I've recently been playing through the Yakuza series, game by game, which may or may not have been inspired by the Beast in the East series here on Giant Bomb itself. I started with Yakuza 4, as that was one of the games I had on PS3 from Playstation Plus. I didn't get very far in the game but I noticed that the world map, Kamurocho, felt very small. This puzzled me, as before I had actually played the games people had compared it to GTA, so I was expecting a much bigger open world.
For reference, this is an unlableled, spoiler-free image of the map in question, Kamurocho. The map itself is made up of a handful of main streets and lots of alleyways, just like a real city would be. In fact, it's based on a real city in Shibuya, Japan called Kabukicho. The highlighted buildings in purple are amusements, orange represents restaurants, yellow represents shops, and blue areas are where story things happen in the city.
After playing through about 4 hours of Yakuza 4 and watching Beast in the East, I decided to go back to the game's roots and play through the PS2 original game first. While I immediately noticed a difference in terms of graphical quality, the city remained basically identical! One would think in this day and age, that having a map that's not only small but also essentially reused from game to game would be completely asinine!
In fact, what Sega did with the series is brilliant. When I started playing Yakuza 1, I was constantly checking my map, looking for what building the next objective was in, wandering the city like a lost child. By the end of the game, I was checking my map less and less. If someone asked me to go to Tenkaichi Street to go to Stardust, I was on my way without so much as a glance at the map. That's easy! It's across the street from Serena! But after about 20 hours, I finished Yakuza 1 and started Yakuza 2 shortly thereafter. The game starts you (albeit briefly) back on the streets of Kamurocho, before ferrying you off to Sotenbori in Osaka, Japan.
It takes 3 chapters before you're back in Kamurocho, and as soon as I walked out on the streets, I was back home. I was wandering the streets and checking out my favorite sushi places, checking out what new games were at the Club Sega, and buying women's underwear at the Poppo convenience store. Even the Don Quijote was still there, blasting that same familiar song out into the neon-lit streets. It all brought a smile to my face, but what really impressed me was the fact that I had finished two chapters of the game without checking my map once.
I had hardly even considered it a tool that I could use at that point. A mission said "The guy you're looking for is in the alleyway behind the drugstore." So I legged it to the drug store, picked up a few Staminan X for good measure, and took the guy out. I was completely immersed in the game, in the world, and wasn't relying on outside resources to help me find the buildings I needed to get to. I met the crooked Yakuza guy in the Champion District , fed him a fancy dress shoe and went on with my day.
After I had noticed I wasn't relying on the in-game map anymore, I went back for just a moment to check out Yakuza 4 one more time. If you haven't played the PS2 Yakuza games, they have Resident Evil styled fixed camera angles while you're out in the world. Loading up my save in Yakuza 4 and walking around Kamurocho again was something special. I went to find all my old haunts and check out the upgrades they had gotten with the move to stronger hardware, and they were mostly all there, as one would expect- with the exception of some buildings that no longer existed due to story events, of course. I got turned around once or twice due to being able to rotate my camera, but I was still mostly walking around without using the map, once again.
I can almost guarantee that Sega didn't foresee Yakuza being such a huge series (7 main series games with a handful of spinoffs!) and definitely didn't intend for Kamurocho to hang around this long- but they stuck with it, and the result is a city that I feel right at home in, completely immersed in my gameplay. In fact, I can't think of any other game series that's done such a fantastic job of creating a world that persists between multiple entries in the series in the same way that Kamurocho does. I'd even suggest that Kamurocho itself is as much of a character as any human character in the games.
What do you think? Is immersion by familiarity something that's done well in other games? I can imagine playing something like Grand Theft Auto 5 for long enough that you memorize the map, but I wonder if that's the same kind of feeling as moving from game to game with the same familiar stomping grounds, and watching it change and grow based on things YOU have done in the story to influence it.
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