Tag: Yakuza

#oneaday Day 953: Like A Dragon

I beat Yakuza 3 tonight, which is why I’m up so late.

The Yakuza series is excellent for many reasons, chief among which is protagonist Kazuma Kiryu, who is just so effortlessly badass throughout that you can’t help but admire him. And yet he somehow manages to be this way without falling into the testosterone-fuelled arsehole trap, which is good. One could argue that it’s further evidence that the Japanese are actually rather good at writing strong, interesting, deep and flawed characters, while the West is often stuck in Tropesville. (This is a gross generalisation, of course, but Yakuza does provide good ammunition against anyone who says Eastern games are just about big-eyed anime girls and floppy-haired teenage protagonists.)

However, one thing was at the back of my mind while I was playing, and it relates to this (rather ranty) Eurogamer opinion piece from a week or two back, during the “girlfriend mode” scandal, also known as “Game Developer Says Something Stupid, Episode 357”. The article had a point — people should speak up when misogyny and sexism rear their ugly heads — but the fact that the article specifically called out Yakuza for being sexist really bothered me.

It raised an interesting question, you see. Yakuza certainly features depictions of a particular breed of sexism and misogyny endemic to Japanese big-city life, but does that make the game, in itself, inherently sexist? Does the fact that the game allows its protagonist to visit “hostess bars” and attempt to romance the women within mean it is a sexist work? Does the fact that the game allows the protagonist to visit a poledancing club mean that it is misogynistic?

You could argue the case for “yes”, clearly, but the perspective from which I approach the Yakuza series is that it provides a (mostly) realistic depiction of another culture that is relatively alien to my own. Part of that culture is sexist, and to deny that it exists causes the depiction of that culture to no longer be accurate or realistic, putting the developers in something of a quandary. Sure, we could probably do without the lengthy cutscenes depicting poledancers doing their thing just before there’s a big manly fight, but for the most part, the Yakuza games depict sexism rather than actually being outright sexist. (As a matter of fact, the incidental female characters in the “hostess bars” are considerably more well-developed than any number of T&A-toting heroines from Western games in recent years. The game also passes the Bechdel Test with flying colours.)

Should we decry Yakuza as a bad thing for showing it like it is and not attempting to make a positive change in society? No, no we shouldn’t. Because not all art is there to make life better. Not all art is there to make a positive change. Not all art is there to create a utopian vision of What Life Should Be Like. Some art is there to depict How Life Is, and Yakuza succeeds in that admirably.

While I do believe it is important to call out sexism and misogyny in the industry when it comes up, I don’t believe the Yakuza series is the biggest problem. I don’t believe it’s a particular problem at all, to be honest. The writers of Yakuza create female characters who are real, interesting people rather than sex objects, and the protagonist interacts with them accordingly. Any sexism present in the game is a result of accurately depicting a sexist society — with the possible exception of the aforementioned poledancing cutscene, but one could argue that was there to establish ambience and atmosphere. And it’s not as if Kazuma goes around beating or raping women, either — every antagonist in the game is male, and Kaz himself treats all the women he comes across with nothing but respect, save for the odd option to give a cheeky, innuendo-filled response to a hostess.

Were the Yakuza series to be sanitised and watered down, with anything deemed to be sexist or misogynistic stripped out, a big part of the game’s authentic-feeling Japanese atmosphere would be gone. As much as we would like to believe we live in a world where there is true equality, the fact is we do not — and in many places around Japan, this is particularly obvious. To deny that this happens by whitewashing your content — particularly in a game that is aimed at adults — would just be short-sighted, and I’d argue that it’s more helpful to acknowledge that all this goes on without being hysterical or sensationalist about it.

But anyway. Yakuza 3 is pretty great. You should play it.

#oneaday Day 875: Kiryu Kazuma

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I’ve been playing a lot of the Yakuza series recently — I’m intending on playing them all back-to-back, and at the time of writing am probably slightly less than halfway through Yakuza 2.

I’d specifically like to talk about Yakuza 2 because the first Yakuza game was covered in a suitably comprehensive level of detail by the Squadron of Shame in this podcast:

The original Yakuza was great. It was another fine example of a “kitchen sink” game — a type of game which incorporates a wide variety of other experiences to produce one surprisingly coherent whole. In the case of Yakuza, it blends JRPG, brawler, dating sim, scavenger hunt and open-world adventure into one of the finest experiences of the PS2 era, marred only by long-ass loading times, a sometimes-clunky fighting engine and the questionable decision to use American voice actors (including some surprisingly big names like Eliza Dushku, Mark Hamill and Michael Madsen) swearing more than your average Tarantino movie to depict the unique idiosyncracies of the Japanese criminal underworld.

Yakuza 2, still on the PS2, fixes almost everything that was flawed about its predecessor. It’s still riddled with loading breaks, but they’re much shorter than in the first game. The American voice acting has been replaced by a much more authentic Japanese voice track — though the subtitles are well-localised and entertainingly written rather than being a literal translation. The fight sequences have been refined to be much more fluid, incorporating far fewer instances of protagonist Kazuma facing the wrong direction and unleashing a devastating combo onto thin air and far more situations where it’s possible to make use of the brutal (and darkly amusing) “heat” actions — smashing people’s faces into walls, battering them over the head with street furniture, sticking a beer crate on their head and then punching them repeatedly in the stomach to name just three.

For the uninitiated, the Yakuza series’ game flow is much more akin to a traditional JRPG than something like Grand Theft Auto, to which it got rather unfairly compared on its first appearance in the West. Kazuma wanders around the extremely well-realised fictional district of Kamurocho (based on Kabukicho in Tokyo) in an attempt to get to the bottom of whatever disaster is befalling him and his buddies in the organised crime world this time. Along the way, he’ll encounter a wide variety of non-essential activities to distract him, many of which are deep, involved quests in their own right, and the pursuit of which causes a game which can be completed in about 12 hours to balloon up to well over 40 hours in length.

By far the best thing about Yakuza is the sheer variety of things to do. It’s an evolution of the Shenmue series’ anal attention to detail, though rather than providing players with the ability to open every drawer in every house for no apparent reason, Yakuza provides players with a well-realised city district in which they can romance hostesses, get into street fights, collect lost locker keys, gamble at an illegal casino, get a “massage” of questionable morality, play slot machines, play a crane game and play baseball. Yakuza 2 adds even more to the mix, including a lengthy sequence where you have to run your own hostess club; another lengthy sequence where Kazuma becomes a host at a club in an attempt to unmask the manipulative, abusive owner; a full Mahjong simulation; a first-person fighting game; golf; “video booths” where Kazuma sometimes learns new abilities; and some other stuff I doubtless haven’t discovered yet. Oh, and Yakuza 2 also includes a whole other district almost as large as Kamurocho again, also packed full of things to do.

None of this stuff really feels like “filler” though, because it is clearly optional — the experience point rewards for completing any of these activities are generally laughable, though sometimes you get some cool items. Rather, the inclusion of all these activities helps the world of Yakuza to feel far more alive than almost any other game world I’ve ever encountered. Not only that, but it gives the player an incredibly strong understanding of Japanese culture, with a particular focus on the seedy underbelly of it — the side that Japan doesn’t like to talk about. It’s a game that draws you in with its interesting story and then encourages you to stay for the hostess bars, gambling dens and men with “FART” written on the back of their hoodies.

Of course, the great thing about the series is that if you do want to rush through them and just see the story, you’re not penalised for doing this in the slightest. I’d already played the first Yakuza back when we recorded the aforementioned podcast, but I just wanted to remind myself of what happened, so I raced through without doing any of the side missions and still had a satisfying experience. (In fact, one could argue that the story is a little more coherent if the game is played in this way, but I wouldn’t trade all the other stuff for anything.)

Yakuza 2, so far, then, is proving to be every bit as good as its predecessor and then some. I have no idea how long it’s going to take me to beat, but I’m enjoying taking my time with it so far. And once it’s done, I get to move into the HD age with Yakuza 3 and 4… and possibly the utterly bizarre Dead Souls after that. It’s quite a ride.