Yakuza Papers: observations on video games and film

 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...