techniques he forgot during his 10 year sentence. What’s really interesting is that some of the moves you unlock are actually Majima’s techniques that Kiryu adopted into his own fighting style. This further emphasizes Kiryu’s learning style of adopting other people’s techniques into his own.