#8: Yakuza 0 (PS4)

I love Japan. It's where everything good and decent that I loved as a child came from. I remember when I was first learning how to read and staring at the cartridge to Super Mario Land for Game Boy and I saw "Made in Japan" written along the side of the cartridge sticker(). I asked my dad what this meant, as I had never seen this "Japan" word before. Nor had I ever really though of video games as being a product that is created somewhere.

"Japan is the country that Nintendo's from and that's where most of the video games you play come from," My dad replied.

It wasn't just video games, but anime I grew up on, like Dragon Ball Z, Cowboy Bebop, Pokemon, Digimon, the list goes on. Even things that weren't created in Japan certainly had a cultural influence from that country such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which was all I lived and breathed when I wasn't playing Nintendo games. A ninja turtle was the first Halloween costume I ever wore, or at least the first that was worth remembering. I literally spent all the money I made working at Taco Bell in high school on insanely overpriced anime DVDs at Suncoast and watching them over and over, staying up far too late and sleeping through most of my classes in high school. Nowadays, anime is not simply an underground secret here in America, it is everywhere. We live in a world now where Scarlett Johansson has played an anime character in a multi-million dollar film. It has permeated into american animation, directors like Steve Spielberg cite films like Castle of Cagliostro as an influence. Hayao Miyazaki is as close to a household name as one could expect of a director from another country. Anime-related gifs, memes, litter basically any part of the internet, for better or for worse. Even Star Wars: The Last Jedi has a scene that is literally straight out of a DBZ episode, where the villain fires a series of laser blasts in reckless anger only for the protagonist to emerge from the smoke and rubble, completely unscathed. Clearly, Rian Johnson is familiar with my boy, Vegeta.

In the 2000s, specifically in the Xbox 360/Playstation 3 era, we saw many Japanese games begin to retreat from what made them so unique and beloved in the first place. the video game industry was on the rise and video games were more expensive to produce than ever. It was also prohibitively expensive to create them and trying to create hits that resonated with both sides of the world was nearly a impossible feat. We began to see industry leaders and giants like Capcom and Konami begin to falter by selling us lackluster entries in their iconic series like Resident Evil, Bionic Commando, or Castlevania that were barely recognizable or outsourced to western developers. Most of these games fell flat, and seemed to completely miss the point on why people loved Japanese games in the first place. Combine this with the fact that culturally Japan was less inclined to buy a Playstation 3 over a Nintendo DS, or simply play games on their phones, It felt like for awhile that big budget Japanese video games were becoming a thing of the past.

The Yakuza series is somewhat emblematic of this downfall. The first entry of the series came to America in 2005 with a completely rewritten script dubbed by "major" Hollywood stars such as Michael Madsen, Eliza Dushku, and Mark Hamill. It was an attempt to throw an enormous localization budget and whitewash something that really didn't need any more than a subtitling job. The game bombed horribly upon release. It was also confoundingly marketed as "the japanese Grand Theft Auto" despite the series having next to nothing in common once you peel the surface away.

Yakuza 0 takes place largely within the same 4-5 city blocks of the Kamurocho red-light district in the year 1988. The gameplay is not comprised of gun fights, bedding prostitutes in the backseat of your car, or driving around listening to american pop music while terrorizing pedestrians. Yakuza 0 is the antithesis of a game like Grand Theft Auto, a game that celebrates the power of what video games can do, to allow you to be as bad as you want to be. There is never a time in GTA where the game forces you to run over pedestrians, it allows you the freedom to make Nico, Tommy, or CJ as ludonarratively dissonant from the main storyline of the game as you want. In Yakuza 0 though, it is not even possible to attack civillians, you portray the yakuza-with-a-heart-of-gold character that Kazama Kiryu is because the focus of this game isn't the freedom of choice. Every single moment of the game feels carefully constructed and pays absolute respect to it's storyline and characters. Much like the rigid structure of the yakuza families of this game, there are few times that you are allowed to step outside the character and do your own thing, and when you do, it's such a joy as generally all the free-roaming segments are filled with lighthearted campy activities such as managing a host club in an insanely dorky smartphone-esque management sim game. None of these activities betray the two protagonists and instead do so much to make them that much more likeable. It's a game where you could find yourself in the middle of a twenty minute conversation between rival yakuza families about adult shit like real estate, and then the next moment find yourself singing in a karaoke minigame, managing a host club, or lending a helping hand to a local band that needs advice on how to act tough, who, of course should they turn to but their friendly neighborhood yakuza? Kiryu feels more like the guardian of Kamurocho rather than the gangster trying to exploit it, and this is the central and most interesting theme of the game. It's a game that does not celebrate crime, but rather studies how crime can ruin lives and how it damages the neighborhood and people that it sometimes boasts to be protecting.

You can also play arcade perfect ports of Space Harrier and Outrun in a retro, 1980s-style arcade. You can eat a bunch of ramen, and I think there's even a fully functioning way to play Shogi? I barely even know what Shogi is. Yakuza 0 does not try to be anything else than what it is, and the series is no longer afraid of that fact. It is Japanese to it's core, and that is why it succeeds.