“Like an Immortal;” some closing thoughts on Gaiden

 IMENSE spoilers for Gomorra the Series

I suspect that there are more of these than I am aware. I am sure that stuff in the Marvel and Star Wars Universes count; probably you could find one in Faulkner, if you really wanted to keep score. 

The relevant category is “works that cover an event/time period that had already been covered by a different work in the franchise-narrative, and ends with a re-connection with the main narrative” and the two that I am interested in are “Like a Dragon: Gaiden” by the RGG guys and “The Immortal” film spin off from the TV show Gomorrah. This strikes me as, even if I am missing a bunch, a pretty unusual narrative choice to make, and the Yakuza games and Gomorra are my two favorite things about this century, with no obvious competitors besides the 2004 Detroit Pistons and some Takeshi Kitano movies. 

And, for bonus points, both “Gaiden” and “The Immortal” center on a protagonist type character that the narrative was trying to move away from, who most people in the fictional universe believe is dead.

You wouldn’t really say that ‘organized crime’ is a thing that Kiryu and Ciro have in common-- despite Kiryu’s stint as Tojo clan Chairman-- which underscores just how stark a contrast there is in levels of criminal behavior, or how barely criminal the Tojo clan is. The Tojo clan would probably go to war with anyone attempting to import cocaine into Japan on a Comora scale, out of a sense of obligation to the community-- which is why the Tojo clan is always broke and constantly on the verge of disaster. 

The Kiryu/Ciro contrast is interesting. They are both mythic figures of their respective criminal/cinematic traditions. They have a strong connection to cinema, even relative their fellow fictional characters. They are both walking embodiments of an insane ideal. Neither is, strictly speaking, even an attempt to portray a human. 

Kiryu’s girlfriend (he just went to Hawaii to give her a ring despite her having been dead since the FRIST GAME set in 2005) got herself a tattoo of a “pale flower” and the big thing here is the non-subtle point that Kiryu/whatever he represents loves the movie Pale Flower THAT MUCH. 

Ciro-- a blue boat cigarette smuggler working his way to the top of Neapolitan underworld-- frequently invokes the politzetti films of the 1970s, many staring Fabio Testi. 

As a child-- as shown in The Immortal film-- Ciro worked on the cigarette boats. He becomes “Ciro the Immortal” when he undergoes a mythic baptism by jumping off the boat he is on, just as it is about to be overtaken by the revenue police, forcing the police to rescue Ciro the child, allowing his gangster mentor to escape with the contraband. 

They are both orphans of organized crime:

Kiryu’s parents were killed by Shintaro Kazama, who raised Kiryu in an orphanage, inspired him as a positive father figure, and cared for Kiryu until he died taking a grenade blast or bullet for either him or Harkua near the end of the first game. Although Kazama is a murderer, he is constantly doing good things and protecting the people that he can; Kazama is a complex guy with both a toxic, violent past and strong desire and ability to improve the society he lives in. 

Ciro was orphaned, not by gang violence, but by the earth quake that struck Naples in 1980. However, the Comora stole most of the money that was raised for disaster assistance, bringing about the conditions that give rise, not just to Ciro, but, crucially, countless nihilistic youths who are NOT immortal and die with the changing seasons, flowing tides, of the Neapolitan underworld. 

The Yakuza orphaned Kiryu but then took ownership of him, supported him, and turned him into some kind of responsible human being. Ciro was orphaned by an act of god; the Cammora stole what support might have been available to Ciro and made sure that the world he was left in was a breeding ground for monsters.

Tale of the tape:

Unless they met in an RGG game, the fight between the Man who Will not Kill and the Man who Cannot Die would go down pretty much exactly like you think it would. Kiryu would die in a second because he is better than Ciro on exactly every single level. Indeed, Ciro is an abject failure at everything except for the ONE THING that Kiryu is bad at: being pure evil. Unfortunately, since they both operate in criminal circles, being pure evil is the only thing counts. 

Kiryu’s inability to kill remains intact after even some seriously weird contortions in Gaiden:

Kiryu is enlisted by some yakuza to beat the snot out of another yakuza, Nishtani III***, so Nishtani III will be out of commission...for some complicated stuff that all the other guys don’t want him around for. Kiryu, quite explicitly, signs up to administer a severe, but non-fatal, beating. 

This is, in my opinion, already shady, and if Nishtani III were to die, Kiryu would be looking at murder charges. In the real world, once you start wailing on a person like that, you can’t control weather they die or not, and ‘I didn’t mean to kill them just beat them severely’ cannot be a defense. 

More to the point, the gangsters who hired Kiryu to beat the guy up, were, pretty clearly, going to kill the guy after Kiryu beat him up-- because it was the only smart thing to do. Kiryu then gets all in a huff when they (seem to) do this, but it is frankly ridiculous that he did not see this coming, and his acting like the gangsters who hired him have abused his trust is pretty distasteful. They were GANGSTERS, Kiryu should know what he is getting into.

Anyway, in a twist, Nishtani III did not die when he should have, due to yakuza’s selling each other out, so Kiryu didn’t even have to worry about being ‘tricked’ into being an accomplice to murder, because it turned out the murder never happened. When it comes to never committing murder, it’s still better to be lucky than good. 

*** I have (had?) a longstanding beef about the lack of connection between Watase (head of the Omi Alliance for much of the latter games) and Nishtani I, one of the all time great characters from Yakuza 0. I always thought that Watase should have been a kinda conspicuous Nishtani I goon in 0; it would have tied things together nicely, I thought. 

Nishtani I is a great character, although he points at some less than great things about how RGG operates.

Mostly, Nishtani I is a Majima precursor; he meets Majima in 0 and Majima fairly consciously goes on to emulate him. The thing is, he is a little more sexual and violent than Majima because he is JUST a one game NPC and not even a reoccurring friend of the protagonist. So they cut more loose with Nishtani I than they do with Majima. 

Which is the thing: RGG LIKE, violent, crazy, slightly gay Yakuzas, but they can’t really own liking them, and they certainly can’t let being these characters be a central part of the player’s experience. These guys are there and they are fun to look at, and important, but at the end of the day, the central figure will always be neither homicidal nor homosexual; a hetronormative ‘good guy’ who never kills anyone. When they let you be Majima, they made him less gay and less violent. Nishatani I was where Majima’s gay/violent tendencies were displaced, the guy he learned them from, but he only incorporates then into his character when he is no longer under the player’s control.

But in 0, Nishtani I, the sexy, murderous Yakuza is someone Majima can look up to; by “Gaiden” Nishtani III has become a pure villain, an embodiment of what is wrong with the Yakuza; someone who Kiryu must beat into submission.