I recently played through Yakuza 0 having never played any of the other games in the series. My thoughts on the game:
1. It's a surprisingly well-told underworld crime melodrama with a killer ending: Unlike the more satirical GTA narratives, Yakuza 0 featured a more serious and relatively more grounded crime story that is closer to a Mafia game than a GTA one. The game juggles its two different narratives quite well and melds them together organically in its climactic second half. Its pacing suffered a bit after the strong first few chapters and before the halfway point, but the game became hard to put down Chapter 10 and beyond. The ending, especially, is one of the best written endings I've seen in recent memory, and certainly not one I expected in a game that is about beating up thugs with over the top moves.
2. Boss battles are fun, but fighting random thugs gets repetitive: I played the game on the Hard difficulty, and despite it being my first Yakuza game, the combat was easy to get a grasp of. Combat animations and hit reactions are top-notch and go a long way towards making the combat fun. Pulling off the various context-sensitive moves never got old, and the combat itself has good fundamentals with attack canceling, etc. The biggest combat issue I had is that random thugs on the street almost never posed a problem once I got comfortable enough with the combat, and past the halfway point, I avoided as much of the random fights as possible. Thankfully, boss battles are so over the top, complete with hype-inducing music and intros, that getting through the random mooks pays off.
3. It's an unexpectedly funny game, due to its side missions: The vast majority of the side missions feature comedic elements, even the ones that start out relatively serious. Despite being a relatively low budget game, the game nails its humor delivery, mostly through clever use of camera angles, funny-sounding jingles and intentionally inappropriate character poses. A mission featuring a dominatrix and another one involving a pornographic magazine vending machine and a curious kid are just a couple of examples of the absurdity that is Yakuza 0's side missions. The missions that are more serious tend to feature poignant writing. The underlying writing theme that is prevalent in 95% of the side missions is that the side missions are rarely what they seem initially, and they almost always have a twist somewhere before the conclusion. There are even side missions that are a part of different sub-chains, and each of these sub-chains actually contains satisfying story arcs. Overall, I've played less than a handful of JRPGs, but the writing in Yakuza 0 puts those to shame.
4. There is nothing mini about Yakuza 0's minigames: Yakuza 0's diversions and side activities are an entirely different beast compared to what I've normally come across in GTAs, Ubisoft games, etc. There is a full-blown club management tycoon game that is a 'minigame' complete with its own storyline. I initially laughed at the silly tycoon game, but 10 hours later I had ended up crushing all the rival clubs. This sort of addictive minigame is not a one-off either; there is a long and fully-featured RC competition minigame where one build RC cars with parts one purchases and finds in the game world, and tinkering with RC cars to get just the right stats is a time sink i don't regret. Outside of these, the bowling and pool minigames with proper physics are good enough to be standalone games. Despite skipping a fair amount of minigames, including the arcane Japanese board games, it's safe to say that when it comes to minigames, Yakuza 0 is in a class of its own.
Overall, I expected something similar to a GTA set in Japan, but what I got instead was a brawler with an engaging and serious crime story that is complemented by incredibly bizarre, yet well-written, side missions, and fleshed-out minigames. I've played nothing else quite like it and it is my pick as the best exclusive on the PS4.
