This is just me assessing Yakuza 0 after the fact. I got the urge to try Ishin so that moved ahead of it on my to-do list. Total disclosure, I haven't played Kiwami yet. Only one he had that connection with was Saejima, and he was still burdened by that guilt for like 20 years. A genuine man, and one that he has a loyal relationship with, is a rare thing in that world. That also probably explains his obsession with Kiryu later on.

So hey, if you can't trust anyone, and you can't crawl out of the hole you've dug for yourself, you might as well embrace the insanity, right? It didn't really feel like Majima had a slow descent of madness so much as he was a normal guy who got heaped with enough shit on his shoulders that by the end he consciously snapped and decided he wasn't going to let it happen ever again. By the end he had given up Makoto so she could live a normal life, thus sacrificing his chance for any lifestyle outside of crime, but the actions of everybody around him in that world still pretty clearly showed he could never trust anyone. It might've stopped Majima from completing the cycle but the damage was already done to his psyche. The little speech that Sera gave him didn't really leave too heavy a mark on him, either. The dude did snap near the end pretty strongly trying to merc the entire Dojima family, AND PRETTY MUCH SUCCEEDING. The Shimano betrayal really left a mark on him and I think that was a big part of it. After I thought about it in that post-game 'yo that game was godlike' bliss, it made a bit more sense. I actually just finished Yakuza 0 a couple days ago, and initially I was a bit taken aback by how jarring the change was. Please do not spoil any games after 0 as I am playing through them all in story order for the first time ever. Did they just make him became insane because that is where he had to be heading into the next game? How could such a detailed story miss this major detail? Overall the story in Yakuza 0 is great and quite detailed.

I rewatched all of the cutscenes in the game related to Majima and I just don't see why he became that way? Did I miss something? I just started playing through Yakuza Kwiami and he's even crazier there. Instead what we got was nothing super tragic happened and he just decided to randomly transform into this crazy character for no reason at all. I kept waiting through the entire story for Majima to finally snap and become the character I heard about. You can imagine my surprise when I played Yakuza 0 and he was nothing like what I had heard. Heading into the game I knew enough about the Yakuza games to know who he was and that he was crazy.

The one perplexing item for me though was the end game character development of Goro Majima. Being a gamer that is primarily playing games for stories I absolutely loved it. Yakuza 0 was the first Yakuza game I have played and just finished it last week.

Goro majima