Nightmare Fuel / Yakuza 0

• A relatively mundane example, but one of which can strike a chord with parents: One of Majima's substories has him trying to help a mother reunite with her daughter, the latter of which joined a cult. The cult engages in brainwashing members to purge them of memories of their families, requiring them to make steep donations, and anyone who tries to leave gets dragged back in, including one hapless victim that Majima sees on the way inside. It's then revealed that the leader of the cult uses it to profit (hence the 100,000-yen donation that was asked of the daughter) and to groom and sexually assault young women, something that could've happened to the daughter had Majima not intervened. After Majima rescures the daughter, she reveals that her father is dead and her mother had been grieving over him, and the cult made promises of bringing back the dead, so she joined not realizing at the time that it was a scam group led by a Dirty Old Man.
• Hiroki Awano deserves some mention.
  • Kiryu's confrontation with Awano, immediately after the former's second fight with Kuze, starts off rather silly: Awano's disco dancing alone with a woman. Then he turns everything off to try and make a deal with Kiryu, who refuses to bite. In an attempt to intimidate Kiryu as he's leaving, Awano shoots said woman dead in cold blood and makes a bluff of an ambush waiting for Kiryu outside. When Kiryu doesn't fall for it and leaves, we're briefly shown the woman's corpse with Awano casually taking a smoke break, who's more annoyed that Kiryu wasn't intimidated.
  • Awano also gets to fight it out with Majima, mano-a-mano with the shirts off tradition - and then the QTE happens as Awano goes for a straight punch. Fail and you take an absolutely nasty amount of damage from his attack. Succeed, and Awano craters the goddamn wall like he's a superhuman! It begs the question of how strong he really was in his prime, and even Majima is spooked!
• Lao Gui: considered Asia's top hitman, and a cold, sadistic one at that. His appearance is way out-of-place compared to the rest of the game's cast, looking like a dried-up corpse with deep, sunken eyes and a stone-cold stare. Whenever he makes an appearance, the atmosphere becomes way more tense. The few times Lao Gui smiles, it feels like the Grim Reaper gleefully staring down his next victim.
• Tachibana's Cold-Blooded Torture, where Yoneda crushes the man's toes with a sledgehammer and takes a sadistic glee in it. And then when it seems like Kuze is finally going to ease up on the torture so their target doesn't die, Tachibana seems to laugh ever so slightly at Yoneda - who responds with a fatal blow via the same hammer upside Tachibana's skull. Yoneda then gets Laser-Guided Karma for that when Kuze crunches his skull to the floor in response. Probably one of the bloodier scenes in the franchise.
• While it's undeniably badass to watch them tear through the forces of the people who have been making their lives hell for the entire game, the Unstoppable Rage Kiryu and Majima display during the finale is almost disturbing to watch:
  • We first get a hint of the sheer wrath bubbling under Majima's surface when the punks who beat Majima back in Chapter 16 show up again and demand that he start licking their boots. Instead of brushing them off with a one-liner or simply walking away, Majima gives them a Death Glare as images of the beating flash on the screen... and when they don't take the hint, he brutally lays them out; one gets punched in the face and goes flying from a kick after hitting the ground, another gets an agonizing-looking gut shot, and the third tries to beg for mercy and receives a kick to the kisser in response. The cold, almost mechanical efficiency with which Majima takes them down is almost scarier than if he had gone completely nuts.
  • Speaking of completely nuts, there's his assault on the Dojima HQ. Holy shit. Even his Mad Dog persona in the later games isn't this mad. Makes you wonder how much of that persona is an act...
    We cut from Kiryu confronting Shibusawa: As Majima punches out a gaggle of Dojima thugs, a whole bunch more rush into the room.
    Majima: (sporting a Nightmare Face) Like roaches to the slaughter... It'll take more than a few BUGS TO STOP ME!!
    Thug: Th-this guy's got a screw loose. He's crazy!
    Thug: You don't stand a chance, boy!
    Majima: You fucks don't even add to my body count... Now outta my way... YOU MEAT SACKS!
  • Kiryu is mostly his stoic self during the counter-raid on the Shibaura port, but his fight with Shibusawa shows off a really ugly side to him. Many of the QTEs are incredibly brutal, and the final one is almost difficult to watch, with Kiryu slamming the guy against a railing and beating him to within an inch of his life. And then, during the final cutscene, it all comes to a head: Kiryu knocks Shibusawa to the floor and starts whaling on him as he flashes back to all the people he's hurt. As Shibusawa lies on the floor, bloody and bruised, he urges Kiryu to finish the job and satisfy his bloodlust and become the Yakuza Kazama wanted him to be. Kiryu starts shaking... and, as he lets out a nigh-inhuman ROAR of pure rage and pain, lets fly with what was almost a killing blow. If Nishiki hadn't tackled him, the new Dragon of Dojima might have turned out very differently like Nishiki is in 2005.
• The "Videotape" substory with Majima. The clerk at the adult video store tells Majima of an urban legend where a woman in white gives a special tape. Sure enough, Majima runs into such a woman in an alley, who's moaning of the cold. After giving her some oden, she says she's not cold anymore and gives a tape in return. As Majima's leaving, he suddenly makes the connection and turns around only to find the woman gone. When Majima returns, they both decide to watch, except the video contains nothing, but static and a woman moaning that she's cold. The guys leave with their own conclusions and then the tape restarts and the video clears to show the woman now in the booth, looking at the camera with a creepy grin and saying "I'm not cold anymore..."
• The "Mystery Caller" substory with Majima. Majima finds a ringing payphone, and the caller, simply calling himself "Simon" in the English version^note a pun of "Simon Says", as he's telling you what to do, offers to pay Majima hefty sums to Dead Drop various illegal weapons. After this, Simon tricks Majima into taking care of some loose ends (read: beating up some prior associates he backstabbed). As thanks, he sends an unknown frightened woman to Majima to work for his cabaret as a reward on the threat of her death. This nets you a new hostess, but it's easy to guess what kind of "work" Simon probably meant. Even Majima is left wondering what kind of person is this Simon.
• The higher echelons of the Dojima Family and Omi Alliance are willing to kill Makoto Makimakura, a blind, defenseless young woman all because she happened to inherit a plot of land from her late grandfather that's interfering with their attempts to conquer Kamurocho. When she finds out about this inheritance, it's no wonder she, Majima, Kiryu, Sera, and Tachibana do everything they can to get her name out of that Empty Lot so that she can be done being in the yakuza's crosshairs.
• Sagawa, Majima's immediate superior, can be pretty damn scary if you dare cross him:
  • At the end of Chapter 8, Lee tries to start his van up in a bid to flee Sotenbori with Makoto...and then his van explodes the moment he starts the engine, which kills him and sets the neighborhood ablaze. Out of the smoke comes Sagawa, who's wised up to Majima's failure to kill Makoto and was the one who rigged Lee's van, and nearly puts a bullet in Majima, only stopped by a timely intervention from an unknown man in white (later revealed to be Sera). When the game cuts back to Majima in Chapter 11, Sagawa is shown beating the shit out of Majima with a bat, the latter's abdomen covered in nasty bruises. If not for the fact that he still needs Majima for some unfinished business, he would've just bashed his head in completely.
  • While torturing Majima, Sagawa tells a childhood story about an injured bird he took home to take care of, despite having been forbidden by his parents to have his own pets. Everything seemed to be going well, and he even gave the bird a name, Mametaro. Unfortunately, his parents found out, and he came home to see the family cat eating Mametaro, much to his horror. His idea of revenge wasn't much better: he killed the cat.
  • In Chapter 12, Majima has just fled back to Sotenbori after seeing Biliken and Nishitani killed by the police officer who was supposed to serve them, and runs into Sagawa, who then drags him into a nearby bathroom and starts choking him while lecturing him on not leaving Sotenbori without permission.
    Sagawa: Sotenbori's not your backyard, asshole! It's your cage! Your CAGE! When you step out at a goddamn hotel you let the front desk know!