Yakuza

Speaking of free dlc, make sure you’re seeing the clown for all the free packs

Just met the clown.

The remake collection is out and I’m only replaying 3 and my God, the fishing is still fucking hard!

Ok, this may be just me last night but I totally fell asleep starting Yakuza 0 and an hour in. SLOW. SLOOOOOW.

definitely slow. It's kind of a game for hanging out in, more than like plowing through, it seems like.

Go to a Karaoke bar! Play Mahjong!

I am trying to get past a lot of this dialogue to get more into the story but now we can't find the game we saved last night. OMG I was so bad at karaoke.

Yakuza doesn't autosave, you have to manually do it (at a telephone booth) (remember those?).

yeah we found it. Thank G. We have had guests for a week (that just left) so am now cramming in a bunch of playing.

I appreciate the sideburns in this game.

Playing the hd remakes for PS4 rn. 3 was a total treat with all the added back content, but the mahjong was harder than in all the other games! Now on 4 and taking my time with mini games and completion til I get bored. Definitely a good self-isolation investment.

The soundtracks are apparently all on Spotify? Idk if this is true of them all cos I’m too excited that Reign! is on there!

https://open.spotify.com/track/5pVXt1JRoB6QVitDGmsn3l?si=BEVt71T1TJuPfFoIKd1sxg

Honestly incredible when they introduce this in-game.

Also the karaoke songs lolllll including classic Venus ripoff Queen of Passion

https://open.spotify.com/track/6IG120oWSCkGH6UVStALwR?si=qeujj7-sSUaahuHihqRSFg

and my personal favourite, Koi no Disco Queen:

https://open.spotify.com/track/3talAeqbqkl8sOSc6hT3TI?si=k123w-tCTsG2TIi-RiAv9A

right. do I start with zero or kiwami or one of the others?

Zero is chronologically the first one!

0 is both the best game and the best entry point

i love hanging out in the world of yakuza 0 but i wish the combat didn't feel so unsatisfying

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K90yf6y4bDE

bought yakuza 0 lads

about to peacock some moms

Delighted for you, tell us how you find it

I watched the entirety of Yakuza 0 being streamed in Giant Bomb videos recently. Less time consuming than replaying the whole damn thing and it's so story heavy that it works out pretty well. Fucking love this series so much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNmM9pivqQ0

anyone fucking with the new jrpg one?

it looks good, i'll get to it eventually. i'm like a year and a half behind on new jrpgs

xp I’m playing this! I’ve never played an RPG of any stripe before so, you know, interesting. Ichiban is a great character, I love him. The beginning is very cutscene heavy but I’m just starting to unlock stuff now. It’s hard to earn money at the start, so it helps if you can win at mahjong. A thing I am not sure is widespread in other games series is how sympathetic the series generally is towards homeless people - in this, you’re taken in by a homeless man, who is a member of your party and who you can bond with and level up, and you help protect sex workers from Japanese ultra conservatives!. It’s a very interesting story. Yokohama is great too, it’s by far the biggest city you have to play in in any of the series and it’s gorgeously done.

Played Judgment last month and it's good, but the main character is just obnoxiously smart and good at everything; into Y7 now and it's so nice to just slip into the shoes of an absolute dumbass

The game's apparent attempts to grapple with some of the series' more problematic recurring themes are definitely interesting. Had a bit of a grim lol at Nanba's righteous monologue about the no-win situation the homeless are in being followed up by him joining your party and disabling enemies with noxious homeless guy burps

Had some mid jaw-agape moments involving ad*lt b*bies and some enemies dancing around wearing full bin bags

Oh this series loves the adult baby takeovers, they were in 2/Kiwami 2 as well

But i don’t know that the series was ever dodgy wrt depiction of homeless people? It definitely depicts homelessness as prevalent and an incredibly difficult grinding existence, and homeless characters are depicted largely sympathetically

Had a bit of a grim lol at Nanba's righteous monologue about the no-win situation the homeless are in being followed up by him joining your party and disabling enemies with noxious homeless guy burps

Kiwami 2 is on Humble Choice this month so I'll pencil in another adult baby takeover for 2021

Nice, I really liked K2, it’s up there with 0 for me

Is it worth slogging through K1? I got about ten hours in last year but the age of the underlying game really shows with that one

i dont think its that long, you were probably halfway or more unless you were plinking around on side content a lot

Yeah Kiwami isn’t long, K2 is on the new engine as well and looks and plays a lot better

i just want the karaoke to open up, i found a place in yokohama i'm fairly sure it's that but it's shut down atm

I just found the Mario Kart style minigame!

Haha, it’s INCREDIBLE. Hurtling around the streets at high speed with rocket launchers? Yes.

Yagami-san! A bunch of those Keihin gang guys just showed up and started wailing on people outta nowhere! You gotta do something!

Spoilers for late game Like A Dragon

After the above post, I didn’t play the game again until two weeks ago. That was me, not the game; I had a lot of irl stuff going on at the time and I needed all my time to be depressed. Then after Christmas I picked up Hades and fell in love with it. I’m not quite done with that either but I intended to come back to Like A Dragon and I love it.

My God. What is this game?

So I’ve never played a JRPG before and this was a lot to come to terms with learning curve wise but once I got used to it, I was sold. Because of this, the dynamic is different and fascinatingly so; the fight scenes are never alone, you are always helped by your party (apart from a couple of times where numbers are limited for plot reasons), and when you defeat enemies you all celebrate. It’s weirdly wholesome and cheerful compared to Kiryu just, like, glaring at them or spitting out an insult.

The party is now seven strong and I laughed when I went to do karaoke and had to pay in for seven people. (Even though Joon-gi doesn’t have a song, oh WHATEVER). I love when the party is walking around the streets and conversations start when they see an interesting building or sign or something, and the dinner table talk is really nice too, you can feel the love for the seven characters and it’s great.

The plot itself is predictably dramatic but even for a Yakuza game, this Went Places. I wish I knew literally anything about Japanese politics so I could work out if they are commenting on real people, but that aside it feels very much like the culmination of a lot of themes the series has been building up to. Especially 6.

Ichiban, oh God. I love that guy so much. His scene at the park with Arakawa hurt me cos I knew what was coming next. I can’t believe I had no interest in this character when they initially announced him - he’s warm, energetic, caring and all that, very different from Kiryu in his way but also... not.

I hit my first with this series when Majima and Saejima appeared and I had to fight them - SEVEN FUCKING TIMES it took with a load of grinding in between to beat them. Their fight theme is incredible though.

And oh, I was so happy to see Kiryu.

More thoughts when I have more time, but ultimately an incredible game that I can’t recommend strongly enough.

bookmarked once i work the courage back up to dive into this bananas game

Yeah, I ended up going through that entire fighting building in Sottenbori to level up because I kept getting my ass handed to me by Majima. One trick I picked up online that ended up helping a lot was to get the dude poisoned early on. The huge fight afterwards when they announce the disbandment of the Omni alliance was a bit of a letdown after that - kinda prefer the Kingdom Hearts 2 approach where the enemies may be super weak but you do get that rush of defeating like twenty of them.

Totally agreed on Ichiban, he is such a sweetheart. Yakuza games were alway going to be good for lockdown because of the illusion of getting to walk along the streets of Japan, here you get the extra bonus of hanging out with all your buddies as well.

I've long thought that some intrepid youtuber should do a series on Yakuza analysed through the lens of Japanese politics, there's so much political intrigue in there. You could have chapters on real life attitudes towards organized crime, the real estate bubble of the 80's, tensions with the US, etc.

I have often toyed with taking a picture of Joon-gi and Zhao and captioning it "immigrants - we get the job done", a meme for literally no one.

Neither of them are immigrants iirc, they are second or third gen. I love how huge Yokohama is and it takes so much time to wander around, love doing it for the reasons you said and also you can pick up tons of material pretty easily. I’m grinding up for the last fight now but I’m also trying to finish off minigames and substories etc.

CAN WE JUST

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5c/ed/21/5ced21f8281c913e14c252ba53f84c09.png

Look at this adorable idiot throwing out a bin of crusty tissues
https://64.media.tumblr.com/3397ea570ca7d6fcd10ea5b073d2c963/d5edf8473845e989-ab/s500x750/49201b448e9708d6879443ee68944b192678de0d.gifv

Yeah, they are second gen, but (again a video series on this would be useful) I think the game views them as very much Korean and Chinese because Japan doesn't view immigration in the same melting pot manner that the West (fools itself it supposedly) does. The visibility of immigrant communities in these games is something I'd love to understand better, there's also the Masayoshi Tanimura storyline in 4.

Yeah true, and ofc Y0 and the second game dip into this as well. I’m sure that they’ve used the character being secretly Chinese/Korean plot a few times as well. I found it really interesting how they will talk about food and the Chinese/Korean way of doing things, it’s very different from what has gone before.

This is the best summon btw
https://media2.giphy.com/media/5YugAJvmcaNvIauK0I/giphy-downsized-large.gif

is it just me or does Zhao periodically go "eye of the tiger!" during battles?

I haven’t noticed this, but Nanba says something that sounds like “Tom Turkey!”

Oh I finished this btw! Fair warning if you share a console with someone else, as I do, because the end cutscenes are over an hour long and largely unskippable. This isn’t a problem in any sense except in terms of me having said “I’m just about finished, come down and you can have the ps4.” But yeah, they really went hard in that last bit, phew.

Grinding for trophies now, am not nearly levelled up enough to try True Ultimate Millennium Tower or whatever it is.

https://www.polygon.com/22424987/yakuza-rpg-turn-based-sequels-judgment-action

Not sure about this, the turn based combat was a fun novelty and made sense because of Ichiban's Dragon Quest obsession but I miss the crazy moves of previous entries.

Here's hoping this Judgement doesn't interrupt the action every 5 minutes for you to either run around defeating random gangster bosses or be reprimanded for being a coward.

ichiban is continuing as the main character, no? so it makes sense to keep that for his games

i never finished judgment but was enjoying it other than the frequent stealth/tailing segments

I loved Judgement and I am so happy to hear there’s a sequel!

I got the platinum trophy on Like A Dragon today, have no problem with the mainline series continuing in that direction.