Like A Dragon: Gaiden-- The Story So Far I: Spoilers, Kiryu, Publication

 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 in about one sitting. In the novels he had HUGE financial incentives to get you to buy the next installment. Dickens’ saw his literary output the way that Nino Brown saw his stash of crack: it was to be carefully distributed to a desperately addicted public, with no goal other than to maximize profit. Giving that sentimental, manipulative, beyond talented, bastard access to ‘cliff hangers’… 

The books were printed in England, and came to America by boat. And the apocryphal part is that you would have people standing on the peer screaming questions to the ship carrying the latest installment: ‘is Little Nell dead?’ and the ship’s crew would yell back answers. 

Weather or not this happened, the existence of the story speaks to the existence of a pre-spoiler literary culture. Weather or not Little Nell was dead, you were still going to buy the book; I don’t think that was ever a question. 

[‘team little Nell’ walking way from the peer in disgust, in their ‘Little Nell’ T-shirts, upon learning of her demise, never to patronize Dickens again, merely flame him in the 19^th century equivalent of...I can’t keep this going: ‘team little Nell’ NEVER EXISTED and EVERYONE bought the next chapter.]

What changed? Well, everything. But there is a lot more media now than there was, and therefore a bigger need for individual works to stand out. This gave rise to the ‘trick ending’--where the point of a work is that you don’t know how it ends. 

The Usual Suspects is I think a turning point. It’s one of the big films where you could have potentially just ruined it for someone by telling them the ending. When it first came out the revel was simply sublime-- and it took everyone who initially saw it by surprise.

But in the last fifteen years or so, nearly everyone who I have heard of watching the film for the first time guesses what is going on by about half way though.

And, fine, we all were a lot dummer in the ‘90s. I guess that’s fair. But I also think that the success of The Usual Suspects, the related ubiquity of the ‘trick ending,’ just changed how people watch stuff. You look for the trick now-- guessing it is increasingly the point.

And something is crossed up, because increasingly work commands interest, power, simply to the extent that you don’t know how it ends. The ‘age of spoilers’ can seem like it is providing cheap cover for writers because their work is interesting until it is finished. Even if you are pretty sure how something will play out, once you achieve sufficient determination not to have a work ‘spoiled,’ a writer can achieve originality simply by doing the next chapter. 

The utter absurdity of this moment was brought home when someone got mad at me for ‘spoiling’ Moby Dick. 1)that jamoke was NEVER going to read the book, so whatever, but 2) I don’t know exactly how I learned how Moby Dickended, but it certainly was not from reading Moby Dick. I read the book knowing how it ended; discovering the ending of Moby Dick is not the point of Moby Dick; all the other things about Moby Dick are the point.

Was this on that guy’s mind when he gave away the ending of Squid Game? Despite everything I just wrote, I was actually pissed to have Squid Game spoiled, to the point that I bailed on the last two episodes. [The best part was the silliness of the context in which it was spoiled. I texted and asked if in the end it turned out that the real prize was the strength that they discovered and the friendships they made playing the games (pretty clearly not a serious question, at least imo); and this dude responds with ‘no, this is how it ends…’ Was that revenge for Moby Dick?]

[Another good one was Anna Karinina- which I also don’t know how I learned the ending, but I did without reading the book. I was in a kind of ridiculous place to start with, because I had spent the winter break smoking weed and reading War and Peace, assuming that it would be required in Russian Lit II, and I would then be able to take a month off from doing homework. But it was Anna Karinina instead, (which I probably should have guessed, since it is A K is 300 pages shorter than W & P….fuckn pointless, imo, you’re doing this shit you should go for it). Anyway, on the first day of Anna Karinina the professor asks us for possible instances of foreshadowing and I go ‘oh I got this...they go to a train station and in the end she kills herself by getting hit by a train!’...and then I got a whole class of Russian Lit students pissed at me for giving away the ending of Anna Karinina. I guess it’s good we didn’t do War and Peace because once they figured out Napoleon lost, the book would have been ruined for them...]

Squid Game and Moby Dick are completely different types of thing on a bunch of levels. And, fuck it, Moby Dick is a better order of thing, at least partially because it does not rely on suspense or questions about how it ends to get you to read it. You read Moby Dick TO READ MOBY DICK. [I was gonna say you read Moby Dick because someone assigned it to you, but that’s actually pointless-- the internet will do you just fine if you need to convince someone you read it. In 2023, you read Moby Dick because you got it in your head that reading Moby Dick was a good idea]

Kiryu: Biography

-In the 1980s Kiryu joins (and briefly leaves) the Yakuza. 

-In 1995 he is sent to prison for ten years for killing his Yakuza patriarch (he was innocent), he is kicked out of the Yakuza,

-released in 2005 he is made 4^th Chairman of the Tojo Clan, and then retires from the Yakuza.

-spends a lot of time in the 2000s running an orphanage.

-goes to jail for...stuff.. after Yakuza 5. 

Yakuza 6:

-out of jail, he gets in an absurd situation (kind of even for him) that ends with him getting majorly on the shitlist of an insane, but dying, nationalist politician. [the fucking lunatic who wanted an extra Yamato]

-Kiryu fakes his own death...so that the politician’s organization will not be tempted to come after his family? (it doesn’t make a ton of sense)

Kasuraga’s game: 

it turns out that Kiryu is in some kind of contact with the some members of the Yakuza and working (obviously in a mysterious/incoherent manner) for whatever is left of the battleship nut job’s organization. 

Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

A game where you play as Kiryu set after Yakuza 6:

We will presumably get some answers to something. But I am sure as shit not counting on them making any kind of sense. 

Games:

I’ve never played the original Yakuza and Yakuza 2 on the PS2. But you can kind of tell that the combat was less involved and more raw than it would be latter.

Combat gets more involved in Yakuza 3-5, Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami (remake of the original game for a newer generation of consoles). You can craft and carry weapons, with increasingly involved systems. In Yakuza 4 and 5 you have to play as different characters who each use a slightly different fighting style. In Yakuza 0 you ‘only’ play as two characters, but each character has access to four different styles. Yakuza Kiwami is mostly assets they used in 0, and, although you can only be Kiryu, you still can use the four styles you had in the other game, and carry weapons.

In Yakuza 6 Kiryu is back to one style (‘back’ is technically wrong-- he only ever used one after about 2006-- but you hadn’t played as him post-2006 for a little while) and can’t carry weapons. It is very much a ‘back to the roots’ project. For Kiryu the character, but also for the gamers and developers: a starker experience where you just wonder around with one move set and beat people up with either your fists or stuff you find lying around. 

Yakuza Kiwami 2 is kind of a hybrid: Kiryu’s has one style, but it is flashier and more invincible than what he’s got in 6; and he can carry weapons, even though he cannot craft them.

[huh...am I gonna have to check out Kiwami 2 in order to verify the assessment of his fighting I just gave? Seems like the responsible thing to do, but idk how much time I could put into Kiwami 2 before Gaiden comes out….I’ve got Dead Island 2 plans]

Here, the Ryu-Ga-Gotaku guys take their games in two directions. One of these is Kasuga’s Game-- which is somehow more delightfully baroque and absurd than the series has ever been. Fighting styles aren’t a thing, because it’s a dang turn based game, with a seriously goofy ‘jobs’ system that determines the move-sets of, like, seven different people. Weapons and crafting are a huge part of the game, and it is generally just bonkers. We are going to see a follow up to this with Infinate Wealth, in which Kiryu will also be playable, sometime next year.

The other direction is the Judgment series, where Takuya Kimura, who used to be in a boy band, is a detective. These follow up, mostly, on the Yakuza 6 approach: even though you can switch styles, you can’t carry (and certainly not craft) weapons and the goal is to tell a down to earth (if really goofy) story where a lot of guys get beat up. 

Kimura is an interesting guy-- he has remained stupidly famous for something like thirty odd years. One thing about him is that he apparently has very aggressive management, and they don’t like to have him stay doing one thing for very long.

What apparently killed the Judgment games, though, were agreements about making versions for PC. I’ve never heard it spelled out, but my feeling is that the Kimura camp had the sense that if their guy was in a game on a PC it would be inviting people to use his image in all kinds of porn, and they were strongly opposed to that.

One wonders what would have happened to the Gaiden project if they had been able to bring Kimura back for another Judgment game. What I’ve heard about it sure makes it seem like it is going to be in the Yakuza 6/Judgment category, so they might not have done it at all, if Kimura was still doing Judgment; especially because they are promising to go full nutso in Infinite Wealth. 

Then the question is what is the long term plan for Ryu-ga-Gotaku’s low-key action games? Will there be ANOTHER Kiryu game? I wonder if ANYONE wants that, at this point… You gotta think that they are waiting for another Kimura to come along, some third guy they could make games about, with at most tangential connections to the Yakuza-verse.