Beast in the East: Yakuza 0 - Part 14

I'm here.

Aww yisss it's Miracle.

One of my favourite substories coming up :D

Edit: @alex: The dude fighting with you is your security dude. Once you have security assigned to an area, they jump in to fight with you.

It's time for a Miracle

This is the Yakuza lifestyle I crave.

Hopefully with the introduction of Miracle Johnson, they'll start to see the appeal of Kiryu - the perpetually out of his element straight man, watching as all this rampant bullshit goes on around him

I love them ending the last episode by saying they would train next episode and at the start of this one both Dan and Alex have forgotten he very existence of the training and acting like Vinny is a crazy person.

So happy they finally did this substory.

Oh wow, I don't even think I saw that in my playthrough. Super hype for EASTBEASTIN

@alex In case you're curious, those dolls are called daruma, and popularly are associated with good luck.

Very happy they found that substory. So good.

Wait what is Bruno Mars doing in 80's Japan?

@alex I also had the Smooth Criminal VHS tape, and it was rad.

I love this series so much. Anyone know if anything different was in the black box?

Just a heads up, The Tojo Clan and Omi Alliance are totally separate and rival factions. Everyone in Osaka belongs to Omi, everyone in Kamurocho belongs to Tojo. Majima is working for the Omi Alliance because his boss (Shimano, bald eyebrows) is buds with the guy who told Majima to kill Makoto (weasel guy in tan coat) and rented him out.

@asraimun: Well, you know... "It doesn't matter if you're black or whiiiite~"

YESSSSS!!! I knew he'd be the cover photo when it finally happened. Won't be able to watch for a while but I wonder if they found it accidentally or saw all the people begging them in the comments.

Soon as I saw the thumbnail I knew Miracle Johnson was about to hit beast town. Nice episode taking some time to enjoy the side content.

Couple of things:

The guy that was helping you for the double powerbomb was your district security employee who will randomly appear in combat encounters.

The Manager/Security Influence with the number -1/0/0/0/4 etc. That is the effect the employee has per collection. When you collect that number will move to the right. You can change and reset the staff by swapping them out.

In combat you can always throw away what ever your holding by pressing the circle button. Also yes L1 while grappling will reverse your hold. Also if you press circle on a grounded opponent you pick them up and they will be dizzy for a couple of seconds, though certain styles and near legs you will do other actions.

Go to the bowling alley and get a turkey perhaps next time ;)

Great stuff, look forward to next epsiode.

Y'all should head back to the bowling alley from the beginning of the series. The woman at the cashier/food area gives you something for the real estate business! Swear to god.

@alex@vinny@danryckert

I'm almost done the video at time of writing this. Sorry if it happens in the last 20 minutes or so!

This is a quest you do not want to miss! It's a bit tough but see it through and it's super good

You want to talk to this kid. You actually passed him quite a few times but didn't notice his dialog popups.

Other than that, here are a bunch of maps of the places you can buy (any of them that you can enter require max friendship with the clerk there)

http://www.khhsubs.com/rggzero/moneyisland.html

It's translated from Japanese so the names arn't the same as in the localization but it's pretty easy to figure out. Here's the first map, the area you're buying property in, for reference

http://www.khhsubs.com/rggzero/graphics/moneyisland/pleasuretycoon.png

This actually won't happen until that section the real estate business opens up.

@alex, you should speak to the Chef you shot down. He runs a decent restaurant.

It's a great, dumb substory.

@sankis: They talk to the child but get sidetracked finishing up some other loose ends. I do hope they remember the kid for next time, though.

Another great episode!

You guys should check out the south-eastern corner of the main part of the Champion district (the square of alleyways with a couple of bars to the right on the map) it has a pretty amazing sub story and you won`t go by there naturally, so you kinda have to seek it out.

You should definitely check out the telephone club. The minigame is pretty amazing the first time.

I don`t think the good stuff at the bowling alley unlocks until you open up that district in the real estate sidestuff, so maybe hold off on that.

Found it huh.

You guys should go back to where the Miracle substory started. for reasons, ya know...

So, some random comments about this episode:

...about Miracle Johnson and real estate... Maybe you should see if you could find those two western culture enthusiasts again...

The black box would have given you some shoes that lets you avoid encounters, though this far into the game you might as well just throw money to accomplish the same.

The guy who helped in the fight was the security guy you assigned to to protect that area in the real estate office.

If you ever finish Yakuza 4, you should play the zombie spin-off. It's not that great of a game gameplay-wise, but it is pretty amusing if you're a fan of the series. Also Heat Snipes (heat actions with guns!)

The engine the shady password guy sells is really useful for the miniature car racing. As is the bumper part you get when buying a car from the pawn shop.

And, apologies, but after the abrupt end of Majima-time, I'm back to hawking that damn mandarin orange for Kiryu as well. Maybe the store next to the real estate office has one? You should go into that place regardless, there's a friendship to be made there!

I'm onto you, Giant Bomb... your scheming machinations to make Mondays not suck haven't gone unnoticed.

"Guys, I've got porn to watch!" [throws money in the street]

They're really living that Kamurocho life now. (Also, you totally did end up watching that girl's video, Reika was the hostess.)

Relevant:

@danryckert the in-game menu has a Business option, which let's you view the progress of your collections wherever you are. The shire is also a good place to visit, sense it has collection boosting perks available.

About the staff, they have five numbers on their cards, which you could liken to uses. The number highlighted is the effect they will give you during the next collection. Like a manager with 3 will give you more money (economy arrow on the overview screen points up) and a one with negative gives you less. With every subsequent collection the highlighted number moves one square to the right. So the longer they are assigned to the district, might make them more or less effective. They wont disappear if you use them more than 5 times, but if you rest them, they will reset and the highlighted number moves back to the first number. Same with security.

@alex when you fought those dudes and a random guy helped you, he was your security assigned to that district. Their card numbers, Problem solving and safety influence, are how good they fair in Money Battles and how likely the Money Battles are to appear, respectively. To my knowledge, them helping you in a fight is a random chance.

@alex I think you guys only have a single telephone card of Marina. IIRC, to unlock the video, you'd need to have a set of three.

Here's that Ghosts video I was talking about.

I forgot that it's FORTY MINUTES LONG.

@asraimun: Yes actually the better item was in the black box. The black box contained the "Encounter Finder" which lets you see people in need of help (a.k.a finding sub stories/side mission NPC's by just glancing at the map) Which is a a really useful item early on if you want to mop up all the side stories.

@odinsmana said:

Seconded on these two things, both very much worth checking out!

@tactfulogre: Holy shit, lol.

What in the fuck, I've never even heard of this.

The black box had Silent Shoes. The Encounter Finder is in another black box.

Edit:

Also has some of the best Majima karaoke (spoiler tagged as spoils Majima's character development post-0). Video in a spoiler block isn't working, so here's the link. (Majima's character development post-0 spoilers)

@tastycakesmcg33: Had to look Bruno Mars up, never heard of the lad.

It is clearly Michael Jackson, his name is Miracle Johnson in this

@asraimun: If I remember right, you either get a T-shirt or the encounter finder device. (They have the encounter device with Majima). Big difference in items, it clearly does matter if it's black or white :p

Please check out the Champion District sometime (square-ish area with the two bars on the right side of the map). The game doesn't really give you any plot reasons to go there at this point but it has one of my favorite substories.

So the way those five numbers in real estate business works is as follows. I'll set up some hypothetical numbers here that don't intentionally correspond to anyone. We'll start with managers, though this applies to both outside of some specific wording.

-1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3

So each of these corresponds to a payout period (let's call them "days" just to be brief about it). The first day you have them working, your economic forecast is -1, so it's down. That day, you're not making 100% of your possible income. The second day, there's no effect, same with the third, so it's not going up or down. You are at 100% on "0" days. On 1, you get a bonus. On 3, you get a much bigger bonus.

So it seems obvious, then, that you shouldn't bother with anyone who starts off at a negative, right? Well, no. Because sometimes, people who start off at negatives end up with really high bonuses. And you can't get to those bonuses without just getting through the negatives. On the flip side, sometimes people have high negatives at the end. When they get to their final day, they stay there until you switch them out to get some rest, so the last day usually isn't good for anyone.

The same applies to security guards, though not really for economic forecasts. On good days, they are likely to help you fight in battles in that district and there's less likely to be enemies there causing trouble and slowing down your payouts. On bad days, the opposite happens.

As an aside to Vinny, you can't buy any office buildings because you're in the Leisure King's area and trying to take him down. He tends to only work in leisure businesses.

A couple of other notes:

- The red thing is called a Daruma. There's also a Pokemon based on it!

- The reason the camera is weird with the Rush training is because you're not using the Rush-style blocking, which dodges incoming attacks within a window. The game is assuming you know how to use Rush since you're trying to learn new moves in it and Dan never uses it.

- When you get back to Majima, and find a kettle on the street, use it on a downed enemy.

- Has Dan forgotten how heat actions work? I keep seeing him hammer Triangle and complain about no heat action, but there's no heat prompt on the screen.

- Now is a good time for bowling. I'll let you guys figure that quest out, but if you need tips for guaranteed Turkeys, I can comment here next week about it.

Oh, also, SPEND YOUR CP. There is no point to just holding on to it and Majima and Kiryu share some CP achievements. You probably have more than you think!

Great stuff again. Unlocking the softcore videos is usually tied to substories, sometimes to friendships, never to the cards. Mr Libido will point you towards any you haven't got yet and I believe he appears near where you meet the girl in question.

Also, most of the punchout artist training can be achieved by blocking as well as dodging, as long as you don't take an actual hit.

Thank God someone else remembers Ghost by Michael Jackson. I remember seeing it once or twice when I was a kid and I think it was a thing MTV did every Halloween, they had some Michael Jackson marathon or something? Everyone I've ever mentioned it to has been so confused.

Mondays are always the best now. Also I finally wrapped up this game over the weekend (did the last three chapters having completely run out of other things to do in-game). It really is such a great time and I'm super excited to watch the rest of it once again through Beast eyes.

Great episode again, it really is insane how much side stuff is in this game!

Just wanted to offer some assistance with the sleeping Mr. Shakedown you encountered at the end of the video. It's actually possible to steal all the money he's carrying without waking him up. If you let go of "x" as soon as you see the exclamation point and then immediately reapply it, he won't wake up! The rate at which you take money from him is very slow at first, but the longer you steal from him, the quicker his total money goes down.

The only negative is that the Mr. Shakedown story won't progress until you actually beat him in a fight, which means he'll just be wandering round the map with 0 yen, whereas if you beat him in a fight, he'll eventually come back with WAY more yen (been a while since I completed the game, but I wanna say he came back with like 80 million yen the next time I saw him)

Don't forget: while in Beast mode you don't need to hit Circle to pick up items. Just start hitting Square and he'll pick them up. Will prevent you from getting hit and dropping items so much.

Having been inspired to play, and subsequently finish, Yakuza 1 and 2 in the time between this episode and the last, I'm pretty damn excited to get more story from 0 (particularly about Majima's change in tone). Still a good episode, though next week and however many weeks it'll take to get there can't come soon enough.

Would be pretty rad if they came more frequently though ;)

@emphulio said:

No, that's not correct. Problem Solving reduced the number of "incidents" where collections stop for an area until you've gone and beaten up the thugs that are causing problems. Safety reduces the number of random thugs appearing on the street.

Are you talking about Weaving? That's the second Rush training upgrade, which he obviously won't have during the first (and second) fights. And regardless, the camera during the Rush training just plain sucks. It's annoying and frustrating for no good reason.

Kiryu favors the Ganso style of piledriver I see.

Anyone have a link to the sad song on the soundtrack that plays when the dude is talking about his divorce?

@alex: As others have mentioned, the red thing is a daruma. The traditional use for them is a reminder that a task/ambition/what-have-you is left unfinished; you receive a daruma with blank eyes and fill in one pupil when you begin something, and fill in the other when it's completed. The idea is that seeing the one-eyed daruma will remind and motivate you about said objective. I think the image of it comes from some blind monk in Japanese folklore?