A Yakuza Retrospective: Creating a Classic
Kiryu Kazama’s Amazing Dragon Punch-venture.
Every society has an organized crime mythos. There’s something in our subconscious that draws us to stories about a bunch of bad people doing bad things, flaunting their living outside of what we consider “polite society.” There’s a sort of timelessness inherent in stories like “The Godfather” or “Goodfellas” that transcend the eras from which they come and constantly find new audiences with the generations that come after.
Many of the organizations that become the focus of these mythos have roots in organizations that act outside of the law to help those with whom the law has failed them. The roots for this can be found in the story of Robin Hood. The truth is usually that these organizations do much more harm than they do good, but still, we find great entertainment in these stories.
In Japan, these organizations are given the title of Yakuza and they are historically depicted as people in an expensive suit and tattoos covering their body. The Yakuza is the setting of a series of games developed by Sega that spans eight mainline entries and several offshoots. The Yakuza games are a wonderful exercise of game design that has a few strands of DNA from another Sega series Shenmue but has become its own monster.
Kazama Kiryu: The Dragon of Dojima
The main character of the bulk of the Yakuza games is one Kazama Kiryu, the baddest yakuza to ever yakuza. There is nothing that can’t be fixed with the proper application of his fists. Each game is a justification to have Kiryu punch a bunch of dudes and stop a war or something. This is a wild simplification, of course, but if the player can’t connect on this level of storytelling, chances are good that these games are going to be a bit of a tough sell.
Kiryu is every bit the trope of the strong, silent type at least in the beginning and it is a testament to the emotional investment that these games can garner in the player that there is as much emotional depth in this character over time. Through the course of seven games and twenty-one years of his life, each battle that Kiryu goes through propels both player and protagonist to the inevitable conclusion of each game.
The player is taken along a journey of a man who starts out going to prison for a murder committed by his blood brother, to becoming the fourth chairman of the Tojo Clan, to a simple owner of a small orphanage, eventually coming to terms with the violence that follows in his wake. Only a couple of games into the series, and he begins to be seen as an absolute legend in the world he inhabits and antagonists begin to mistakenly believe that they are the ones that can outsmart the legend. It’s a lot of character progression, that is on the level of a good novel series.
The relationships that develop over the course of these games are the bedrock of what makes the stories so special in these games, although near the end of the Kiryu Saga if a character hasn’t been in a previous game, they more than likely are just there to die eventually to up the stakes. It’s an unfortunate side effect of many long-term videogame series as plot dependent as these.
Overall, though, Kiryu Kazama deserves to be on the short list of the greatest video game protagonists of all time.
The Tokyo Nightlife
One of the earliest “life simulators” was 1999’s Shenume. In that series, the protagonist was able to take a break from the main thrust of the story and take do a series of innane things that served to immerse the player into the world as if they themselves were living some form of their real lives in the fictional world. That idea was then streamlined a bit and focused when making the Yakuza series.
Much of the game takes place in a fictional section of Tokyo’s red-light district, Kamurocho. It’s a district that is overrun with side activities that are bound to take up much of the players actual playtime with each title. In an individual play session, it is not unheard of to forsake the actual storyline and just spend an inordinate amount of time just hanging out.
A short list of the trouble that the player can engage in are various types of gambling, hanging out at a host club, baseball practice, and even an arcade with various versions of classic Sega arcade games (it’s always Virtua Fighter). That’s not including the (usually about 100) side missions in each game. Sometimes the side missions are wild.
There are other cities that are inhabited through the course of the series, and except for an excursion to Hiroshima in the sixth game, each of these cities are just as fully realized with side content as the original Kamurocho. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that a setting is another character in the story, but in this case each city is an actual living, breathing place.
This is what makes the Yakuza series such an immersive experience.
The Yakuza 9 to 5
A few of the later games (and the two Kiwami titles) have some sort of job minigames. These range from the awesome nightclub simulators to the rather terrible click menu and wait minigames. Each of these sections are a good way to get money, but really except for the prequel Yakuza 0 (which tied money made into the progression system) money tends to be close to useless in a majority of the series.
The Orphan and His Family
The overarching theme through much of the series is one of family, much less the ones we’re born into, but the ones that we gain throughout our lives. Kiryu starts the series as an orphan who joined the Yakuza to gain the respect of his “father” who is the patriarch of a Tojo Clan subsidiary. Along with him is his sworn blood brother Nishkiama, who eventually becomes overcome with jealousy while Kiryu is in prison for a murder that Nishkiama committed, becoming one of the antagonists of the first game.
This is juxtaposed with a chance meeting with a young girl Haruka who seemingly is another orphan, but turns out to be the daughter of the woman that Kiryu had a relationship with before he went to prison whom has subsequently disappeared. Haruka’s development is stark compared to the relatively flat development of Kiryu as she basically spends her adolescence during games 1–6. Through the course of the series, this father-daughter relationship becomes one of the major motivations for Kiryu who is constantly striving to keep Haruka both safe and relatively innocent.
One Man VS the World
The moment-to-moment action in every Yakuza entry is similar through every game but the newest entry (which is strangely a turn-based JRPG). For the most part, it’s not much different than a typical 3D beat-em-up. The player has access to a light attack, a finishing maneuver button, a block button, a dodge button, and a rudimentary lock-on button. The lock-on and block buttons are terrible, working sometimes (but not enough to be reliable) and the dodge takes some time to get used to.
Each mission has a fair number of enemies to fight, but just by walking around Kiryu will come across some thugs just looking for a fight. In the early game, these random battles add some excitement to the exploration, but a couple of hours these battles just become something to be avoided if possible. Luckily, if forced to fight some of these thugs, they go down in a few measly punches.
This is not to say that there is nothing that breaks up the monotony, though…
Feel the Heat
One of the most famous parts of the Yakuza series is the “Heat” system. During each battle Kiryu fills a meter and when this meter is filled, gains access to various Heat Actions. Even though many of these moves are highly dependent on positioning, weapon equipped, etc., the moves in question are so over the top that it adds a visual spectacle to each battle. Many of the easiest moves to pull off become stale after a while, but there are always enough of them that it never gets stale. Each one just hammers home how awesome of a fighter Kiryu is.
A couple of the games even tie this system into the various boss fights, where at a certain enemy health level gives Kiryu a scripted sequence of brutal fury. These sections give a each of these boss fights a different feel than typical minion fights and breaks up the button mashing monotony. It’s too bad that each of these are not unlocked from the beginning due to one of the weaker parts of the games…
Systems for Days
One of the negatives to the whole experience is the systems behind the scenes. Each game has some sort of “leveling” system and each one is a special kind of awful. For one of these systems to work, usually the player must feel as though they are getting more powerful. Each Yakuza game ties different things to this leveling system. The requisite health and attack power levels are there to unlock and they are easy to justify. The rest of the unlocks are things like Heat actions (lame), better performance at the minigames (eh, sure), and even more attack power for various specific gameplay situations like after drinking.
The problems come in when playing these games one right after another, where things that were unlocked from the beginning of the previous games (that the player has added into their playstyle) is now locked behind several layers of leveling up. This can have the unfortunate byproduct of causing the player to only rely on the most basic of actions with a few Heat Actions thrown in for good measure. Overall, the games can feel stuck in a rut after a couple of games until the story kicks in to draw the player back.
Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
Yakuza is a series that is a greater whole than the sum of its parts. If a player just focuses on the combat, each game is a mostly mediocre button masher. The minigames are quickly thrown together and not very deep. The job sections get old fast. The stories of each game are good to great, but probably not good enough especially near the end of the series to keep a player coming back. In the end, though each game comes together in just a way to keep it feeling worthwhile to keep going. The end of each game is strong enough to keep players moving to the next game with aplomb.
