6.27

Yakuza 6

I finished the bondage battle-dungeon, went back to Onomich, did a bunch of Snack New Gaudi stuff, got done w baseball, beat up some guys, skipped some of my least favorite Yuta cutscenes and am now back in Kamuchero, with dumb ass Yuta. Currently playing arcade games while thinking about saving him.

Snack New Gaudi

I stopped drinking in 2015. It had been my primary activity for most of the millennium, and I didn’t have much choice. 

I started playing Yakuza games in 2018. Sometimes it makes me miss bars, and sometimes I think they spend a lot of time glamorizing a thing that nearly killed me, but mostly the alcohol in the Yakuza series is fine, or even sort of amusing to me-- I like laughing at the single malt scotch nerds who show up in most games. 

[single malt scotch is to alcoholics what a Ferrari or something is to dangerous drivers. Yes, it is THAT much better than all that other shit, but if you are actually committed to the thing you can end up just as dead in a Mazda or Ford, and the expense and effort of the superior product actually makes you seem much less cool, imo]

A big reservation that I had with New Gaudi was that I didn’t remember the characters being very good-- in fact I remembered them as somewhere between aggravating and despicable-- but what I had forgotten was that that was the point. Everyone in New Gaudi is utterly horrible, in a banal middle class, self satisfied way. Kiryu becomes King of the Bar by engaging in conversations where he says nothing, with extreme self importance, over and over again. You get rewarded by coming up with responses that add nothing, whose virtue is adherence to a conversational genre that is about conformity rather than information. 

My read of the feel and significance of the Snack New Gaudi conversations is very much at the mercy of the translators, and it is entirely possible that there is something more substantive, or radically different, going on in Japanese. For one thing, there might be more to it when Kiryu’s multiple choice conversation options are in Japanese characters: there could be layers of stuff going on there-- potentially anything from zen koans to dick jokes-- and I just straight up do not know how Japanese characters work. 

But anyway, although I hate the people in New Gaudi, I actually liked messing around with them, because it reminded me of aspects of drinking that I absolutely do not miss-- being part of a self important, offensively middle class, community defined by a mindless hostility twords poorly defined ‘outsiders,’ consumed by a never-ending, pointless tug of war for meaningless power and status, against a background of chemical addiction. 

To read probably WAY to much into it, the ‘secret of Onomichi’--[not actually the secret of Onomichi-- see ‘secret of Onomichi’ post] the existence of which we are only starting to learn about at this moment in the narrative, but with which people who have played the game twice before are already familiar-- is that during WWII the Japanese actually committed even more war crimes to the point that there is a sizable conspiracy that exists around covering it up, into which our heroes have, naturally, stumbled. The physical proof of these war crimes is in Onomichi in the form of the biggest battleship of all time (built with slave labor, thus the war crime), completely hidden in, uh, a trap door in the ocean. 

Forgetting that this is actually about par for the course in the Yakuza-verse, the idea that there could be a GIANT FUCKING BATTLESHIP built in Onomichi and hidden there, for seventy years, is, on one level, ridiculous. The only way that would work is if everyone in Onomichi compartmentalized their knowledge of the slave-labor built battleship, removing it from the realm of consciousness. The thing though is that THAT--an entire town that was aware/unaware of a monument to war crimes that had happened there relatively recently-- could actually work extremely well (see 20th century, history of), and, once you assume the uncoerced and unconscious complicity of the patrons of Snack New Gaudi in the concealment Japanese war crimes, the plot of Yakuza 6 suddenly becomes disturbingly credible. 

The clue should have been the ‘drinking-with-Adolph-fucking-Eichman’ mini-game, because the corollary of the ‘banality of evil’ is the ‘evil of banality.’ When you are that smug, that consumed by middle class concerns, whinging about your children becoming adults, wrapped up in memories of high school romances, wrestling with weather or not technology is cool, you already might as well be a war criminal. It does not matter in ANY WAY if your day job is feeding oysters to satisfied customers or Jews to the machines of death, because, if your emotional and intellectual life is that shallow and that worthless, you have no right to ask anyone to believe that you would take a principled stand against killing Jews (or anyone else, or any other horror) if given the chance. The human race lost that benefit of the doubt decades, if not centuries, before I was born.

Anyway, its interesting when a country can give themselves BONUS WAR CRIMES, and then use their government’s to conspiracy to conceal these crimes as a motivator for a silly video game. America could absolutely do this as well: there could be (probably have been) games about us doing even worse stuff than we actually did in Vietnam (not that what we did in Vietnam was in any way insufficiently horrible-- I just have a lot of faith in video game maker’s ability to come up with horrible things) and a conspiracy to cover it up, and then a whole bunch of shooting and car chase levels. Same with a conspiracy to cover up crimes against Native Americans.

You have a character who knows about the crimes, and they use this knowledge to extort the government to their own ends. Someone who did such a thing using a fictional atrocity against Native Americans, or Vietnamese (or Japanese, for that matter) to extort the American government could come across as a relatively sympathetic person, depending on other aspects of their character and story.

It would be kind of different, I think, if you had a guy who knew about the EXTRA CONCENTRATION CAMP(s) and used it to extort favors from the West Germans until the extortionist reached super villain status in the late seventies. In addition to being a thing that probably actually happened (it is at least a billion times more credible than the Japanese having an extra ‘largest battleship of all time’), people might think of it as insensitive to the victims of the actual concentration camps to just create more concentration camps and more victims, as needed, to give characters a reason to hurt each other in video games. 

ORDER IN WHICH TO DO SOME THINGS IN YAKUZA 6:

- leave Kamuchero w 1) a pork Bento and a 2) a sushi set. You could also visit RIZIAP and get some protein (this is a good idea, just generally) but the guy who wants the protein is a pitcher and, as far as I can tell, not really worth a shit. Alternatively, you could try to forgo the ‘octopus pitcher’ (and all of the following advice) and level up your other pitchers instead, in which case you probably want to have the protein on hand ASAP.

-the Bento is for something else, you can get it latter, but you might as well have it. Gotta be pork, which you can only get from the store near the batting center. 

1) just do stuff in Onomichi as it happens, no need to get very into anything, just wait for clans to unlock. Recriute the randos for baseball, when the opportunity comes up. (give the one guy sushi, the other booze, and shell out the million yen for the one dude. The million yen is a lot so probably wait to pay it until after you have the best speargun (below), but do do it before you get very into baseball) 

2) once Clans shows up, do the Pocket Circuit Fighter’s sub story and recruit him for clans.

-Fighter’s power in clans is that he lets you put nearly your whole army on the field right away: once you get your leaders deployed as quickly as you can, the clan missions kind of take care of themselves. 

3) with Fighter in your line-up, beat the Onomichi Clan missions until the Bartender tells you about the blackmarket dealer. Go there and buy the ‘Ahab’s revenge’ spear gun.

4) use the speargun to kill the octopus (and the shark while you are at it, why not)-- you CAN get the octopus with a normal spear gun but that fucker will go right down against the over-powered black market spear gun. Killing the octopus will get you a pitcher, who as far as I can tell, is the only pitcher you need for the baseball game.

5) plug the Octopus pitcher, and the other guys you recruited, into the lineup. Play all the baseball games. As you play the baseball games your players will get better, allowing you to beat better teams. Just let them level up, and play a couple more practice levels if they loose a game. Particularly, if you leave Mr. Octopus in for nine innings most games, he will keep getting better and should carry you through it.

5a) [pretty much optional] take a break from baseball to do Snack New Guidi stuff and get three more players. You have to be in baseball before Snack New Gaudi shows up, which is annoying, bc it would be nice to have the guys there all along. Also, one of the players is yet another pitcher and, as far as I can tell, not worth anything.

6) this should let you beat the guys you need to beat to prevent them from tearing down the beloved baseball field, without ever using training tickets, or the players that you get from winning batting challenges in Kamuchero or the one dude from an awful sub story.