Yakuza 0 Substories & Minigame Guide: 100 Side Stories, Pocket Circuit, Dance Battles, and Telephone Club

Substories: Kamurocho's and Sotenbori's 100 Side Stories

A hundred substories split unevenly between the two leads, sixty for Kiryu and forty for Majima, and the split tells you something about each man's chapter. Kiryu spends more time walking Kamurocho as a (relatively) normal guy people stop to ask favors of, so his sixty lean toward character studies and slow-burn comedy. Majima's forty are denser and weirder per capita, since he's got less screen time but the Grand gives him a built-in cast of hostesses and lowlifes to collide with.

Substories unlock by chapter and don't always stay available once a new one starts, so the single most important habit is checking your map for the yellow exclamation-mark icon every time you enter a new chapter rather than saving a cleanup pass for after the credits. A few are also gated behind specific locations you'd otherwise skip entirely, a particular back alley in Sotenbori, the batting cages, a specific vending machine. Walk the full map once per chapter instead of beelining the next story beat.

• Chapter gating: Some substories vanish permanently if you advance the main story past a certain point without triggering them first, most notoriously a handful tied to early Kiryu chapters.
• The completion list: The pause menu's Completion List tab tracks exactly which substories remain and in which district, so there's no need for a manual spreadsheet beyond knowing to check it often.
• No missable Platinum Trophy risk if you're careful: Finishing all 100 substories isn't required for the main story, but it is required for 100% completion, and several of the trickiest replace standard quest markers with no marker at all until you talk to the right NPC.

Kiryu's Substories: The Interview Tricks, the Sales Pitches, and the Setups

Kiryu's sixty are where the series first leaned hard into "mundane favor spirals into life-altering nonsense," and a handful hinge on a specific right answer rather than any amount of combat skill.

• The Cabaret Grand Prize job interview: Kiryu poses as a magazine interviewer grilling a Grand hostess applicant. The correct answers lean toward warm, encouraging phrasing rather than blunt honesty, picking the gentlest option in each of the multi-choice prompts gets the best outcome instead of the answer that sounds most "correct" on paper.
• The salesman substories (vacuum cleaners, et al.): A handful of substories drop Kiryu into a door-to-door or storefront sales pitch. The trick isn't charisma stats, it's picking the pitch option that matches what the specific customer says they actually need, listen to their complaint line before choosing, don't default to the flashiest pitch option.
• Amon's training substories: Several late-game substories are disguised extra lessons from the hidden boss Amon, and skipping them means skipping free CP and a preview of fights that are otherwise much harder cold.
• The disguise and mistaken-identity chain: A multi-part substory thread has Kiryu repeatedly mistaken for someone else across separate encounters, playing along rather than correcting people every time is what keeps the chain progressing toward its payoff.
• Money-related side jobs: A few substories hand over blank-check cash rewards for completing oddly specific tasks (finding a lost pet, retrieving an item from a vending machine), these are worth prioritizing early since the yen matters more in the first few chapters than it will later.

Majima's Substories: Grand Shenanigans and Street-Level Absurdity

Majima's forty lean into his forced-cheerfulness persona cracking under pressure, and Sotenbori's tighter geography means more of them chain directly off each other.

• The Grand's staff drama substories: Several substories involve mediating disputes between hostesses or handling a customer complaint inside the club itself, picking the option that defuses the situation calmly (rather than Majima's instinct to escalate) nets the better ending almost every time.
• The breakdancing challenge threads: A set of substories pit Majima against street dancers outside any formal Dance Battle menu, these feed directly into unlocking some of the harder Breaker-style combat techniques later.
• The "MAD DOG lookalike" chain: A running gag thread has Majima repeatedly dragged into cases of mistaken identity tied to his own reputation, playing along with the confusion (rather than immediately setting the record straight) is again the move that keeps the thread alive to its punchline.
• Substories feeding Cabaret Club Czar recruits: A number of Majima's substories directly unlock specific hostess hires for the business minigame, Nugget notwithstanding, so if the money-and-management side of the game matters to you, prioritize these over the purely comedic ones.
• The karaoke and talent-show substories: A pair of substories put Majima on stage in increasingly undignified costumes, no wrong answers mechanically, but committing to the bit (choosing the most enthusiastic dialogue option) gets the funniest version of the cutscene.

Pocket Circuit: Beating Fighter and the Championship Builds

Pocket Circuit's radio-controlled car racing hides a genuinely deep tuning system under a toy-store aesthetic. Every car is built from seven component types, body, tires, frame, motor, gears, battery, and an optional add-on slot, and each circuit's hazards (sharp chicanes, oil slicks, jump ramps) reward a different balance of speed, handling, and durability rather than one universal "best" build.

• Intro Race: Golem Tiger body, Soft Tires, Balanced Frame, High Torque Motor 2.0, Regular Gears, Regular Battery. This combination clears the opening cup without needing anything purchased beyond the starter shop stock.
• Little Racer's Cup: Golem Tiger, Low Profile Tires Plus, Balanced Frame Plus, High Torque Motor 2.0, Regular Gears, Regular Battery. The upgraded tires matter more here than raw motor power, since this cup's turns punish anything that can't hold a line.
• Rookies' Race: Golem Tiger, Soft Tires Plus, Balanced Frame Plus, High Torque Motor 2.0, Balanced Gears Plus, High Capacity Battery, Side Stabilizer 2.0. The added Side Stabilizer becomes necessary once this cup introduces its first real chicane sequence.
• Pro-Am Race and Fighter's rematch: Golem Tiger, Extra Spiked Tires, Balanced Frame Plus, High Torque Motor 2.0, Godspeed Gears, Regular Battery, Side Stabilizer. Fighter, the game's recurring rival racer, scales up his own car between cups, so a build that cleared an earlier race won't necessarily survive his late-game version without the Godspeed Gears swap.
• Where to source parts: Bodies mostly come as cup-clear rewards rather than purchases, while tires, frames, motors, gears, and batteries are bought from the Pocket Circuit shop counter, the West Park weapons dealer, Ebisu Pawn, or Don Quijote, so check all four before assuming a part is unavailable.

Dance Battles: Reading the Beat and Besting Every Rival

Majima's Dance Battles run on a button-prompt rhythm system layered over a visible beat track, and the difference between a mediocre score and a full combo chain comes down to anticipation rather than reaction speed.

• Watch the approach, not the prompt: Inputs appear on a timeline scrolling toward a hit marker, and pressing on the beat the marker crosses the zone, not when the icon first appears, is what keeps a combo chain alive.
• Chain discipline over panic inputs: Missing one prompt resets your combo multiplier, so a clean run of smaller combos consistently outscores a reckless attempt at one unbroken chain against a difficult rival.
• Disco Queen and the other named rivals: The toughest individual battle in the mode rewards grabbing every available combo opportunity before each major scoring checkpoint rather than playing conservatively, a 9000-plus score is achievable once the rhythm clicks, and Easy difficulty on the hardest rival fights is a legitimate strategy rather than a cop-out, since some of the late prompts come faster than Normal's reward justifies.
• Costume and venue variety don't change the core loop: Different clubs reskin the stage and song, but the underlying timing window is consistent across every Dance Battle in the game, so mastering the base rhythm once pays off everywhere.

Telephone Club: Spotting the Fakes and Landing the Real Date

Telekura, the Telephone Club substory thread, is a listening-comprehension minigame disguised as a dating sim parody. Nine girls call in across three categories distinguished by bikini color, blue, green, and white, and each category hides two decoys alongside one genuine dateable girl.

• Learn the fakes first: Because each category always contains the same two impostors, memorizing their voice patterns and go-to phrases on an early call means instantly hanging up on them in later categories instead of wasting a slot.
• QTE length is a tell: The real girl's call tends to run a noticeably different quick-time-event length than the decoys in the same color group, a shorter or longer prompt window than you've learned to expect is reason to pay closer attention rather than hang up reflexively.

- **Listen past the script:** The decoys' self-descriptions are written to sound almost identical to the real girl's, so the actual giveaway is vocal tone and delivery quirks rather than anything in the dialogue content itself. - **A wrong hang-up isn't fatal:** Misjudging a category doesn't lock the real date out permanently, the game cycles calls again, but it does cost time, so building genuine voice recognition over guessing is worth the early investment.

Shogi, Mahjong, and Catfights: The Rules Nobody Explains

These three sit in the "optional table games" bucket the main story never bothers teaching, and all three reward a baseline understanding of real-world rules the tutorial text alone won't give you.

• Shogi basics: Shogi is Japanese chess with one major twist, captured pieces can be dropped back onto the board under your own color, which makes material trades far less final than in Western chess. Prioritize controlling the center early and never assume a captured piece is gone for good, since your opponent's next drop can undo a trade you thought favored you.
• Shogi intermediate tip: The King's safety matters more than piece count in the midgame, a material lead evaporates fast if your opponent builds a drop-piece assault on an exposed King, so spend early turns building a defensive formation around your own King before pushing an attack.
• Mahjong basics: Yakuza 0's Mahjong uses the standard Japanese riichi ruleset, building a hand of four sets and a pair from tiles drawn and discarded around the table. Watch opponents' discards for tiles they're clearly not using, since reading a safe discard matters more early on than chasing a big hand.
• Mahjong intermediate tip: Declaring riichi (a ready-hand bonus) telegraphs your hand to the whole table and locks your own tile choices for the rest of the round, so hold off declaring until you've confirmed the hand is genuinely safe to lock in rather than rushing it for the point bonus.
• Catfights basics: The all-female brawling substory arc plays like a simplified version of the main combat system, with less emphasis on style-switching and more on reading a smaller, more aggressive moveset. Blocking on reaction rather than attacking first clears most early matches without needing any CP investment specific to the mode.

Conclusion

Yakuza 0's side content isn't a detour from the main story, it's a second game stapled to the first one, and treating it that way, chapter by chapter rather than as a post-credits cleanup job, is what keeps a hundred-plus hour completion run from feeling like busywork. For the combat and story systems all of this side content sits alongside, the full Yakuza 0 review and the business and economy guide cover the rest of the package.