A yak’ business
So, remember when I went on and on about how flawed Yakuza is? You should mentally follow that post with a jumpcut to me finishing the game with over 28 hours on the in-game clock. I ended up liking it quite a bit.
All of my previous criticisms still apply, plus a few more. The pauses when the game changes camera angles can be awfully long. The fighting is indeed fun, but it derives a lot of its challenge from being kind of obtuse: if you go for a lengthy combo, you’re stuck performing it even if the guy you’re trying to hit ducks out of the way, which means he’s going to hit you. The voice acting is often comically bad, although Mark Hamill does a good job as one of the crazier bad guys (typecasting?). Some of the side-quests (“sub-missions”) are fairly easy to screw up, and there are a couple of them where you can unwittingly do the wrong thing and prevent some future side-quests from appearing. I had to rely on a FAQ written for the Japanese version to avoid missing stuff, which was complicated by the fact that many of the characters, items, and streets have different names in the English version. (Big one: what he calls “River Styx” was officially translated as “Purgatory”.)
I think it’s actually those side quests that made me like the game so much. There are 72 total, and the resolution to most of them is “find some bad guys and punch them all in the face”, but usually there’s some interesting context to that, and it helps flesh out the culture of the game’s world (a few square blocks in the seedier part of Tokyo). I’m sure the game takes some great liberties with Japanese culture, but for what it is, it’s kind of fun to track down a pair of glasses for a salaryman who left work early to check out a strip club but forgot his. Why your character, ex-yakuza badass Kazuma Kiryu, would do all this stuff isn’t really explained. He comes off seeming more like a tough-but-nice beat cop.
There are a bunch of weird things about the game I’d like to list here. Some of them may make more sense if you live in a Japanese city or (more likely) have seen a lot of yakuza movies, but I’m willing to bet some don’t.
- Hostess clubs: this is apparently a real thing where you go to a bar and actually sit down with a hostess of your choice, chatting her up and paying handsomely for the experience. In the game you can make them like you more by answering their questions correctly and giving them presents and such, and eventually they’ll have sex with you. I doubt the veracity of that part.
- A bunch of homeless people live in a park-turned-tent city, the aforementioned “Purgatory” — that part isn’t so weird, but what’s weird is that underneath the park is a fairly opulent complex run by a guy named Kage who keeps watch on the entire city via hidden cameras and hosts a casino and UFC-type fights. That the homeless people live adjacent to Kage’s complex but don’t literally bum rush the place (you sure don’t see ‘em inside!) seems implausible to me.
- There’s a point in the game where you’re wandering around the city with Haruka, a plot-critical 9-year-old girl. By this point you’ve saved her life a couple times already, but the game puts her trust in you at “F”. To fix that, you wander around restaurants and shops and buy her food and snacks and presents. That’s already pretty weird, especially considering your character is apparently immediately recognizable as a yakuza to most people on the street. But I got my trust grade up to “S” (which for some reason is above “A”) by buying her enough food to make a whole classroom of 9-year-olds puke.
- That part is optional, but to finish the game I believe you have to go through a section where you take Haruka to an illegal underground dice game, where the following amazing dialogue happens:
Dealer: “You babysittin’ or something?”
Kazuma: “Take your daughter to work day.”
As for the main story, it’s allright. It’s a crime soap opera, basically. I know people say this about every movie set in a city, but the city itself was the most compelling character, to me. I became most aware of the storytelling’s shortcomings toward the end, when the bad yakuza start trying to kill Haruka (spoiler?) and Kazuma starts to lose his cool a bit. After leaving crime, he’s found a purpose in protecting the girl. Problem is, this made me think of a movie that already worked that angle really well.
