Overworld examines how one game or series establishes a unique sense of place.
I’ve never been to Japan. But having played the Yakuza franchise, I can say that…I still have no semblance of what it’s like to be in Japan. But I do have a strong sense of a picture of an urban Japan, of what the leaders at Amusement Vision feel the cities must be like for a haunted, violent criminal. It’s an affecting place, one the hangs an ever-present melancholy over the game.
It’s not so much a visual thing, though the graphics do combine technology-limited photorealism with broad splashes of the anime aesthetic for a look that is recognizably Japanese. It’s also not just about the meaningless street violence, of which there is plenty—that exists more for the sake of story progression, though it naturally colors the experience of the environment as well.
But it’s more about the little things, what Yakuza will and will not let you do as you interact with the world, that gives its urban Japan its lonely, oppressive feel. Let’s look at what you can do: you can eat, partially to heal up, but mostly for the experience of eating while facing an empty chair. You can drink, for seemingly no reason, again with experience (and a chatty bartender) being the sole incentive. You can play video games, in an arcade, alone. You can watch videos, some of them dirty, in a small room alone. You can pay a young lady to be your friend. You can be paid to be somebody else’s friend.
Now let’s look at what you pointedly can’t do: talk to most of the people on the streets. Of the ones that will talk to you, most will fight you; there’s no avoiding this, other than to avoid these people entirely.
The flow of the city matters. Crowded byways of faceless strangers give way to empty alleys that flash with violence. Eating quickly makes the pain subside, but then it’s back outdoors, shoving through the crowd to the next bloody exchange.
The Yakuza games are about the Japanese criminal underworld, but they’re also about loneliness—we’re talking about a series where the protagonist is an orphan, who continues to watch the people he loves die, who starts the second game in the series by leaving his adopted daughter behind, alone, as he goes off to bust some skulls. The Japan that was built to highlight this loneliness is a masterwork of isolation—it’s a densely populated world where friendly conversation costs cold cash, where drunken stumbling is noticed only by opportunistic vagrants. The fact that many of the places are real world locations and chains, and that the meaningless material comforts like liquor are likewise licensed, make this sad city almost real. Which makes it even more unsettling when you, as Kazuma Kiryu, lash out against it.
More Overworld:
Friday the 13th
Marble Madness
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