What the above image signifies, besides the fact that I need a better camera (seriously, the 3DS camera is garbage), is that I recently completed a perfect game of Yakuza 2. Albeit a perfect game that took some 80+ hours to obtain. Subsequently I have little else to talk about this week, so here's yet another blog based entirely around the second Ryu ga Gotoku game, why not.
I've thought about structuring this blog as an "Anatomy of a S-Rank" sort of affair (as with my similarly obsessive Tales of Vesperia run), but Yakuza 2 doesn't actually have achievements. I mean, it has stuff for you to do, and there is a false sense of achievement from doing that stuff I suppose, but beyond that there's only the categories listed above on that screenshot you can barely see. Therein lies the meat of Yakuza 2, though, so I'm just going to go through each one and give you some idea of what it means to fully complete this game, and why it took so goshdarn long.
I Have a Serious Problem
Food & Drink
So one of the neat things about Yakuza is that, for the sake of realism, the game features a lot of actual places - the game's primary Tokyo setting of Kamurocho is a fictionalized but otherwise structurally identical take on Shinjuku's red-light district, for instance. This also extends to specific stores, restaurants and various edibles and beverages you might come across. I mean, sure, you can decry it all as a flagrant sponsor-fest, but the game's only purpose for including these elements is for verisimilitude; there's no giant splash ads for Suntory anywhere, nor does C.C. Lemon's mascot barge into fights to toss you a refreshing citrus soda to give you the energy to continue shoving yakuza faces into lampposts for hours to come, but if you had the wherewithal to enter one of the many nightlife locations in the game, sidle up to the bar and check the menu, you'll see several Suntory drinks interspersed among Carlsberg, Glenfiddich, Laphroaig and a dozen other branded liquors. You get some lavishly elaborate descriptions for each one, of course, but it's presented in such a way that it feels more like the bartender is desperately trying to sell the main character on some quality high-priced spirits than any sort of untoward meta advertising. (Even so, I kind of like how grown-up a game makes me feel when it discusses the comparative virtues of bourbons and scotches.)
This is where the "Food" and "Drink" completion stats come in: It basically involves eating the entire menu of each restaurant (133 items in all) and drinking each of the 35 alcoholic beverages of each bar found throughout the game's three urban settings. With the exception of the real-life Matsuya chain of restaurants, the restaurants are all invented establishments that each serve a specific type of cuisine: You have imported American fast food institutions like the Smile Burger, hoity-toity European cafes like Café Alps, sushi restaurants, okonomiyaki (Kansai-style savory pancakes?), ramen, fugu (like fancier sushi that can kill you), takoyaki (octopus!), a restaurant that serves nothing but fried offal and one that's entirely cuisine from Kyoto, which I believe is more fish. It's all part and parcel of Yakuza's fantastic attention to detail as it applies to day-to-day living in Japan. I mean, you're also punching tigers in the face and fighting on top of moving trucks (more on that in a moment), but it's really the emphasis on the little things that make the Yakuza games the sort of immersive affairs in which one could potentially lose more than three entire days' worth of time. Hypothetically speaking.
Side-Missions
This is where the vast majority of that play time duration was spent. Side-missions are, true to their moniker, ancillary incidents that Kazuma can choose to get himself involved in. They generally involve helping out the less fortunate, taking down the more overtly criminal elements of the Japanese underworld or pulling off some impressive feat to keep the legendary reputation of the Dragon of Dojima alive. Often there's no gain besides an item or two and an experience point boost, but there'll be instances where you might befriend various locals (which occasionally pays off in battles) or obtain new skills and passive abilities. However, it's unfortunately quite easy to fail these missions by selecting the wrong option: Say, for instance, you get hassled by a pregnant woman into paying her child support for knocking her up. Kazuma's never met this woman, of course, but there's an option to acquiesce with her scam simply to shut her up. Doing so will fail the side-mission and cost a considerable amount of money besides, while calling her out on her scam will cause a heavy to appear out of nowhere and "do the right thing" by beating you up for being a deadbeat father. Or he'll try to, anyway. It's amazing how often this seems to happen to Kazuma, and equally amazing how his reputation as an epic ass-kicker never seems to precede him.
Anyway, the side-missions are often the best part of any Yakuza game. It's where the game can afford to be silly and let its hair down a bit, since the main story is often a little too po-faced for its own good. I mean, it's a traditional Yakuza story with all the pathos and drama that comes from living in a world full of revenge and remorse, but Kazuma can only seem to crack a smile when he's wryly accepting the grim realities of life, which hardly counts as levity. So instead we have side-missions where an American Major Leagues pitcher bets his Japanese girlfriend against your ability to score home-runs off pitches that would leave Christopher "you are already dead struck out" Robin aghast; a Yakuza underboss that gets his jollies from autonepiophilia (yeah, feel free to Google that) and gets so unreasonably angry with Kazuma when the latter chooses not to get freaky with him that he and his cronies throw down in nothing but diapers and bonnets; running a hostess club; being a host; finding a Ringu video; getting involved with insider trading; and beating a guy at a fictional version of Virtua Fighter, causing him to get so mad at you he comes at you with a lightsaber. It's not quite the level of inspired insanity of something like Saints Row, but there's an admirable amount of sheer stupid fun to be had if you're dedicated enough to seek it all out.
But it has its dark side too. In fact, I believe I wrote quite the screed about this last week. Go read up on it and try and figure out what's wrong with me; you'll be saving me a fortune in therapy sessions.
Hostesses
A.k.a. the more overt dating sim aspects of the game. Hostesses are an entirely Japanese construction; a modern-day equivalent to geishas where a man (or, indeed, a woman) can pay to spend time with attractive members of either gender just jabbing and drinking socially. It's a cross between an escort and joining an exclusive dating ring and kind of hard to describe in a way that doesn't make it sound like the shadiest, most licentious and socially regressive thing in the world.
It really isn't. You have friendly conversations with pretty ladies and if they like you, they ask you out on perfectly innocuous dates to restaurants and bowling alleys. Presumably most of the clients that aren't 6' smoldering, broody powerhouses like Kazuma rarely reach the "getting asked out for reals" part of the hostess experience, but beyond the inherent ickiness most people would have with spending money to talk to an attractive person where said attractive person is then contractually obligated to pretend to enjoy your company while shilling the most expensive libations they think you can afford, it can be almost kind of cute at times.
There are larger issues with the dating sim in general that make the whole genre feel a bit off to me, specifically how interacting with real women is rarely analogous to a multiple choice exam that you can memorize the right answers to, but it's surprisingly inoffensive given how embarrassing you'd think the hostess sections must be if Sega had to step in and scrap the whole feature from subsequent Yakuza localizations. I mean, it is a little gross, but it's certainly no Otomedius Excellent, Gal Gun or IGDA after-party. I'm not saying it excuses a minor misogynist thing by comparing it to major misogynist things, but I think it's perfectly okay to depict human sexuality in games if you remember to include a little tact and empathy towards crafting the female component in those relationships. Whatever, that's part of a much longer and more serious blog that isn't about what some loser did to achieve 100% on a video game where you beat up goons with an ashtray.
Hell, I'm sure site-favorite Katawa Shoujo is more overtly scurrilous. Back me up @video_game_king?
Coliseum
Oh good lord, the Coliseum. This is perhaps where the game got the most unfortunately grindy, my run-in with the Eastern game of tiles excepted. The Underground Coliseum of Purgatory - which it itself already an underground city, thus rendering the official name of the coliseum a tautology - is a series of contests where Kazuma must fight three opponents in a row of ascending difficulty while only recovering a third of his total health between each bout. Each contest has its own specific rules: No throwing, no "groundwork" (i.e. no stomping on a dude while he's lying on the ground), no kicks, etc. There are also contests held in arenas that are lined with barbed wire, or flame traps, or the fence is electrified. You know, basic Kumite unsanctioned underworld death fight stuff. (Kind of an amusing aside: I was listening to one of my favorite movie podcasts We Hate Movies while hashing this stuff out, and it just so happened to be covering Best of the Best 2: A movie based around an unsanctioned underground death fight arena. Go figure, huh?)
The problem comes with this side-quest's "gotta catch 'em all" aspect, where to unlock the top tier fights you have to repeat lesser contests a set number of times to open them up. To fight the two most difficult opponents, you have to face a set percentage of the 49 other combatants before they'll appear. This set percentage is 100%, incidentally. While it's fun to fight a bunch of diverse badasses such as a fat guy in clown make-up ostentatiously named "Don Carpaccio", a Brazilian kick-boxer, an elderly Judo expert, a European giant holding an enormous battleaxe, a fat otaku who comes at you hard with kali sticks, a mob boss in a suit and lucha mask and a Chinese master chef, it's less fun when you're having to repeat fights to find the one guy who only appears in that particular contest sometimes. This is exacerbated by the fact that these are some of the toughest fights in the game, often require some weird conditions before they'll appear (such as completing a contest that only unlocks way later) and loads you up with so many crappy "prizes" that you find yourself with constant inventory management problems that it's almost not worth the trouble.
I say almost not worth the trouble, because the most powerful Coliseum opponent in the game happens to be prolific VGM composer Akira Yamaoka wearing Michael Jackson's outfit from the Smooth Criminal video. I... yeah.
Locker
Actually, there's not much to say about this one. Locker keys can be found lying around all over the place and each one will unlock one of the coin lockers in the middle of town. Each locker has a reward. That's basically it: A series of hard-to-spot collectibles (they're little dots that sparkle intermittently, like the treasures in Uncharted 2) that at the very least grant you actual benefits, rather than a few pieces of concept art or a 3D model of some facsimile of an Etruscan urn. Best to sweep them all up using a walkthrough as soon as you're free to wander around town and then move onto the fun stuff.
HEAT Actions
Talking of fun stuff, HEAT (yep, all caps) actions are essentially what the Yakuza battle system is predicated on. While it's spiffy and all to rely entirely on Kazuma's mastery of the martial arts, these are street fights you're getting involved in and that means employing whatever improvised weapons and environmental take-downs are handy. Honestly, who ever heard of a street fighting game where most of the combatants only use their fists and feet?
When blocking attacks, taunting or hitting opponents hard enough to send them flying, Kazuma is building up a gauge that will allow him to perform particularly damaging attacks. I know, stop me if you've heard this one before. However, what the game registers as "particularly damaging attacks" are cases where Kazuma might roughly lift a combatant and hurl him into the freezing cold Dōtonbori canal (oh sorry, Sotenbori canal) from twenty feet up or pick up a guy by his ankles and spin him into a car's windshield. And that's just the environmental stuff. There's a HEAT action attached to every item and weapon in the game (though many perform double duties): Baseball bats, golf clubs, staves, swords, tonfas, salt shakers, portable stoves, pliers (yeah, that's a good one; if you get squeamish about amateur dentistry, look away now...), signboards and a mysterious syringe left in a car park filled with who knows what. I realize that environmental kills and brutal melee animations have become so ubiquitous in action games in the past few years that their impact here would be inevitably lessened somewhat, but it's still the #1 reason anyone should play a Yakuza game. Outside of something like the Arkham games or Sleeping Dogs, which really has a lot to answer for regarding its "influencer-influenceé" relationship with Yakuza, there's no better brawler combat system out there.
Of course, finding all the HEAT actions is no picnic. Some are unfortunately linked to one-off fights, like one where you slide a guy across the bar, breaking every glass and bottle with his face and sending him head first into the wall at the end: While a lot of fun, there are only two fights in the game that take place in a bar. Likewise, certain objects are hard to get a hold of, and since everything in the game has a durability stat it's generally a good idea to put stuff away until the HEAT gauge is filled and ready to go. It's not overly aggravating, but is definitely one of those things along with locker keys and side-mission responses for which you need a browser displaying GameFAQs at your beck and call if you're hoping for that elusive 100%. There's a pretty good spoiler-free FAQ by HeeroXXXG-01W I could recommend, even.
But yeah, 83 hours I'll never see again later, and I find myself with a perfect ranking and a whole heap o' regrets. But don't let me put you off from trying a Yakuza game for yourselves; provided you don't go completely insane with it like I did, it should be a lot of fun (this is similar to the advice I gave for Xenoblade Chronicles too). See you all next time for more spirit-lifting tales of obsessive video game playthroughs, either here on the GB forums or on an episode of A&E's Intervention. Could go either way at this point, frankly.
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