YAKUZA 0 MAJIMA DISTRACT MONEY PATCH
YAKUZA 0 MAJIMA DISTRACT MONEY SERIES

As Kiryu, the player explores a virtual Tokyo, earning incredible amounts of money by both beating up rival gangsters and running a real estate firm.

YAKUZA 0 MAJIMA DISTRACT MONEY SERIES

Series mainstays Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima are still young, both having been exiled from the fictional yakuza Tojo Clan after Kiryu is framed for murder and Majima is involved in an unsanctioned hit. The game is set in December 1988, toward the tail end of the economic boom.

YAKUZA 0 MAJIMA DISTRACT MONEY PATCH

“The Empty Lot” is nothing more than an ugly patch of back street strewn with bits of rebar and industrial trash, but it’s also the final step in buying up an entire area of the city that’s soon to be the target of a massive gentrification project. In it, various factions vie for control over a valuable piece of undeveloped land in the middle of Kamurocho (the series’ analogue for Shinjuku, Tokyo’s entertainment/red-light district, Kabukicho).

Yakuza 0 is centered on an especially dramatic example of jiageya activity. Often enough, the jiageya would get what they wanted and these forced sales yielded enormous profits, with banks, real estate firms and criminal groups gaining huge amounts of money and increased bureaucratic power. Tenants who refused to sell could find themselves neighbors to yakuza who move into nearby properties, blaring music and destroying the surrounding area in between bouts of verbal (or occasionally physical) intimidation. Jiageya are infamous for forcing land sales in ways that banks and above-board real estate companies could never directly employ. With so much money changing hands and with real estate values skyrocketing, the yakuza were eager to capitalize. Jiageya became especially prominent in the second half of the 1980s same time that Japan was entering into its “ bubble economy. Most important for its portrayal in Yakuza 0 are jiageya, yakuza or yakuza-run eviction businesses that strong-arm property owners into sales that benefit lucrative, large-scale real estate developers hoping to build on an occupied plot of land. It accomplishes this through traditional racketeering and the trafficking of people and illicit goods, but also by manipulating the economy through semi-legal techniques. The yakuza, like all organized crime groups, primarily exists to make money. They’re a detail meant to remind the player at all times that cash is the raison d’être of the 1980s Japan she explores. Though the Yakuza series has always had a complicated relationship with reality (just check the glowing auras that surround enraged mobsters during combat), these yen explosions are something else. Bills burst into the air in time with each good smack, notes fluttering to the ground like the victim is a rich kid’s piñata and not a human being the player is battering half to death in back-alley Tokyo or Osaka. Hit an enemy in Sega’s Yakuza 0 and cash explodes from their body.

Yakuza 0 majima distract money