Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Quick(step) and the Dead

 There’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 DESTROTONATOR and then beginning/ending every battle by going “say ‘hello’ to my little friend!”

Similarly- and I don’t like this AT ALL-- you have to be in the ‘fighting stance’ to use quickstep. A lot of the second half of this essay is about how I could kind of feel where the game was going before it got there-- and that happened because I have played RGG games far more than was reasonable or even sane. But-- prior to Gaiden-- I had been able to work my way stupidly, dangerously, deep into the RGG headspace essentially without EVER using the fighting stance. Since it is the game’s most powerful move, I have occasionally tried to land ‘tiger drops’-- but not often and not with any reliable success and these are the only times I had ever used the fighting stance-- outside of when they show you how to in a tutorial. 

The effect is that fights are a little more complicated than they have been before (not a lot) and I do think you put in a little work that you hadn’t had to in earlier games. This is ok. Prior to Gaiden, however, I had developed a pretty quickstep heavy style, and I want my old quickstep back, dammit. 

Fighting mechanics and the narrative world of the RGG games are different though. I’m not gonna say I’m any good at fighting mechanics; after quicksteps, the other key to my success is bentos (as in I eat them when I am about to die, and carry enough of them such that I am functionally unkillable) You really don’t need the ‘fighting stance’ to step right into the RGG chamber. 

I started trying to figure out if guys were Ryugi Goda LONG before the game gave your THREE (as of chapter four) extremely explicit chances to wonder if a guy was Ryuji Goda. Now, I had been playing Kiwami 2 immediately prior to Giaden, so I did have Ryuji Goda on the brain, but, also, I do think about Ryuji Goda a lot, just, like, in general. 

The first candidate for ‘could that possibly be a not-dead (although he sure seemed dead last time we saw him) Ryuji Goda’ is a giant guy in a Henya mask who showed up in the intro, but you didn’t fight him until a bit latter, giving you quite a bit of time-- during which you learn that the masked man belongs to the same criminal organization Goda had-- to speculate on who might be under that mask and contemplate how RGG feels about life and death in general. 

The conclusion I had reached was that, if they were going to bring Ryuji Goda back they would have done it already, and so the mask guy probably was not him. The idea that I had that I like (and still think would have been sweet) is if the masked man had been Ryuji Goda’s son. This seems less dumb when you consider that an elementary school Ryuji was a pain in the ASS to fight in Yakuza 0 (hell yeah I beat the shit out that elementary school kid with my baseball bat! It wasn’t even easy!) and son-of-Ryuji (barring an invitro fertilization scenario) would have to be at least 13 years-old. 

The guy turned out to be a new character named Shishido. In his mask, he seemed pretty evil; Kiryu certainly felt that way. Now, however, I am taking a Gaiden break because I am out partying with Shishido and so Gaiden is kind of on hold until I am in a place where I want to do some pretty focused mini-gaming or am resigned to getting my ass beat by various characters at karaoke.

Which brings us back to Ryuji, because Shishido is now doing an extremely important job, that Ryuji, along with a slew of others, had done in earlier games. Incidentally, this illustrates why “yakuza” was just a god awful (although possibly irresistible) thing to call the games in English. 

The job that Ryuji, Shishido, Kazama, and Kashiwagi, and a slew of other characters who were all close to Kriyu, but NOT KIRYU himself, had performed was to actually be a goddamn yakuza. 

Kiryu is not a yakuza; he is an improbable magic Batman-person who had been a yakuza and remains FRIENDS with a bunch of yakuza. The yakuza are crucial because 1) without his stupid friends, the magic Batman-person would have nothing to do and 2) they tie us to Yakuza cinema, the light that illuminates the post-modern world. 

Now, Kiryu has obviously been a yakuza. And there are times (the early parts of 0 and the first game) where you can control him while he is in the yakuza. You can also wonder around as Siagima for a bit before he gets re-expelled from the Tojo clan in Yakuza 5. But for the most part, you never control anyone while they are in the yakuza. My strong feeling is that this is because yakuza are, officially, in a way that there is no real equivalent for in Western society, ‘bad people’ and RGG refuses to let you play their games as a ‘bad person.’

Being friends with actual, dangerous yakuza gives Kiryu more gravitas than Batman, which is important when you run the constant risk of having less gravitas than Batman. 

RGG is certainly still exploring Kiryu’s relationship to these characters in Gaiden. Other than the periodic rounds of ‘could-that-guy-be-Ryuji?’ the big one is a pretty interesting sub-story that involves Kiryu’s yakuza mentor, Shintaro Kazama. 

Kazama is important. Kiryu’s admiration for him is one of his major motivators in life, but Kazama had also done a bunch of genuinely terrible things, such as murdering Kriyu’s parents. Kazama seems to have become a good man despite this, through various good and complicated deeds that he orchestrates. But the character never really added up; the player never quite saw enough of him to justify Kiryu’s admiration for him-- you had to take Kiryu’s word for it.

RGG, I think, acknowledged as much when they cast Takeshi Kitano to be Kazama for a new group of yakuza in Yakuza 6. With Kitano in the role (he murdered their parents and then raised the yakuza; he is a murdering scary person, but also a sort of a good guy, and mostly so cool that it hurts) you see more of the character during the relevant parts of the character’s narrative. And Kitano just gives you a level of detail about who he is and how he got there that you never see anything like from Kazama. 

In the Gaiden substory you meet another guy who had his parents murdered by Kazama and was raised in the Sunflower orphanage that Kazama ran because he seems to have killed enough people that he needed an orphanage for their kids. This guy, however, figured it out, and ran away from the orphanage. Even though this guy grew up to be completely evil, it does point to an explanation/angle of the Kiryu character that has always been there-- although it is rarely discussed.

The explanation is that Kiryu was far more effectively brainwashed by Kazama than he ever acknowledges, and, despite being the coolest person there could ever be, was always serving as an extension of the will of the creepy manipulator who killed his parents. Exactly the extent to which this is “true” does not really matter in terms of the story, or even a final assessment of anything-- but it is interesting that an interpretation of Kiryu that gives him much less agency, casting him as mainly a deluded victim, has always existed-- and has even been articulated by characters at different times (notably Kuze in Yakuza 0)

Anyway, a thing with the ‘actual yakuza’- characters in the RGG games is that, however RGG feels about them morally, they are pretty damn cool. This is, on one level, practical: Kiryu can’t be as cool as he needs to be, unless he is shown being cooler than people who are also cool. But it’s also just a truth: yakuza dress well, have awesome tattoos, are at least theoretically willing to throw down, and inspired some truly great movies. That is an awful LOT of your basic elements of coolness. If you want to be cooler than that, I think you have to be in a really good band. 

An immense thing about the yakuza characters, relative to Kiryu, is that they can kill and die.

One of your classic ‘actual yakuza’ was Kashiwagi, the scar-faced captain of the Kazama family, and one of Kiryu’s closer friends in the yakuza. I don’t think I can remember solid evidence of him killing someone, and the stuff he did do tended to be make the Kama family seem like an unusually well-dressed Elk’s club, but he was pretty clearly an ‘active member of a criminal organization’ in a way Kiryu was not, and he got completely shot to hell in Yakuza 3, and seemed quite extremely dead. 

However, he showed up running a bar (and helpfully turning vegetables I had grown in public parks and window boxes into health items. Thanks man, I still appreciate it) in Kasuraga’s game and was still doing it as of Lost Judgment. 

Kiryu has a meeting with someone at Kashiwagi’s bar, and, if you are far enough into this, the anticipation is one of the funnest parts of the game. Is it less awkward when you are both supposed to be dead? It puts in really sharp focus the two things that I desperately want from Gaiden: I want Kiryu to own his past, and I want the RGG guys to own the fact that the world they have created is fun as hell and completely goddamn ridiculous. [RGG does a lot of the latter in ‘Kasuraga’s game’ and seems pretty intent on doing more of it in ‘Infinite Wealth’ fwiw] Where I am in Gaiden neither has been ruled out, but they haven’t happened yet, either. 

They sure take a cheap way out of the potential Kashiwagi reunion: Kashiwagi had called out with a bad back, and wasn’t there. But you kinda knew that was going to happen (I had guessed ‘sick’ instead of ‘back’) and the anticipation, the possibility, was so much fun that I didn’t even really hold the let down against them. I really don’t know how many people in the history of characters and storytelling have been this good: they hint, they dangle possibilities, make your imagination do all the actual work, and then screw you, and it’s still all a really good time. For all the urge to criticize Gaiden for not delivering the things I want, you have to take a step back and realize that they are working at a level that very few people have ever achieved at all. 

That said? There is a pattern in Gaiden and I don’t like it. You see it again with the way they introduce the pocket circuit mini game. Long before the game shows up, you start seeing pocket circuit parts in places where you can get things [pocket circuit is entirely acquiring items, so it helps a lot with the lack of weapons] and for those of us who lost our minds playing RGG games this is a sure sign that pocket circuit would be playable and it was a clear invitation to think about a reunion with Pocket Circuit Fighter, one of the greatest characters in the series. That was actually interesting: could Kiryu lie about his identity to Pocket Circuit Fighter? Fighter’s vulnerability, his sadness, would have made that quite a moment, however it went down. On some level you want that to be what makes Kiryu break his promise to the secret government guys he works for-- his anonymity destroyed by a joyous reunion with one of video-games saddest men. But the opposite could also have been fantastic, Kiryu turns his back on Fighter, breaks the man’s heart, just a bunch of weird emotions from bizarre places, all surrounding a mini-game that is comically un-fun and barely functional. 

But when you get to the mini-game it’s actually something to do in a bar, run by a hipster chick, because now the people who were nerds in elementary school have money. It’s very Gaiden, very our world, of course: the weird garbage (video-games) that kept a generation going when we were young and alone is now retro-cool, and people who are younger and better looking are running around all over it. Good for them, I guess? I actually really do hope they find a way to enjoy it.

Because they sure are not playing MY pocket circiut. MY pocket circuit was wild and untamed such that the mere sight of a frame for sale in an Ebusiu pawn shop, got me setting the story of a seven year old video-game to a Beatles tune, thus: 

I was just ex-Yakuza- like we say a ‘family man’--

then I got out jail and was chairman of the Tojo Clan.

But those guys are all a bunch of violent jerks

So I quite the mob

and I wanna to be a Pocket Circuit Fighter

Pocket ...Cirrrrrrrrrciit……. Fiiiiiighter

If your car ain’t fast you can get new wheels

--the guy at Don Quixote gives you quite a deal.

There’s tires, bumpers and frames:

you’ll need a lot of parts

if you wanna to be a Pocket Circuit Fighter

Pocket ...Cirrrrrrrrrciit……. Fiiiiiighter

Gaiden doesn't make me feel like that, but it also knows I felt that way once, and it wants me to think about it. It’s probably telling me that, even if things can still be wonderful and weird, I can never go back there; however reluctantly, towards whatever strange destination, we all must move forward.

And that is, also, very Gaiden: it’s kind of more correct than it is interesting.