I decided to jump in with Yakuza 5 because i got it free with PS+ and i find the fight system pretty clunky and the tutorial barely explains how it works. If i hadn't watched Beast in the East i'd have a much harder time getting into it. Is combat in Yakuza 0 easier to get into?

Aside from i like what i've seen of the story and Kiryu's intro.

It's pretty similar. The biggest difference is that instead of playing as a bunch of different characters with specific playstyles in 5 you have two characters that can switch between wildly different playstyles on the fly.

As an in intro to the series 0 is much more newcomer friendly though. 5 relies pretty heavily on its predecessors for setup compared to 0 (or 4) and definitely expects a degree of familiarity.

@zeik: The biggest stumbling block i've had was fighting those 2 thugs in the hostess club. I found it frustrating to actually land some punches on them.

Think i'll suck it up and buy Yakuza 0 and see how long it takes me to catch up to the GBeast duders. I really wanna play around with the Beast and Breakdance styles.

@jedted: Are you using the R1 lock-on function?

@zeik: I tried that but it didn't feel like it helped that much. I still got flanked by the other dude and didn't have time to react.

@jedted: use r1 more, but try to focus more on evasive dashes and striking at opportune times. The yakuza games are not supposed to be combo mashing games in my experience.

This, r1 and dodging are key, except they made yakuza 0 extremely easy so with that one you can totally just mash it out 99% of the time.(Yakuza 5 is the only one I havent played though, so I have no Idea wether its considered to be easy or hard or down the middle)

0's combat is based around the 4 fighting style combat from Ishin, which is s lot better than 5 I think.