Yakuza Papers: observations on video games and film

  “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...

 [7.24] So, and I question my use of the word ‘feminist’ but am just too damn lazy to think of and take a stand over anything else, if you find a ‘feminist’ critic, ask them to list their twenty or so least favorite tropes for female characters on index cards, put these cards in a hat, and then select one at random, the chances are overwhelming that you will have drawn one that comes up at some point in the Yakuza series, probably specifically in reference to Haruka, and-- more likely than not-- in Yakuza 6. Previously-- because she was mostly per-purbesebnt-- they hadn’t been able to use any reductionist portrayals of female characters related to motherhood on her, and they check off a lot of those boxes in “Song of Life,” while also bringing back some classics, and having her in a comma for most of the game. It’s honestly a fuckn laundry list of lazy things writers do to minimize and trivialize women.  I don’t feel like I need to go through that. Most of it is obvious and I ...

 [7.18] I was playing Ishin! before I started this Yakuza 6 thing. Specifically, I was re-playing it on “Ishin!” a preposterously difficult setting and trying to grind for exp like a maniac to compensate-- it wasn’t especially working out, but I’m not sure I won’t go back to it. Um, I really like Ishin!, like, a lot. Two larger points: 1: The Ryu-Ga Gotku guys are the sources for most of my information about, certainly Japan, but, probably also the human condition generally at this point and 2: for being the same general type of game, and made by the same people, Ishin! and “Song of Life” are really impressively different. What’s wonderful, just absolutely lovely, is the way they use fighting mechanics as a dimension in story telling. In “Song of life,” where your character is an aging ex-Yakuza, you are a kind of violent rag doll, blown about by the winds of the brawl, opportunistically corralling your opponents and picking them off one by one. It’s a recognizable form of action s...

7.6  … . ok after 5 movies, two of which I watched twice (Outrage Coda, Violent Cop) it’s time for Kitano to get...beat. I think I know his moves now. Yakuza 6 - it took them 7 games, 2 samurai spin offs, and zombie zpinoff, but they finally, kinda, sorta, a little bit sold you on a guy who could kick Takeshi Kitano’s ass wait, the battleship is just proof that a kinda crooked Japanese nationalist politician payed off a sketchy ship building/yakuza dude (w government money, for a shitload of years) bc he wanted a secret battleship? I just imagined the slave labor thing? Welp… I’m certainly racist. Those dudes built the battleship with poor Chinese refugees, which is how Chinese gangsters know about it bc helping poor refugees is what Chinese gangsters do? Conceivably, I am not the only racist at work here.  -and now TK tells just a beautiful Yakuza story, the first and only Yakuza story: TK was a punk ass kid in bombed out Hiroshima, who joined the Yakuza when a Patriarch took...

 These are, um, not coherent, I don't think. I'm just putting them here cause it's the stuff I wrote at about this time, as part of whatever this project is or was: 7.1 VIOLENT COP  2 mins- homeless man killed WITH A BIKE AS BLUNT INSTRUMENT -camera almost entirely on victim, handheld, moving, perps (teenage ‘homeless hunters’) are off camera, just impact, voices TK’s jacket is beautiful.  - charges into kid’s house, kicks shit out of him, tells him to come to police station and confess, man do we hate that kid --cammea stays on TK administering the beating, like it did w the homeless man taking it -kids throw bottles at boat off of bridge, run away, anarchy, TK emerges from same shot,  bear like walk, opposite direction as kids, jaunty music - is this his first film? Unreal how good he is, but otoh he is doing a TON of work w camera in a way new directors do. It’s not bad. You honestly wish that directors would keep on having that much fun w it as the...

6.29  When I have turned on 6, I’m still just killing time waiting to go back to Big Lo and get on with things, trying to figure out if I want to do my mini-Takeshi Kitano film festival before or after I play his chunk of the game.   For all of this, and for sometime before, and for the foreseeable future, some joker has been hanging out of a window on Tenuchi street yelling something that I would phoneticize as approximately “Tas-ka-tay,” which subtitles tell me means “help me.” I am in no hurry to advance this guy’s sub story and drag him into the window because 1) he’s an asshole and 2) his constant subtitled screaming was a big step in my learning a few Japanese words-- so I am going to let him literally hang for a while longer. The deal is that you can’t advance his story until you look at him in “first person mode” and I figured out that “tas-ka-tay” probably means something like ‘help me’-- because I was hearing it with the subs whenever I walked on Tenuchi st...