Yakuza

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.

Yeah Judgment was a good time, apart from the aforementioned Keihin mobster nuisance events. Fantastic levels of "smiling judge nods and says 'I'm going to allow this'" wackiness in the courtroom scenes

This new one apparently has large parts set in a high school, so my prediction is that Yagami-san goes undercover...as the coolest schoolboy ever

My post up there really belongs in the first response hall of shame. Wish I could delete that

Ok, so this year:

Like a Dragon: Ishin

This is a remade version of the same game that was released Japan-only in 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ixRs8MX4aQ

Like a Dragon: Gaiden - The Man Who Erased His Name
(Terrible title)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8gvTDCJb0E

A new game with Kiryu, not with turn based combat.

And next year is the sequel to Like A Dragon (8?) with dual protagonists Kiryu and Kasuga.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJhqN7R_oAg

Yeah Judgment was a good time, apart from the aforementioned Keihin mobster nuisance events. Fantastic levels of "smiling judge nods and says 'I'm going to allow this'" wackiness in the courtroom scenes

This new one apparently has large parts set in a high school, so my prediction is that Yagami-san goes undercover...as the coolest schoolboy ever

yakuza games are a good time

love the turn-based combat on Like a Dragon but i'm looking forward to (eventually) getting round to Ishin and Gaiden too

bonus stage
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/world/asia/japan-yakuza.html

there's an episode of furuhata ninzaburo where a yakuza baseball team is a plot point

Infinite Wealth trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q1HRYrO1Gw

God I love this goofy series, real silent film comedy energy to this cutscene.

Worried that I'll miss the walking around Japanese streets aspect but I guess I've never been to Hawaii so...

Ahhh I loved Okinawa in Y3 and I love new locations!

ohmygod i love the RPG mechanic i want it now

I've never played any of these games, and think I only have one of them (Yakuza 0?), but despite reading reviews and watching reviews and watching clips and reading descriptions, I still have no clue what any of these many, many games actually are or are about. Like, are they fighting games? Turn-based? Exploration? RPG? Is this DLC? Stand-alone game? Is it one series or two different series? More? Just the same series with a different name? Are they serialized? Are they supposed to be serious? Comedy? Just campy? All of the above, it seems. It's wild.

Yakuza in general are basically action adventure RPGs; you fight a lot of guys and there's a big epic main story, but really so much of the charm is in the sidequests and minigames. A big part of the appeal is just simulating walking around the streets of sundry Japanese cities, as said before.

This is the second in the Like A Dragon sub-franchise, which uses turn based combat as opposed to the main series which does not. It's somewhat confusing but by the standards of JRPGs it's hardly the worst offender.

The main stories are hyper complex, hyper dramatic in the tradition of yakuza cinema, but a lot of the substories are explicitly comedic.

xp please don’t start playing this series

Why not? Or are you just getting personal (for some reason)?

Well, I'd certainly say it's not a decision to be taken lightly. Once you're in, you have to live by the code, no matter what the cost. Karamucho can chew you up and spit you out, I've seen it happen a million times. Also it feels really bad when you fail at karaoke.

Every day I wake up and think "maybe I'll reinstall Yakuza 0 and actually finish it" and maybe today is the day I'll actually do it.

You should definitely do this

Yakuza 0 is the best one

"Like a Dragon" actually is the main series now rather than a spinoff, the name change was just to bring it more in line with what it's always been called in Japan

At least, that's their story right now. Maybe the "Kiryu is James Bond" spinoff will become the undisputed main event of the series

Haha, well I guess it's mostly semantics, but I think since they're games with a different protagonist and combat system than the original series entries and the former protagonist and mechanics are still featured in upcoming games I think referring to them as a spin-off is the less confusing explanation for a newbie no matter what Ryu Ga Gotoku says.

There is a new Kiryu game coming out soon right?!

So the original “Yakuza” in English, Like A Dragon in Japan is the Kiryu series. Like A Dragon in English (no idea what it’s called in Japanese, might just have a subtitle) with Ichiban and the rpg mechanics. The Judgement series is the same type of gameplay as the Kiryu series, all of these are set in the same universe.

ETA: November! And going back to Osaka!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Dragon_Gaiden

0 was my first and I’ll always love it the most for the following reasons:

- the dual protagonists
- the absolute thrill of ripping through a building beating up a load of guys while the soundtrack blasts this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WKq57ibDXc
- the disco minigame which frankly I am amazing at
- cabaret club!!!
- just being like, ok I know you’re in grave danger or whatever but it’s time for me to hang out in a bar playing drunk darts and then go play Outrun at the arcade for two hours
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhe7rcDUTeI
- the tonal shifts from grave to brutal to ludicrous and none of it feels wrong, it just is
- https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErRoPAmW4AEO2Qw?format=jpg&name=small

Otm

There has never been better song to crack skulls to than Reign

Also the cast of mocapped Yakuza movie guys who play the various grizzled bosses are fantastic

Tired: off-grid secret agent Kiryu
Wired: calm ponytail Majima

xp that sewer brawl is one of my favourite fights in the whole series

KkyuzEHHHHHHHH

Don’t forget the king
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/AnnualCaringBat-size_restricted.gif

Loves a round of golf