Developer(s): Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
Publisher: SEGA
Platform: Playstation 4, Xbox One, PC
Hours played: 170 hours across the three games
I’m a bit late to the party with this one. YouTube is flooded with content creators singing the praises of this once-niche series and heralding its revitalization for western audiences. Thanks to stellar localisations and the development studio remastering and/or porting the entire mainline series to modern platforms, more people than ever before are experiencing the contagious energy of Ryu Ga Gotoku’s Yakuza. While I don’t want to repeat what countless others have said regarding this series, it would be remiss of me to downplay just how much I am loving it (I’ve just finished Yakuza Kiwami 2). There are few games that have such an infectious sense of style, such a cathartic and expressive gameplay loop, have torn my emotions in so many opposing directions, and have got me so invested in every single character and detail in its world, as Yakuza. To accomplish this over the span of a series, one which often asks you to sink hundreds of hours into sometimes incredibly repetitive tasks, is nothing short of legendary. As I slowly gnaw away at this mammoth series, I want to pin down why. Why am I falling more deeply in love with this franchise with every instalment? Why am I shouting from the rooftops about this whacky Japanese import from the publisher of Sonic the Hedgehog? Why have I spent hours on those rigged claw machines?
The thing that holds Yakuza’s chaos of features together, and likely what draws new players into the series, is its visual and written humour. I was one of those people. Humour is what reconciles the absurdities player witness in the chronicles of Kiryu with the seriousness of the crime drama main plot, but there’s something deeper happening here. Baked into its DNA, harmonizing story and gameplay, is the comedy of life. Yakuza embraces player interactivity and ludonarrative dissonance and manages to artfully weave it into a celebration of the absurdities of ‘the human experience’. While the series features heavy elements of tragedy, the prevailing message is pure comedy: the assurance that ‘life goes on’.
Kazuma Kiryu
A theory of comedy arose in the 18th century, based on the musings of philosophers from Immanuel Kant and James Beattie to Arthur Schopenhauer and Søren Kierkegaard, called the Incongruity Theory. It says that laughter, humour, comedy is a reaction to “the perception of something incongruous—something that violates our mental patterns and expectations”. What else are we supposed to experience when we are thrust into the shoes of Kazuma Kiryu, 3rd Chairman of the Tojo Clan and later find out that he kills it at karaoke?
This is the joke that new players are going to pick up on first. Kiryu is a legendary mobster, but the player can steer him away from his more pressing concerns to play darts at a moment’s notice. He’s unrealistically strong in combat, singlehandedly chewing through hundreds of mobsters on the regular and nary emerging with a scratch. His legendary status as the Dragon of Dojima exceeds his years, weapons barely dent his chiseled exterior, and in his early career he did some terrible things for even worse people. On paper, Kiryu doesn’t look like the kind of guy you’d want to empathise with. The more time you spend with him, however, the more the directives of the beat-em-up combat, the crime drama main story, the social satire side stories, and the quirky minigames align. Kiryu, with his unwavering moral code and persistence in the face of adversity, is the rugged glue that holds these disparate elements together.
As Kiryu moves through the fictional district of Kamurocho between main story beats, he’s moving through a perpetual Carnival where one minute sees him diffusing bombs planted around the city by foreign mafia and the next sees him teaching an inexperienced dominatrix how to improve at her craft – and he treats both scenarios with equal care and attention. From his physique to the way he dresses, it’s obvious to everyone on the street that Kiryu is ex-yakuza, but he also has this undeniable magnetism, chameleon-like sociability, and curiosity that makes him privy to the lamentations of the needy and the forlorn of Tokyo. Conversely, his enemies in both the main story and sidequests tend to be cocky, self-important arseholes: high-ranking yakuza exploiting those below them, punks intimidating the homeless and businesspeople alike, sexual predators, power-hungry politicians, and bent coppers. The punchline of many sidequests turns out to be quite literal – Kiryu will solve a dispute with his fists to send loan sharks packing – but a surprising number of them end with Kiryu comforting the quest giver, dispensing some wisdom, or telling them to follow their dreams. He possesses an infectious sensitivity that both catches us off-guard and is entirely consistent with his drive to do the right thing. There is a gameplay incentive to doing these quests (lots of them net you useful combat or healing items, sellables, or experience points), but ask any Yakuza fan and they will say that the true reward of playing these sidequests is seeing the crazy scenarios and writing they yield. This is where Yakuza shines, in its ability to contextualise what would otherwise be a string of street fights and harmonise the whacky sidequests with the predominantly serious story where they would otherwise be dissonant, and tying back to our main character.
What makes Kiryu such an effective avatar is that he treats life like the player does, as a game. Little animations preceding a minigame, such as how speed lines appear and Kiryu thrusts his head back as he starts a game of Outrun or how he pictures himself in full rockstar getup when he belts out a karaoke classic, add charming flourishes to his character. I mean, who doesn’t mutter “let’s go” to themselves as they stand up to take a game-deciding round in bowling? Oh, that’s just me? And is it so farfetched that Kiryu should act this way? When every waking moment could see a vengeful opposing clan member drag your life and everyone you love back into the crossfire, surely you would enjoy every moment of respite spent with those loved ones, too. There’s a chapter towards the end of Yakuza Kiwami 2 where the player is given time to explore the open districts with Haruka, the orphan girl Kiryu looks after, while she spouts ‘requests’ to get a certain score in golf, take her to a local restaurant, or win her a stuffed toy at the arcade. Some of these objectives are incredibly unbalanced and they don’t scale in difficulty at all but I found myself fulfilling Haruka’s every whim because I knew that the final showdown was just around the corner. Haruka and Kiryu have been through so much at this point that this final tour of the districts is a touching change of pace and a reminder that these characters have lives beyond the conspiracies of the main series plots they’re embroiled in.
Scott Strichart, localization producer for Yakuza’s 0, Kiwami, and 6, told Gamasutra,“The goal is to make these dudes likable, and aspirational. In Japan, part of what Kiryu’s arc represents to a Japanese player is the ability to change things. The ability to make an impact, and to decide that something is right, and follow the path to make things right. Despite how hard it is.” In my opinion, the localization team not only succeeded, but created one of the most endearing video game protagonists ever conceived. Presumably, there are a ton of nuances surrounding identity and the ability to make a difference in society regardless of our heritage that I, as a non-Japanese player, cannot fully appreciate. All the same, it’s a powerful message and Kiryu is the perfect vessel to communicate it. His legendary criminal past means that he is inevitably challenged by those hungry to rise to the top. He faces them with honour, fighting to protect others rather than to seize power, and when he gets the chance, he is the dancing queen.
Street Comedy
But where are my manners? I’m failing to mention the second biggest star in this saga: the district of Kamurocho itself. Setting most of the games in the same place runs the risk of becoming stale and homogenous. In practice, you become so intimately familiar with these much-trodden streets that it allows you to appreciate the subtle differences between each iteration. It’s in these details that the art design and the denizens of Kamurocho produce the impression of a city in constant flux, one that is bigger than the underworld Kiryu keeps getting dragged into.
There’s no getting around the fact that as a westerner, part of the appeal of Kamurocho is being able to inhabit some Japanese idiosyncrasies and light satire for a while. Still, I’m struck by the extent to which even the seemingly ‘out-there’ substories have a precedent in Japanese culture and history. A quest in Yakuza 0 sees Kiryu try to reclaim the hottest new video game, Arakure Quest III, from a bunch of muggers who originally stole it from a boy after he waited hours in line to get it. Since Yakuza 0 is set in the 80’s, this is an obvious reference to the popularity of the Dragon Quest series in Japan, whose long lines and muggings around the release of Dragon Quest III became so prolific that it is now law that Dragon Quest games cannot be released on school days. Another example from 0 sees Majima help a guy out to get his revolutionary bag phone working. After bringing him a battery, the bag has placed such a strain on the man’s shoulders that he needs a health item before you can use it. Clearly, the Nokia brick has got nothing on this beast. The arcade games in each game reflect the year in which the game is set. Parks inhabited by the homeless in the 80’s economic bubble become quaint French restaurants and shopping malls in the early 2000’s. Even the peeing minigame in Yakuza Kiwami 2 exists in parts of Japan – and Kiryu, naturally, takes this game very seriously. Scott Strichart refers to this “inside look at things like the nightlife industry” as part of Yakuza’s “virtual tourism”, even for Japanese players who don’t interact with these circles themselves. When terms do need to be explained “we can also flip the script and make it a little educational. […T]he consequences of getting that wrong are low; you might get a different item at the end of the substory. But regardless of what you pick, at least there’s an explanation that makes it clear okay, this is a weird Japanese term to describe either a manly face or a soft, feminine face.” Each of these games’ hubs are time capsules of Japanese history, from their minigames to their substories, and their visual design. Kiryu is not just lurching between tones within games, trying to decide what he wants from life, but the times are changing around him across the whole series.
And Kamurocho goes beyond “virtual tourism” in how so many sidequests feed into each other, giving the impression of a living, breathing city. Helping people with their queries in the street will often lead to them joining your business later, be it the real-estate empire and cabaret club of Yakuza 0 or the construction company strategy game of Kiwami 2. Help the Michael Jackson parody Miracle Johnson with his latest film shooting and he will later challenge you to a dance battle. Win that and he and his Steven Spielberg parody agent will come into real estate with you. Win a chicken in bowling to promote it to senior staff in your real estate business. Help an up-and-coming director shoot material for his yakuza film and he will return the favour by fighting landsharks at the construction company. Some of these sidestories even span multiple games. The Pocket Circuit Fighter is a recurring character tied to a recurring minigame in the series. In Yakuza 0, he simply commentates the Scalextric-esque races with extreme fervour. In Yakuza Kiwami, the kids he coached in 0 are now grown-ups and Kiryu must find the Fighter’s successor to coach the next generation of racers. The cabaret club management game introduced in Yakuza 0 became a fan favourite and returned in Yakuza Kiwami 2. The latter game acknowledges this when Majima takes over as the commentator and recognizes the new manager as the star hostess from the former.These winks and knods are an outstanding reward for longtime players, acknowledging the absurd side content as canon and getting them invested in the world.
These surprises are not only nice additional rewards for tasks you might have completed hours ago, but consolidate the notion that Yakuza’s side content is more than a bit on the side, a comic distraction. These civilians can be just as, if not more, compelling than the high-ranking yakuza who drive the main plot. They are just as much a part of Kamurocho’s beating heart as the big bad of the game. Walking these same streets, seeing how technology and culture evolves, sometimes bumping into grown-up versions of side characters from the previous games, like the aging Kiryu, I am reminded that, despite the dark machinations of organized crime, justice systems, and general haters, life goes on.
Player expression and the gamification of life
Yakuza prides itself on giving players the freedom to access its side content regardless of whether it makes sense in the context of the story. In general, the series is very transparent about any points of no return, severely limiting gameplay-related headaches. It also prides itself on offering a dizzying amount of content. The result is an intoxicating degree of freedom and potential for self-expression and player-driven comedy.
Opening the completion list in any Yakuza game reveals that there are rewards for doing just about anything. Playing a little longer reveals that participation in all this side material is by no means obligatory to complete the story. The rewards are nice, but there’s no need to bang your head against a wall trying to learn how to play mahjong if you don’t want to. More often than not, I find myself creating my own gameplay loops based on a mixture of role-playing as Kiryu, the tonal shifts of the story, and just sheer desire to kick back and play some baseball – sometimes with some hilarious results. In this way, knowing that you can chill out at the arcade whenever you feel like means there’s always a comic relief when the main story takes a dark turn. The sheer number of things you can do in these games, and the patented series’ humour they’re encoded in, means you’re bound to create personal anecdotes that will make you chuckle. There’s a simple joy to fly-kicking some punks in the street, then dusting yourself off, swaggering into a restaurant, and ordering a ramen with some gamey feedback for your efforts (eating restores health and there are rewards for trying everything on a menu). On the other hand, when you’ve really taken a beating and you need a lot of food to refill Kiryu’s beefy health bar, you might decide to order fifty hamburgers and devour them in seconds. These player-generated comic moments stick with me longer than any accomplishment from filling out an objective checklist.
And this is without even touching on the combat, which offers its own bevy of choices. You might decide early on that you want to become a weapon master, collecting one of every kind of weapon in the game. You might decide that you’re going to fight exclusively with golf clubs or make a pact with yourself not to use that bowling ball in your pocket until the final boss. The style-switching mechanics of Yakuza 0, and later Kiwami, allow you to customise your Kiryu even further. Do you want to specialise in the quick jabs, bobbing, and weaving inspired by street boxing? Bob and weave, my friend. Do you want to throw a dude into a dude and beat that dude with another dude? Go nuts. Do you want to power through everything with super armour and bulldoze a group of thugs? Unleash the beast. Or maybe you want to dabble in all the styles and switch frequently on the fly like you’re playing Devil May Cry and then chuck a cheeky taunt in there for good measure. Earlier in this article, I argued that Kiryu treats life as a game, and this leaks into the combat, too. Taking a closer look, it’s essentially brutal, visceral slapstick. The outcomes of fights are neither serious nor permanent. Whether you slam them into a car door or skewer them with a katana, enemies will get up after the fact and skulk away clutching their stomachs. There’s no option to attack people in the street, even if they are hostile thugs. They have to approach you, the pre-battle cutscene needs to play (often with one of the enemies throwing the first punch), and only then can Kiryu fight back. The flashy Dragon Ballesque effects that punctuate important fights are almost like the combat equivalent of those speed lines at the arcade, or Kiryu imagining himself in full 80’s rock garb when singing ‘JUDGEMENT’ at the bar. They come off as metaphorical rather than what actually happens in the fights, as if the combatants are radiating with the power imbued within their trademark tattoos. Again, this is another case of style and self-expression winning out over realism, despite the animation being so weighty and the setting so grounded.
In offering all this freedom, Yakuza can be overwhelming and it does end up sacrificing a steady difficulty curve to achieve it(after all, with so many interrelated systems and minigames, not all of them are going to be winners). In theory, you can exhaust a lot of the sidequests before playing the story’s second chapter and end up being ridiculously overpowered until the endgame. On the flipside, some of my most memorable moments playing Yakuza have been times when I thought myself overpowered only to be humbled by some random challenger on the street. My most tense battle in the series thus far was the final fight in Majima’s scenario in Yakuza 0. Expending all my health items, I was forced to observe my opponent’s movements and choose my openings carefully. Maybe I should have poured more resources into beefing up Majima as I had done with Kiryu, who proceeded to steamroll the final boss of his campaign, but then I would have been denied the satisfaction of overcoming these odds. It almost feels fitting that Yakuza’s difficulty can be a bit all over the place, can have you dancing over your foes one minute and getting surprised by a crazy boss the next. That’s life, at least in Yakuza’s language. Even three games in, legacy skill only gets me so far when I boot up the next instalment. You can prepare for these challenges (and break a lot of them in half, if you feel like it), but the game’s always going to throw another surprise your way, be it beatdowns, baseball, or blackjack.
The mountain of gamified simulation elements and its expressive combat make Yakuza a playground of comedy possibilities. Add a difficulty curve that can be both erratic and exploitable and you have an addictive gameplay loop that deals out delights and dolor in equal doses. Much like the ups and downs of life, the joys of Yakuza’s world range from immediately gratifying (seeing Kiryu defend a Michael Jackson parody from zombie actors as he moonwalks down the street) to deceptively complex (finally, finally beating that guy in a fight with no healing whatsoever because you forgot to save before initiating it).
Conclusion
Comedy, in Yakuza, is the natural relief response to the amount of trauma these characters go through. Spending most of their time moving in circles where performative intimidation and respect are paramount to survival, the protagonists of Yakuza treasure those moments where the absurdity of life sneaks through the cracks and surprises us. Every moment Kiryu and the player spend with a concerned NPC makes us stronger for when we do have to face the challenges of the criminal underworld (both in gameplay and moral terms). These moments remind us that this city is worth saving, life is worth protecting, with baseball bats, tea, and tonfa.
Discovering the wholesome heart of this series beneath its veneer of violence, seemingly random sense of humour, and daunting amounts of content remains one of the fondest moments of my gaming life, and I’m not even halfway towards catching up to the series’ present! So what does the present look like for Yakuza? This year saw the series’ combat shift away from a 3D beat-‘em-up to an RPG captained by a completely original protagonist. As sad as I’ll be to see Kiryu go, the fact that Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio continues to grow and showcase new ideas perfectly captures the games’ spirit that life goes on.
Many series localisers and fans have expressed that the western title of the series, Yakuza, is a bit of a misnomer, considering how the plot fixates on Kiryu’s attempts to live a normal life while constantly getting roped back into the clan, rather than glorifying organized crime. This is a valid point and one I find myself leaning towards the deeper I delve into this franchise. For the positive energy that it exudes, the Japanese title, *Ryu Ga Gotoku, seems a lot more appropriate. When you prove you’re the strongest but use those powers for good. When you’ve been to hell and back but continue to fight for what’s right. When the world is full of darkness but that never stops you from appreciating the light. When you can do all that with a smile on your face, that’s what it truly means to be *Like a Dragon.
These games contain multitudes. No one article I could write on this series could comprehensively analyse what makes it so special to so many. This won’t be the last time we drop in on the Dragon of Dojima. Mark my words, Kiryu-chan!