10 Most Essential Japanese Video Games

6. Yakuza 0

You can't talk about Japanese video games and not mention the Yakuza series.

A straight-up awesome mix of brawler gameplay with ludicrous plot twists, Yakuza 0 is arguably the best of the bunch. Filled with minigames that include old-school Sega classics alongside jaw-dropping fight choreography, the series has always been one of Japan's most popular IP for almost two decades.

In the West though, thanks largely to Yakuza 1 being marketed as an open-world crime game, it resigned Yakuza to "that game your friend is always telling you to play" (I should know, I was that friend). Western releases for each game lagged years behind their Eastern counterparts, to the point where Yakuza 5 was arriving on PS3 in December, 2015 worldwide, yet Japanese audiences had since played prequel Yakuza 0, and were just a year away from Yakuza 6.

Thankfully today those release dates have largely synched up, and following things like the Yakuza Collection finally bringing 3, 4 and 5 to Xbox for the first time in the series' history, a global audience can enjoy Sega's unique brand of arcady super-violence, twinned with stories and characters you'll remember for the rest of time.