#i remember a long time ago readmores didn't work on mobile. god i hope they fixed that. for y'all's sake.

[eyedelater]

yakuza like a dragon post

i went to a store and bought neo TWEWY, and then instead of playing that, i bought Yakuza: Like a Dragon (yakuza 7) on steam because it was on sale and started playing that. now it seems like i'll be playing this game for the rest of my natural life because the amount of stuff to do is simply limitless. so that's bad news for my copy of neo TWEWY, but good news for me?

naturally, this post is going on my anime blog because the game is originally in japanese. i have the audio set to japanese, and it's very educational. the japanese voice actors are all quite good. kasuga's voice actor is fantastic. and at first i didn't have that many thoughts worth recording about the game, but now, several have built up, and i need somewhere to put them. i should note that i've never played any other yakuza games, but i understand that they are generally well-loved by everyone… maybe? i've only ever seen tiny snippets of gameplay footage from the other yakuza games, so i have no idea what their gameplay is like. if you have to aim a gun with your joystick, i'll never play them.

good first impressions. i LOVE a minimap. i LOVE a minimap that is set to north-up and is always on. if i ever got some stupid shit like google glass to put a GUI on my everyday life, i would put a north-up minimap corresponding with my GPS location. (ok maybe i wouldn't want it tracked constantly. but still.) on my in-game minimap, kasuga is a big arrow, and his party members are little arrows, just like a duck and ducklings. i'm running around leading my little ducklings all around yokohama. because i'm trying to make kasuga the best man he can be, i usually make an effort to have him navigate the sidewalks in a polite way. i want him not to crash into other pedestrians even though he is tall and imposing and his hitbox is very wide. so i skillfully dodge between all the pedestrians to avoid making them shout. but despite my best efforts, i hear all my little ducklings behind me crashing into every pedestrian i managed to avoid. my little ducklings are so clumsy.

i did the side quest where you lead the bubble man to a clothing store. i didn't like that duckling.

the hitboxes on items and vending machines are Absolutely merciless, and because the interact button is also the run button, i keep breaking into a run and crashing around instead of picking up the item. there's just no way for kasuga to look cool when trying to interact with something.

you might not know this about me, but in my view, the best video games allow you to run fast and jump high regardless of the circumstances. so i can't deny that my heart sank when i found out that this game has no jump button whatsoever. i will do my best to see past this obvious deficit.

this game has such a good sense of humor. it's ridiculous and not overly negative despite some terrible things happening. i laughed out loud at the cheerful little tune when someone joins your party. i love the wholesomeness of kasuga just trying to be the best man he can be and become a real-life hero. the way side quests always devolve into violence and then the problem is always solved by a beatdown is too funny. the absurdity and good humor puts it on a level that is not too far from golden kamuy, in my opinion. i'm not especially far along as i write this (saeko just joined my party), but i really think this game might be a treasure. and i have to say that if i hadn't been really into golden kamuy immediately before playing this, i might not have been in the right mindset to appreciate cute ossans like this. i like the audacious decision to make your party primarily out of down-on-their-luck 40- and 50-somethings, and i love the audacious decision to have them do cute things like become best friends and earn vocational school certificates and plant little gardens. (if i apply the COCK test to this game, it passes 3 points with flying colors: completely unhinged, offends the church, kicks ass. it might be deficient on the Creatures point unless you count the catchable bugs, which barely count due to their pure normalness, or sujimon, which barely count due to their humanity.)

i've learned that these vocational school certificates don't fuck around. however, i'm determined not to cheat or look up answers. (eventually i decided to savescum, but only a little.)

i was thinking it's really hard to do anything to improve kasuga's personality, but then i finally unlocked the part-time hero quests and like 50 achievements hit at once and he became 5 times the better man instantaneously.

i love nanba. he's the best. i love his frown and his slouch. his deadpan voice is the best. i love his finishing attack that knocks him flat on his ass. i'm trying to get lots of side quests done in between main story points because i don't know when i might lose access to this map like i lost access to the kamurocho map, but i can't get emotionally closer to nanba without advancing the main story more. i need that, and that's why i'm advancing the main story. (the fact that getting closer to him is tied to story progress might indicate that he's going to be an especially long-lasting member of your party…)

nanba has the highest of whatever stat makes you go first in battle, but he seems to be the slowest of my ducklings when it comes to keeping up with running kasuga, so it happens over and over and over that kasuga aggros the enemies and then nanba is like "all right, it's my turn!!" but he's like 30 feet behind or around the corner and has to run a little while everyone waits for him.

i work with homeless people in my day job, and i think this game portrays them somewhat cruelly… i have really mixed feelings about it… like the narrative puts in effort to be like, "everyone has their own reasons for being on the street and it's not as simple as going and getting a job," which is true! and it includes the obvious fact that not having a home is a gigantic obstacle to getting a job. (hot tip: you will have trouble getting a normal job if you don't have somewhere to take showers and do laundry, because otherwise, you will stink too much for anyone to hire you. and if you have a very small income, are you going to spend it on doing laundry often enough at the laundromat, or are you going to spend it mostly on food? and are you going to spend it on thrifty foods like dry beans and pasta to boil up at your nonexistent stove, or are you going to buy more expensive fast food and gas station food that is immediately available? it all comes together into a big vicious circle that is incredibly difficult to escape without outside help, no matter how badly you want to work. yet many people fail to consider any of this and act like homeless people are some kind of mess to clean up.) but despite that, the game also implicitly and explicitly makes fun of homeless people a lot ("battle bum" and "hungry hungry homeless," "homeless guy" as a job class, nanba's bad breath attack and pigeon attack [even though i love his pigeon attack], weird implication that there's a Leader at the homeless settlement that everyone respects). and it does seem to completely ignore the fact that drugs and mental illness generally factor into homelessness in a major way. (maybe it's different in japan? i don't know a single thing about the drugs situation there. but i can't imagine the mental illness situation is too different.) i don't know. you can't expect every depiction to be perfectly respectful, especially in a very silly game like this. but i think it's not good to ignore the disrespect. this is something i'm still chewing over. all the outfits are exactly right though.

is there a mod where you can give kasuga a giant white cravat so we can acknowledge how much the color of his outfit reminds me of miles edgeworth

i noticed that sometimes kasuga has nothing in his unbuttoned shirt except his cleavage and other times there's a red scarf thing there. what's up with that? oh, is it when he transforms into a Hero and that means his outfit changes slightly, just like how nanba puts his hood up? [note added in later: yes.]

i have unlocked many things such as gardening and part-time hero quests, but i still don't have anything to do with the extremely burgeoning pile of crafting materials i have been amassing this entire time. i could build a hosue with all this shit.

classifying other humans as sujimon is interesting. it's true that if you're out in the real world you may come across someone and it's like, "have i seen this person before? no… i've just seen another of the exact same Type of Guy." i myself am of a certain Type that old people mistake for their niece. of course, it's kind of bizarre and messed up to classify sujimon as if they're something other than human. but it is funny. (and in this case, the "mon" isn't short for monster but rather for mono 者, which can be a word describing humans.)

some of these cutscenes are incredibly long. i like to listen carefully to the japanese lines as if it were a listening exercise. based on my listenings, i would say they did a good job with the translation, though it's clear they decided to lean very much in the direction of "getting the connotations across and making it sound good in english" and away from "translating literally exactly what they are saying." because of my personal taste, i tend to be a stickler for leaning toward the latter (with allowances for making it sound good in english), but that's just a matter of poetic license. there are some lines i would have translated quite differently, but that's only a result of my own oversized ego. overall, they did a better job than i could have. obviously. i also noticed in the cutscenes that there are often unnaturally long pauses between the lines but that you can make them shorter if you press the A button? maybe to give you, the viewer, time to process? seems weird though. [note added in later: i think that was my computer struggling to load the cutscene. so instead of having huge loading times in between cutscenes, they have little tiny loading times in between all the dialogue? seems like something like that. this is the most demanding game i've ever tried to run on this computer.]

adachi is constantly saying, "koshi ga haru ze." i think it's "haru," but i'm not sure. "koshi" means "hips," and he's an old guy, so it's probably something about his hips aching. but i can't quite figure out the verb. is it haru as in "to stretch or strain?" i guess that would make sense. or is it a different verb and i'm mishearing? my auditory processing is somewhat notoriously poor. anyway, whatever he's actually saying, i kinda want adachi to shut the fuck up about his hips.

i basically never play games where the characters are meant to be photorealistically rendered. there is not one such game that i have played through to the end. i just prefer cartoonier stuff for various reasons, not the least of which is the uncanny valley of almost-realistically rendered human faces. this game definitely, absolutely has that uncanny valley factor, but i can overlook it. it's refreshing to see character designs that are just people.

i can't believe there's DLC for this game. how could i possibly ever run out of stuff to do. how could i possibly ever run out of stuff to do (a second time for emphasis)

crashing into people on a real-life sidewalk "sorry ma'am, my hitbox is just-- oOF, excuse me, i'm so sorry, it's my hitbox--"

i'm not pumped for this business management minigame. i saved right after we set things up with nick ogata and then stopped playing for the day. i'm too exhausted today to try it… i hope there's an easy way to do the necessary part and then i can forget about it because it doesn't seem fun… can't i just pawn this off on nick ogata right away? by the way, i had to check if nick ogata's name used the same kanji as That ogata, and it does. so i guess it's a name that exists and has the "tail" kanji in it for real, rather than noda-sensei unusually spelling an existing name with a "tail" kanji for hyakunosuke because he's a cat.

they had a moment of minor fanservice after everyone took a bath and saeko was sitting with her cleavage out. but then in the same scene was kasuga's entire boobs. that's balance.* no one can make complaints on any side there. maybe the complaint is that we didn't see nanba's. though i'm quite sure his torso would be unexceptional. but that's why i want to see. look, this is not for my sexual gratification. i just think it's funny how showing a man's entire boobs is totally allowed, and i want to see. (golden kamuy got me used to being allowed to see.)

(*is it?)

i don't want to see adachi's boobs.

i was like "it's so hard to find bugs :( they only spawn on a tree once every 5 hours of play" but then i went to hamakita park and ran around in a field catching bug after bug!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

do these various chinatown bun vendors know that their prized proprietary recipes are so similar to each other's offerings that their buns stack together in my inventory

playing in fullscreen, having various thoughts, but this .txt is behind the fullscreen so i can't click away to it. finish playing for the night. forget everything i was going to write.

i historically spend most of my computer time in the web browser without minimizing and may go weeks without looking at my desktop. but when i do rarely play a PC game, i open it by going to my desktop where i have plonked the game's icon. so lately, i'm seeing my desktop much more often. my desktop background is that color page of tsukishima and koito from volume 24, and lately i see it every day. my boys are here to ground me with their serious looks.

right before we got access to the romance workshop, it was like, "this is a great way to repurpose our old items instead of shelling out huge amounts of cash on new ones!" but i have to shell out monster amounts of cash to upgrade the workshop.

one of these days i have to give nanba a new job. i think kasuga will remain a hero, and i don't know about the others, but nanba needs a job other than homeless guy because he needs a new outfit. maybe he'll have more good attacks too. his flame breath is a little frustrating because it's really hard to get him and the enemies in the right position so that it hits more than one enemy. when i feel like i have them in a good position for his flame breath, he decides on his own to run 20 feet closer so that he can only hit one enemy after all.

i want to appreciate the game for all it has to offer, but i'm not very interested in learning how to play all these real-life card games and mahjong. i mean, i know how to play blackjack. knew. it's somewhere in there. i've tried the darts, baseball, and golf minigames. they're fun enough. haven't downloaded the slots minigames. but i don't really want to play cards.

ichiban calls saeko "sacchan (さっちゃん)," but they romanized it as sa-chan. that's fair, given that "sac" is an english word that we don't especially like. and romanizing "sacchan" as the also-phonetically-accurate "satchan" would mean the T appears out of nowhere, so it's not a good option in this case.

i'm SO glad this game doesn't run on real time or abbreviated time or any semblance of realistic passage of time (unlike persona 4). i don't have to ration my side quests or relationship growth based on how much time is left in the day (unlike in persona 4). i won't miss out on important things because i ran out of time or accidentally missed a deadline for that particular date (unlike in persona 4).

my dear nanba killed me once. he can save me, and he can kill me, but only the saving matters to the narrative; no matter how many times he kills me, it is erased. that is his conundrum as a character in a video game with a predetermined plot. anyway, i bought him an expensive weapon, and he killed me with it. it was already somewhat late at night in real life when it happened, so after that, i spent the rest of my time before bed upgrading my weapons and grinding a little in preparation to kill my dear nanba. the game didn't want me running all around ijincho in between fighting the wrecking ball and fighting nanba, so it disabled the taxi service, but i can't be stopped. i ran all the way across town and back to get vegetables so the master could make me some bentos. and i came across hiro's missing cat at hamakita park, so i got a million yen to upgrade my weapons and armor. and now, the next day, after thinking about it all day, it is just about time to kill nanba. but he'll be okay, and then he'll rejoin my party where he belongs.

i killed nanba very easily. i didn't need to use any of the master's bentos. nanba was okay, but he still didn't come back to my party yet. but that's okay. he'll keep gaining XP in the background, and in the mean time, we have a new little duckling. i really wish joon-gi had some attacks that affected the whole crowd of enemies, since he has the highest agility or dexterity or whatever makes him attack first, and when you attack first, the enemies haven't had a chance to spread out yet, so that's when you want to do a broad attack… maybe if he levels up a bit…

i've been watching someone play paper mario lately, and i keep thinking, i wish i could put my party members in my pocket so i don't have to worry about my 2 or 3 incredibly clumsy ducklings constantly crashing into everyone and everything and me as i navigate the crowded city.

nanba came back sooner than i thought. he didn't even have time to get a new outfit like i thought he might. but i guess when you're a level x homeless guy as your job, you can't just get a new outfit even if you meet your brother off-camera and solve your emotional difficulties. also, when nanba came back, sacchan got put in my pocket! so they can be put in my pocket while i run around! but then they won't help me fight.

when i first started playing, i thought the danger level indicators were like the wantedness indicators in GTA, like that's how hard the police are going after you and it's based on how many crimes you commit. but it turns out that there are no consequences and in fact many rewards for beating up endless chinpiras in broad daylight.

joon-gi's voice actor is quite good. i enjoy his polite speech. and despite his calm demeanor, when he attacks, he often lets out a very powerful TSERYAAAA!!!! that feels kind of uncharacteristic but very amusing

i got sick of trying to be nice walking on the sidewalks. now everywhere i go is a chorus of UWOs and KYAs and WOTTOs. it's not my fault my hitbox is wide and my ducklings are so bad at pathfinding. when i break into a run, they also break into a run and loop around to run directly in front of me from a 90 degree angle. i keep getting t-boned by my own ducklings. and then they make a complaining noise.

i'm gonna go to isezaki ijincho just to visit the several large SEGA-branded arcades that definitely exist there in the real world. oh wait, this area itself doesn't quite exist in the real world. i guess that makes sense.

i maxed out my relationship with nanba. i was very annoyed that there was the whole thing of "oops now we have to actually give nanba a surprise party because he's expecting it and he's excited about it!" and then we maxed out his hearts without actually having a surprise party. give me a break. when is he gonna get his goddamn surprise party. he told you that he always wanted one since he was a kid. that girl coming in and lying to him was not a surprise party; it was a misguided gesture that half landed, half flopped. WHERE is nanba yu's surprise party!!!!!!!

han joon-gi finally got an attack that hits many enemies and it's sooo useful. it's also an insane move that would definitely wreak havoc and cause chaos in real life. probably not even an american would risk double-handgun sweeping crossfire on a busy street like that. he does it indoors, too.

(sweating) kasuga ichiban is going to be a MUCH better person than i am by the end of this…

it's fun to have zhao in the party. he sure has a lot of martial arts moves. his painted nails are cute. i like him, but his little mustache is the kind i hate. also is it just me or was there just a little more sexual tension between him and kasuga than expected? when they're having heart-to-hearts at the bar, i mean. well, if i got behind any ship in this game, it would be kasuga/nanba, i suppose.

i don't like the shareholder meeting minigame or the business management minigame as a whole. feels like a swing and a miss to me. i mean, i can tell love went into it. it just doesn't feel intuitive, for one thing… it doesn't seem fun. it is kinda funny how the pacified shareholders settle into a state of dreamy nodding and clapping.

none of the ladies ichiban can woo seem especially interesting as characters. i guess sumire is the best one. maybe you have to be into women for that aspect to land with you. maybe i'll try wooing one or two of them a little more to see if we get any interesting cutscenes or anything. also iroha doesn't care to hear any followup about how i found the secret weapons dealer we were talking about. what's up with that? or am i somehow failing to tell her properly?

with the part-time hero quests, i have to fight x number of a certain kind of enemy, but they have to be new kills since that particular quest appeared. it's frustrating to have to go find 10 more of whatever kind of guy i've already killed 80 of. anyway, they're fellow humans so these aren't kills; they're One-Piece-style defeats, where you get the shit knocked out of you so bad that you change your outlook on life and stop being a sujimon.

i got to the sotenbori arena, and some of the rules are like, "no switching party members during battle!" buddy i didn't even know i could do that.

i wonder if new game+ will be significantly harder or something. as it stands, the game isn't hard enough for me to need to use advanced tactics like swapping out party members during a fight. either way, i've never been much of a new game+ person, preferring to have as much fun as possible the first time playing. i mean, i'm not especially good at video games in the first place, and i haven't played that many games all the way to the end. i think the only games i've new game plussed were okami and hollow knight. except i don't remember if hollow knight actually has a new game+ or if i just played it a second time.

i know just from my tumblr dashboard that majima and saejima are important characters from other yakuza games. i could also kinda tell from the loving way they were depicted and how they had their own special fight music. i loved how they had an unavoidable tag-team attack. i beat every floor in the battle arena, most of them twice, before the fight with majima and saejima, and they still almost murdered us. if i hadn't called in the masochist poundmate to make us nigh-invulnerable, i probably would have lost to them. and it cracked me up that they were added to poundmates just like that.

more weapons should be upgradeable. it doesn't make sense that there are just a few. and you can't even tell from the start which ones you will be able to upgrade. and you can't tell in advance how far you will be able to upgrade them or when you'll hit a dead end. [note added in later: i finally looked it up and found out that there's basically 1 upgradeable weapon per class that will be upgraded into that class's most powerful weapon. but i was unable to glean that just by playing the game.]

is the joke with the empty cough drop tins supposed to be about how, in real life, you know rationally that empty tins like that are essentially worthless, but you can't shake the feeling that they could be useful, so you hold on to them? because if that's the joke it's really funny. i have one such tin right in front of me on my desk. they just seem so potentially useful. of course they're useful if you want to store little stuff. but there's a limit to how much little stuff anyone really needs to store in old tins. and i think almost everyone has reached that limit and doesn't need any tins.

i kind of wish there were more interesting jobs for sacchan... instead of only Very Distinctly Feminine jobs. i dunno. strong binary gender roles in this game.

i'm kind of feeling like i need to finish up this game before may 12th-ish because at that time i will inevitably shift my focus to the new zelda game. but i doubt i'll make a post about that game. i've never had enough thoughts about the story in a zelda game to take notes about it, not in my life. yet i've played almost every one of them.

if it's one of the special fights where kasuga takes his shirt off first, then he's also shirtless in the specials and tag team animations. that's love.

we had a fun fight with kiryu, who i know is the protagonist of at least one other yakuza game. (are all the other guys protagonists too? majima doesn't seem like a protagonist, though.) kiryu's tattoo strikes me as significantly cooler than ichiban's. and when they're standing right next to each other, their outfits clearly mirror one another.

i've played for 100 hours and i'm almost out of things to say about this game, as i've gotten used to all the fun and exciting things and now they just seem normal. if i ever play a game less exciting than this, i'll fall asleep. i'm on chapter 14. i wonder if i'll get any side quests ever again. no new ones have shown up in a while. and none of the side quests have been as funny as the one about the public urinator where you come across the 4 guys standing at the edge of the river. that might have been the peak.

for the past several weeks, i've been busy and very tired and distracted reading the works of junji ito, so i haven't played as much of this game as i had intended to, and now my plan to finish playing this before the new zelda game comes out has been thrown out the window because the new zelda game came out today and i preordered it so i have it and it's right here!!!!!!!!! so do i want to not play the game on its opening day and risk spoilers, which i have heretofore avoided? or do i want to set yakuza aside to play the new zelda game? and poor neo TWEWY gets pushed even further aside. considering how long breath of the wild kept me busy, i can't see far enough into the future to know when i'll get around to neo TWEWY.

but after writing that paragraph, without consciously making a choice, i started reading more junji ito stories, even though i'm not in love with his stuff… i just have a compulsion to read all of it… so i can finish the other text post i'm working on…

...

…i finished the other text post i was working on. time to play on.

ICHIBAN SURVIVED AN EXPLOSION AND SHOWED UP WITH ONE (1) BANDAID AND A SMILE ON HIS FACE!!! THAT WAS THE BEST. i'm reinvigorated.

i was like, "ok we're in the final chapter. let's finish this up (with love and care) and be done with it." but we're back in kamurocho, which i have not thoroughly explored. what can i do but comb every street and alley for mcguffins?! it's only fair! to the developers who put so much loving detail in the game! and while i'm at it, i should upgrade all my weapons so much more! it's telling me to prepare for the final battle! i have to prepare by upgrading everyone's weapons a lot! and in order to do that, i need lots of money! so i'll play the last 10 levels of the sotenbori battle arena 5 times! and then i'll taxi back and forth between the materials cart in the park and romance workshop and make everyone's weapons OP! and then i'll forget what i was doing! and then i'll learn that ichiban has to be a foreman in order to unlock various things! and then i'll get ichiban to foreman level 21 so he won't be so weak! and then i'll learn that ichiban doesn't actually need to remain a foreman to have the demolish ability so i'll switch him back to hero! and then i'll learn about the three secret shops and go unlock them with my demolish ability! and then i'll buy a bunch of gold safe keys from the secret shops! and then i'll look up a list of gold safes! and the list unexpectedly tells me what's in the safes, and i don't really need any of it! so then i'll decide i don't need to open gold safes and forget what i was doing! IT'S HARD TO FINISH THE GAME!!!

the tendo fight, which took forever, didn't give me even half as much XP as the invested vagrant.

i didn't expect nick ogata to stick his neck out like an MVP and grill masato at the press conference like that. mostly unrelated note: i really like masato's aoki ryou politician voice. it's very cute. it's a 100% perfect match for his aoki ryou face.

i'm fighting masato. i love how he's got his swaggery chinpira body language animations but he intersperses it with glasses adjustments. genius touch. i was loving this battle with him. i didn't want it to end, but i didn't want to artifically prolong it by using health items. so i just punched him a lot and then it was over.

...

arakawa masato has passed away. now we're in the epilogue. time is running out for them to give nanba a birthday party before the game ends all the way.

…

okay the game ended and i can't complain about it. even if they failed to give nanba a birthday party. it was good.

ah, the story was good… the confrontation between ichiban and masato at the lockers was a strong ending scene… they wrapped it up neatly. ichiban finally got through to him. even though i know that when masato said he never liked ichiban, he wasn't lying, either. but it's like ichiban said: they have a connection, like brothers. i'm just glad masato didn't kill himself. i'm surprised kume souta didn't show up in the epilogue. i guess we can safely assume he's in prison.

i started this post by extolling the fact that this game has endless things to do. but although i did really enjoy doing most of those things, in the end, i feel like it had a significant detrimental effect on the momentum of the story. by stretching out the gameplay between story segments, the earlier story developments came to feel very distant, and by the end, i didn't feel as close to nanba and saeko and the others as i did earlier in the game… i got too used to everything, got too absorbed in grinding, became obsessed with tying up loose ends, started taking things for granted. the magic faded. how much of that is my fault for getting distracted from the story, and how much is the game's fault for distracting me from its own story? i can't tell.

probably the best way to play this game would be to rampage through the main story as enthusiastically as you can, then go back to unearth and subsequently tie up every loose end on a new game+.

despite all that, i will say conclusively that the game is good and i recommend it wholeheartedly. the combat system is very satisfying. i love the omnipresent, excessive, dramatic particle effects. the animations are great. the voices are great. it's so fun to run around the extremely detailed city and go eat realistic foods at restaurants and have fights for no reason. the story is a strong backbone for the game. and i'm glad you aren't penalized for leaving certain loose ends untied… like the business management minigame, which i neglected until the very end. i know i could have unlocked a new party member through that minigame. it just didn't seem worth it. maybe i'll watch a bunch of youtube videos of all the things i missed. and maybe i'll revisit the game for my new game+ someday.