Personally invested in a dorky gangster
Phew. Last week was my children's spring break, so... yeah. I'm back! This post originally began with how happy I was to find time to write during that period, and I was happy and I did write but, evidently, I didn't actually finish up. I do hope that you are feeling the spring vibes wherever you are. Or the autumn vibes I suppose if you are in the southern hemisphere.
Avowed is still a lot of fun but my game time the past week or two has become dominated by Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. I am typically a year or so behind in the Like A Dragon/Yakuza series, and in this case I actually bought the thing a couple of months ago but had struggled to get into it. There are reasons for that, and I will get into them, but the gimmick today - admittedly there isn't always a gimmick - is the idea of personal histories with game(s) (series). I go back a little bit with Yakuza; we moved back to Ireland when I was 14 after a few years in the Philippines and I acquired an interest in East and Southeast Asian history that, eventually, got me on the lane to researching, writing about, and teaching the history of China and Taiwan. That involved a pretty healthy curiosity about Japan, which was also pretty common among kids in the West in the 1990s. I came to games (beyond the sacred land of soccer management sims) in my early 20s and was soon living in Taiwan. So it was all Japan all the time; that is to say I had a lot of access to Japanese games and the world they came from. I remember that Xbox games were the only games I could get in English. Playstation and particularly Nintendo games tended to default to Japanese.
So after all that I started getting interested in the import scene. Might have been more interested if I could have afforded it. And before too long the Yakuza games loomed large. I knew little about them except they had a lot of mini-games and some kind of open(ish?) world, which in the early 2000s was becoming ubiquitous, all-conquering. But I never got all that far with Yakuza. I did buy the fourth game for the PS4 during a research trip to Tokyo, but it took a while to make the decision because the Ryu ga Gotoku title confused the living daylights out of me. I thought it must be some idiomatic phrase that Japanese people understand in reference to the actual real-life Yakuza, but it was simpler than that. The games were originally called Like A Dragon.
So for me, for quite a long time the Yakuza series was about what I wanted it to be or dreamed it might be more than anything else (I never did play that Like A Dragon game on PS4 for more than a few hours - I wanted to do it to improve my Japanese but it soon proved just too much). In reality the Yakuza series is not a Japanese-coded GTA open world game with less baggage. The English language title is pretty apt: it's a series of extensive, cinematic cut-scenes; it's saturated with melodrama and pathos; and it is particularly focused on stoic, sullen men who do the right thing even if there are questionable acts along the way. In other words there is a pretty clear line of inheritance from mid-century Japanese gangster movies to the Yakuza games.
And that makes sense, and that's okay. It makes it something you are shown and expected to enjoy a little more passively at times, sometimes for quite extended periods. And everything is BIG. Coming to these games late means that I'm interacting with the game mostly through recent protagonist Kasuga Ichiban more than long-time hero and dark brooding studmuffin Kazuma Kiryu.
But I like where I am with this game. It has a lot of its early 2000s PS2/PS3 era DNA hanging around; there are multiple female characters I don't think really NEED to be wearing those shirts, for example. But overall the revamp to make the game more RPG-like that came in with 2020's Yakuza: Like a Dragon continue to work really well. And listen, I Kiryu always did the right thing, more or less, but you've got to love Ichiban. The guy lives for doing the right thing, and also friendship. Not to mention that the standard "loyalty to the boss" trope, whether intentional or not, largely adds to the comedy.
If you haven't played one of these games and you've become increasingly lost as we've gone on, I will say this: the games demand quite a bit from you in terms of how long you can play at a time, and there are a LOT of Final Fantasy style random encounters. But, you can go to a karaoke bar and just play rhythm games. And no matter what, the main characters are all fully dedicated to the bit. It reminds of what for years were my best teaching eval comments: "you can tell he's really interested in what he's teaching." I always took this as a positive review.
Infinite Wealth is interesting in that it brings Kiryu back, letting him act very Kiryu-like, solemn and serious - while Ichiban runs around being a massive dork who just wants to help people and needs you to understand he believes in you. Maybe I'm getting older, or possibly even wiser, but the dork quotient becomes ever more important in my enjoyment of games. This is a game that peppers its liberally distributed and often generous dialogue-heavy cutscenes with plenty of pep-talks, where our heroes pick each other up. Then you run around the streets of Hawai'i for a while until some random dudes curse at you so you have every right morally and legally to beat the tar out of them.
The game's setting maybe deserves another post in the future. Kamurucho (Tokyo's Kabukicho) is so central to most of the games that other parts of Japan feel exotic. The game letting me know we were now dealing in US dollars felt particularly novel. Random hoodlums calling me out to fight now use sometimes pretty funny English swear words. The whole thing feels a little surreal. Some of the voice actors are native English speakers but when possible they clearly defaulted to Japanese actors who could get by in English. Also, after some early language barrier problems, the game kind of gives up and mostly assumes everyone in Hawai'i speaks fluent Japanese. It's a flub Western games do all the time and one I'm grateful for!
I'm now well into my second decade as an educator, and something has shifted recently. I find myself gravitating back to some of the cultural aspects that interested me more when I was younger. I never quite cracked Yakuza then and it feels good to be enjoying Like A Dragon now. I just need more time to watch Ichiban cheer his buddies on between fights.