Spoilers for all games below
- Akiyama's safe. Ignoring the fact that Akiyama just having 100 billion yen lying around (which honestly trivializes the 10 billion yen incident to me, but that's another thing)... there's the fact that he had a safe. With 100 billion yen in cash. That he locks with... oh wait. He doesn't lock it. There's a button to open it behind a conspicuous book on his shelf. The plot was set into motion by the fact that someone had wandered into his office (which, by the way, was unlocked), picked the book off the shelf (because it was a conspicuous book) and completely by accident found the money. Honestly, it's ridiculous... which seems harsh, but there's no reason that should have happened. Akiyama would have been better stuffing his money into a mattress.
- From what I understand, it's mostly because, for all Akiyama cares, the money can get stolen. He doesn't attach a real value to money anymore, and he doesn't like living a life controlled by money. When the money was stolen, he didn't really care, he was only devastated because of the identity of the thief. Calling it absurd might be pushing it a bit, indeed, but it's definitely a real flaw in Akiyama's personality that caused this to happen.
- Aside from the above example, there's also the simple fact that if either Akiyama or Hana are around, they can easily kick the shit out of most people who try to take it (Hana only got beaten by Midorikawa because she didn't want to try anything when he had a gun). The place being unlocked was probably Hana's fault since she said she was only out for a minute.
- Tatsuya, street fighter, prize fighter and petty thug. But yet he still has time for silly part time jobs like serving Gelato at a frilly gelato store, a fast food worker and a doorman for a hostess club. Why can't Tatsuya get a real criminal job like picking pockets or helping run extortion rackets?
- Kiryu's priorities in grief, when Rikiya, Tachibana and Shinji dies, he cries like they are close to him. But when Kazama, Yumi and Nishiki dies, he doesn't shed so much as a single tear. What the hell is up with that?
- There is no "right" way to grieve. When someone truly close dies, tears are an option, sure, but a lot of people simply freeze emotionally because they can't, on a primordial, emotional level, grasp the fact that the person is gone. I cried a lot more the first time I saw "Eugene Onegin" than I did when my dad died two years ago, and I still haven't truly internalized it. It's entirely possible that the first three deaths felt more "real" to Kiryu because he wasn't as close to them.
- Kiryu in the epilogue of six describes Heizo as a father who never loved his son and didn't realize that.... except that the whole reason he kept his son out of the yakuza was because he didn't want that life for him. Which is the exact opposite of what was being said about him.
- Heizo was too busy coddling Hirose as a foster son. Treating him to fancy dinners and other gifts for his job as a crook, giving him a fake sense of belonging and importance. Meanwhile Tsuneo was like the child who was expected to graduate from university, live a clean life and ignore the darker side of his father as Hirose went around and killed Heizo's associates to keep the secret. The worst thing a father can do for a child is to treat them like children unable to handle the truth even as he grows up. And even then Heizo didn't tell Hirose what the secret actually was until he had to kill him to both enforce his authority and spare Hirose the pain of being hunted after he is dead.
- Do any of the main characters actually know what the Yakuza actually do? It has been seen by actual Yakuza that in terms of the plotline, the antagonists act like actual Yakuza, but the main characters seemingly join up without knowing that the business of the Yakuza is crime, all of them are Memetic Badasses, but with hearts of gold, it's the one thing that always bothered me.
- In the beginning of the series, both men are merely the enforcers of their respective bosses, helping them make sure none of the illicit businesses are skimming from the top, paying their rent on time and making collection runs. They were yet to be part of the inner circle of business where they would have to resort to more "persuasive" means of raking in cash. Kiryu never get the chance to go in deep into the dirty business as most of his time spent was watching Sohei after he lost his influence in 0 and Majima while serving as the enforcer of Shimano and his share of violence, was mostly just making sure the real estate business runs smoothly which gave him and his men plenty of reasons to bust heads.
- In Yakuza 2 (or at least Kiwami 2), Date's wanted on a murder charge at the end of Chapter 7. And yet, when the police review the surveillance footage in the beginning of Chapter 8, it clearly shows that the one who was killed was pointing guns at two people. Does self-defense just not exist in Japan?
- Date was a civilian brought into a top-secret criminal investigation (even as an ex-cop, that's a grey area that could result in a moderately severe scandal), gun control in Japan is much more strict than in America and having a civilian kill a suspected criminal, even in self defense, would raise even more questions as to who gave him the gun and why was he involved in police affairs, and Kurahashi is a mole for the Jingweon Mafia and probably doctoring the evidence to get Date and Kawara in trouble.
- So it's revealed in Yakuza 4, that Majima's Kansai accent is fake and not how he originally spoke at all. And he was working on speaking like that before the events of 1985 and before being tortured, and way before the meeting with Nishitani and the events of 0 where he reinvented his personality. So my question is why would he do that before said spoilered events? What does he have to gain speaking in a regional dialect that isn't even a region the families and clan he was affiliated with reside in?
- So did Kiryu never bother making Haruka (or any of his children, really) go to self defense classes? Like, he doesn't have to make her (or any of his kids) turn into a name-taking ass-kicking badass like him but his past and former lifestyle does frequently put her and everyone else he cares about in danger so it doesn't make sense that he doesn't atleast give her the knowledge of what to do to defend herself when those moments inevitably happen.
- Whose bright idea was it to ditch the "Yakuza" in the title? It would be like if Resident Evil started calling itself "Biohazard" even outside of Japan - it's extremely stupid and just causes brand confusion.
- Probably so the story will be free to explore other things without Yakuza involved. As the ending in La D shown.
