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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #39: Walk Like A Yakuza

Adi Tantimedh is a writer and reader. I'm not sure in which order.

I've been thinking about tourism in video games lately. I have a mild fascination with games that try to replicate actual cities and towns, usually in open sandboxes where you get to wander around the settings to your heart's content, even the reality of wading through the distances on the TV screen can be tedious in the extreme. While I admire the vastness of the fictional New York in GRAND THEFT AUTO IV, I've never played the game past the first couple of hours. The Playstation 2 British gangster game THE GETAWAY boasted of replicated the real layout of 90s London, which might add a certain frisson to those of us who lived there, toying with the notion of nicking motors and generally causing mayhem in places like Covent Garden. ASSASSIN'S CREED 2 lets you take a tour of the meticulously researched and recreated landmarks of Renaissance Italy. You can read up on their histories even as you shank or throw bad guys off the top of them. I suspect that the Italian Tourist Board would much prefer it if we actually went over there to spend our lovely money, though. With the upcoming Russian shooter game METRO 2033, we're going to get to walk around the Moscow Underground System after a nuclear holocaust occurs above-ground with the added attraction of being threatened by radioactive mutants and neo-Nazis. Console tourism. You're not only going on a tour to expand your horizons, you get to play at being a badass too. That's a major market.

Role-playing tourism is best exemplified by the Playstation game series YAKUZA, especially when the third game went on sale last week and I downloaded the free demo on the PS3. On the surface, it looks like another button-mashing fighting game, where you push buttons to make the hero fight his two-fisted way through brawls with gangs of rival gangsters. You also get to pick up virtually any object – baseball bats, trash cans, chairs, lamps, golf clubs – and hit them with it. The series is huge in Japan because it's draws on the national pop culture myth of playing the gangster with a heart of gold and experiencing his full range of his lifestyle, from the everyday and mundane to the big blow-ups and assassinations. The interesting thing for a movie guy like me is how directly the game series draws its plots and imagery from about fifty years of Yakuza movie conventions. The original Japanese title RYU GA GOTOKU means "Like a Dragon", and expresses perfectly the masculine myth of Japanese pop culture. The hero, Kazuma Kiriyu, is the archetypal hero from hundreds of Yakuza movies and stories: the gangster with the heart of gold. Stoical, principled, loyal to his friends and a protector of the underdog, he goes through the gamut of Yakuza arcs: from coming out of jail and discovering the corruption of the gangster hierarchy, discovering the betrayal of rivals, facing psychotic, backstabbing colleagues, protecting children and childhood sweethearts, all the way to wanting to retire from the life and go straight, only to be pulled back to fight again when his friends and loved ones are threatened. The English dubbing of the first game by the likes of Mark Hamill and Eliza Dushku rather robs the game of one of its charms, which is the replication of the melodramatic style of Japanese acting in Yakuza movies. The preserved original Japanese dialogue (with English subtitles) of the second and third games let you hear more of the pitch and nuance of the melodrama, which is a very specific form of acting in Japan. Seeing a few Yakuza movies gives the player an additional layer of frisson when playing the games. Anyone who doesn't know the Yakuza genre or myth as defined by the movies will end up with some basic working knowledge. This is how Japan likes to see and celebrate itself, warts and all, when not presenting a respectable picture to foreigners. This is why the game is huge in Japan. It has spin-off merchandising, a spin-off game that re-imagines the characters as figures from the story of legendary samurai Miyamoto Musashi like a kind of Elseworlds story, and even as the third game is finally out in the West nearly two years after its original release, a fourth game is about to be released in Japan this Spring. It even has the obligatory live action movie adaptation directed by Miike Takeshi, which also came out on DVD this month in the US to coincide with the third game's release.

What interests me about the YAKUZA games is their peek into the Japanese dream-life. This is the more grown-up version of the aboriginal dreamtime found in the images and themes of the manga and anime-infused fantasy role-playing games that dominate Japanese video games like in the FINAL FANTASY series. Juvenile Japanese stories in manga, anime and games are generally emo and preoccupied with coming-of-age and forging one's identity and sense of morality. RYU GA GOTOKU is not about identity crisis – its hero is resolute in who he is, and it's about holding onto his identity and honour in an increasingly dishonourable and unjust world. RYU GA GOTOKU (it's fun to type the original Japanese title) is a distillation of the Japanese male's fantasy of the Manly man: tough and two-fisted, honourable but with a heart of gold. Salt-of-the-Earth friend of working people, but misunderstood and a perpetual outlaw. It is about being MANLY! Manly drinking! Manly golfing! Manly bowling! But most of all, MANLY FIGHTING! Manly gambling! Manly hanging out with hot bar hostesses! Manly hitting people in the face with golf clubs! It's really very Asian.

That's not to say the series doesn't have a sense of humour. Throughout all three games, there are minigames that are at once absurd and completely true to life, whether it's participating in a TV game show about Japanese history, Kiriyu trying to remain unflappable at the discovery of the sexual perversity of salarymen when he invades a love motel, playing Mahjong to win cash, learning new fighting moves by taking a picture on his mobile phone and blogging about it, and even grooming an inexperienced girl to become a good bar hostess. Several of the minigames were cut out of the Western port of Yakuza 3, namely the hostess-grooming, mahjong and game show minigames, and another one where the player has to work the controller frantically to keep Kiriyu from getting too… excited when photos of hot bar hostesses are flashed before him. Sega, who publish the game for the PS3, have said that they were cut from the Western release because they felt Westerners would not get them, and deadlines were looming for the release, and hardcore fans have bitched about Sega releasing an incomplete game for full price. Considering the first two games didn't sell well in the West and only acquired a cult following, the third game is likely to be a test to see if whether the franchise can have any legs here, but the cutting of the minigames suggests a tentativeness and timidity on Sega's part. There's speculation that removal of the hostess minigames was to stave off possible objections from parents and Christian groups hung up about sex, despite no one in Japan batting an eye-lash over them. Let's face it, as tongue-in-cheek as they might be, the grooming minigame is hard to defend, some of the girls look creepily young, and Japan is not exactly a hotbed of progressive feminist thought. That there was no publicity or marketing campaign beyond the games press also suggests no real money or effort was put into publicizing YAKUZA 3's release. Despite all this, advance copies were sent to the mainstream press, and places like Britain's Daily Mail and the Guardian have given it good reviews, with no comment on the missing content.

What the hardcore gamers are complaining about isn't just about being sold an incomplete game, but of being deprived of a complete cultural – rather than mere gaming – experience. How are gamers in the West supposed to get the full experience of what it is to be MANLY the Japanese way? What all fans, all geeks, want is completeness, and they will turn on you if they find out you don't give it to them.

Meanwhile, I'm tempted to slap THE GETAWAY on a PS2 and see if I can drive out east to find my friend Juliet's house in East Ham. All from the comfort of my living room.

Yakuza 3 came out on the Playstation 3 last week. Yakuza 1 and 2 are out of print but can be found secondhand.

Reading dragon tattoos at lookitmoves@ gmail.com

©Adisakdi Tantimedh

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