Yakuza Papers: observations on video games and film

  I got into a weird place with Gaiden-- more on that latter-- and then Persona 5 Tactica came out and I got into that, and then, rather than take on the last battle-- which looks to be a pain in the ass-- I fired up Persona 4 (which I’d never played) and, while Persona 4 is, at the risk of stating the obvious, no Persona 5 it sure is a hell of a sharper hit of the ol’ Persona 5 juice, and really put into focus this idea that I had been sort of ruminating on throughout my Persona 5 Tactica experience, which is that Atlus is a bunch of assholes who can get fucked.   What Tactica makes painfully obvious is that, since Persona 5 came out, Atlus has done enough (of certain kinds of) work – between Strikers, Dancing in the Starlight, and all the whistles and bells in Royal-- to have put out another actual damn game (weather it would follow Joker + the gang (Persona 5.5) or just do it with different folks (Persona 6)) but didn’t, not even because they figured out there was more mone...

 T here’s a couple technical things about Gaiden that are really NOT my bag. Probably the biggest is that you can’t craft or even carry weapons. This bothers me, not really because I want to   use   weapons, but because I want to be given weapons as a reward for doing things or (best case) take them from my defeated opponents.   The Iliad   is mostly about killing people and collecting their items.   Without weapons most of what you get for doing stuff is ‘gear’ but you can only equip one-to-four pieces of ‘gear’ at a time and ‘gear’ mostly boosts passive abilities. It’s hard to get a game’s worth of items out of that set-up. Gaiden does have a lot of other stuff you can acquire; it’s an impressive effort but I am not entirely sure that they overcome the lack of weapons. The other thing about not carrying weapons-- and I actually  like  this-- is that it forces you to win the damn fights, as opposed to grinding for whatever you need to get a DESTR...

  As an American, in 2023, it is really hard to know what to make of Japanese politics, especially as they relate to nationalism and the history of Imperial Japan. It’s not even hard: I am flying   fucking   blind.   The vitriol with which Americans treated the Japanese during World War II--it enabled the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-- remains a stain on the national character. The image of the “evil Jap” invoked during and after the conflict incurred a debt against decency that the country has yet to pay off. It’s something I feel bad about-- and that  seems  weird because the I wasn’t alive at the time, and half of my ancestors were in Germany, getting shot at by Americans. But that’s actually the direct source of my discomfort with Imperial Japan. My grandfather immigrated to the US in the fifties and no one ever really held it against him that he had taken up arms against his adopted country  not even ten years earlier. And the other h...

  Fine fuckn’ spoilers: (spoiler warning for   Anna Karinina,  and the Yakuza series)   There’s a ton of ‘spoilers.’ The intended ‘audience’ (lol) for this blog is people who have either played the Yakuza games already, or have no intention of playing the Yakuza games.  But it’s long past time for an examination of the concept of ‘spoilers’ and what this has done to media and story telling.  The story is as apocryphal as they get, but it illustrates a media landscape that was real, and actually relatively recent, in terms of the larger history of art: Charles Dickens’ big novels were published serially, so the expedience of reading them as they came out was probably more like watching  Game of Thrones  on HBO than reading the books by George RR Martin. And if you thought that prestige TV got a lot of milage out of maudlin emotion and cheap cliff hangers--- well, Tiny Tim, motherfuckers! And Christmas Carol is  short . It is meant to be read i...

  “Suppose you are thinking about a ‘plate of shrimp.’ Suddenly someone’ll say, like, 'plate' or 'shrimp' or 'plate of shrimp,' out of the blue, no explanation.” -Miller,   Repo Man So, a heavily astersiked addition to the list of stuff I have never finished-- probably because I am an asshole with too much I common with Imperialist author Rudyard Kipling, despite not meaning too-- is Futurama. One asterisk is that, at many points I actually HAVE watched every extant episode of Futurama. But the last time they revived it I stopped without watching the last episode and that was very much on purpose. HOWEVER, after I did my Kippling List, I realized that 1) Futurama probably belongs on the list AND 2) THERE IS MROE FUTURAMA. I have no idea if I am going to watch the episode that I had been not watching all these years or, actually how or when I am going to watch the new Futuramas. I am STRONGLY opposed to paying for fucking Hulu so I might wait and see if an opport...

I have been playing a fuckload of   Dead Island 2 . I like that son of a bitch, goddamit. Once, I tried to read this thing Pauline Kale wrote about how much cooler she was than people who disliked  Bonnie and Clyde  out of moral opposition to criminals. I made it through about half of it. She was on some shit about good art and discomfort-- I doubt she was wrong, but in this century neither  Bonnie and Clyde  nor Pauline Kale, come across as the work of serious people. A gamer married to a non-gamer, I sometimes forget that my partner can see the TV since they have generally tuned out whatever I’ve been playing for the last seven or eight years. So, I was pretty surprised when they noticed a sequence in  Dead Island 2  and were like “holly shit that’s violent.” Apparently they are not alone: a headline said that ‘the inernet was freaking out’ about  Dead Island 2’s  gore. I didn’t read the article; I was willing to ta...

  A-list actors as country bumpkins doing Karaoke. It’s a NICE bit of film making. Sort of makes me regret that Karaoke is not part of western culture such that Karaoke scenes can find their way into film this naturally. Sort of. Like, I am ENTIRELY on the fence about how much more Al-Pacino-playing-a-guy-doing-Karaoke the world needs. We could need a lot of it. Or there could be FAR too much already. It is extremely   hard to say . Koreans have gotten very GOOD at acting tho-- so even if the Karaoke scene would fit logically in an American setting, there is a very real chance that the actors would be unable to pull it off. Think about Pacino: it might be extremely fun, good ol’ Al, just acting his ass off; but it could be downright painful.  [And Pacino is an uncharacteristically good choice, actually: whatever Al did with the karaoke mike it would be SOMETHING. There’s a lot of American actors where it might be sort of ‘whatever’, which could be worse than pai...

I somewhat obviously went through the end game hoping that one of the clips of news reporters would at least mention that the building of the boat was potentially done under inhuman conditions and thus problematic, but that never happened. In the game the problem of the boat is that it implies corruption, because Japan is not supposed to have battleships, and thus the boat is proof of years of payoffs. The Chinese who built the boat were “refugees,” with some connection to a Triad, but their fate is never mentioned, and does not seem to matter to anyone. The important thing is that getting them there led a triad boss to know about the existence of the boat and thus be able to exert a certain degree of leverage over Yakuza.   At some point in the five years since I played the game I reached the conclusion that the problem with the boat was that a boat of that size could only have been built in the last days of WWII by slave labor, and thus the physical boat was proof of a war crime....

  Kim: The First Gamer? 1) he’s an adolescent boy 2) he is interested in adventure, over ideas, morals 3) he assumes different identities (notably artificially darkening his skin) 4) his world view is neither serious nor indifferent, in a way that would become far more common after the introduction of video games 5) He exists as, and within, a series of constructs as opposed to reality Yakuza 6 -Somya (more or less a bad guy, never met Kiryu before this game) references that it is known that Kiryu never kills-- in response to Kiryu having seemingly come up with a plan to kill some guys. Kiryu seems, at this moment, willing to go through w the homicides -so the Millenuim tower brawl, you, your allies, and the bad guys are all wearing the same fucking suite? It’s ridiculous. No idea who your character is for a lot of the fight. Holds you back less than one might think, tho.  -onomichi pudding, best power up in the game? Not that filling, reaasonable health, green purple exp? -ju...

The Sense of an Ending ...was the title of a book that, with the encouragement of my advisor, I claimed to have read in college, and even served a fairly central place in something that was roughly the equivalent of a thesis, and which they let me graduate inspite of.  My issues with endings are much older-- I probably really should have read that book-- the earliest one I can remember having been in reference to Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons” series-- these books about precious English children doing precious things in the precious English countryside-- which my mother read to me when I was a child, and which I loved beyond all reason.  I really don’t want to get to far lost in the weeds with the Arthur Ransome-- but, in 2023, the point of those books is that the kids are practicing to be colonialists, making games out of handling the logistics of transport and cruelty that are necessary if you want to run an Empire. However, the Empire was well on its way out by the...