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    A free-roaming action-adventure series starring Kazuma Kiryu, a former member of the Japanese Dojima crime family who is drawn into conflict against several Yakuza gangs. The franchise's games are marketed as realistic criminal simulations.

    Amon, a Mirth: Gaming's Most Entertaining Superboss

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    Mento

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    Edited By Mento  Moderator

    The Yakuza games are huge. For a while, each new iteration was even larger than the last, and packed to the gills with side-content, minigames, and "substories": the Yakuza franchise's name for those silly little sidequests where the main character might dress like a mascot, get targeted by ineffectual con artists, date Lady Gaga, meet national sports celebrities and somehow beat them at their own professions, or befriend a Michael Jackson ersatz on the set of Not-Thriller. Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6 pulled back the reins a little by reducing the amount of content and playable characters, but even lowering the substory count from 100 to Yakuza 6's 50 still meant most players never saw all of the content of any given Yakuza game, which almost certainly meant they never met this guy:

    No Caption Provided

    Jo Amon, of the secretive Amon Clan of global assassins, is Kazuma "The Dragon of Dojima" Kiryu's self-appointed eternal rival. He might dress like an extra from The Matrix x Grease: You're The Neo That I Want, but he is not to be underestimated by any stretch. A man hardened by countless battles and hitman assignments, Jo Amon is equal to Kiryu's skill but far more ruthless and underhanded, and in every game is invariably the most dangerous foe Kiryu can face. To reach him almost always requires completing every substory, upon which you get the call to meet him in a special arena for a fight to the death to decide who is the strongest (to the latter's chagrin, Kiryu never actually deigns to finish off Jo Amon).

    What each Jo Amon fight demands is not only full mastery over the game's combat engine, and ideally a Kiryu that has been upgraded to his maximum level and is stuffed with healing items, but a whole lot of patience to deal with what can only be described as "cheat engine bullshit." Amon is the only Yakuza character that can canonically command magical forces, for instance, and will not hesitate for a moment to sneak in military-grade technology or unexplained sci-fi nonsense to this "noble" duel if it'll help him destroy Kiryu once and for good. This also makes his fights, in addition to being a worthy challenge for any player looking for same, hilarious in hindsight due to the myriad ways Jo Amon (and the developers) can and will fuck with you.

    Since so few Yakuza players ever do the legwork to reach Amon, I wanted to do a little rundown of all his encounters in the Yakuza series to give you all some idea of what I mean when I say Amon is cheap as hell and lives to troll you. He represents what I've always believed is the true reason superbosses exist: to give smartass players who have too much time on their hands a rude wake-up call with regards to their "mastery" of their beloved games. Why even become a video game designer if you can't code in a means to figuratively flip the bird to your more obsessive fans?

    Warning: There are some non-story Yakuza spoilers here across the entire core franchise, as I go into each Amon fight in significant detail. If you'd rather go in blind, which I'd recommend if you're willing to do everything necessary to unlock them, feel free to skip parts or all of this week's blog. I'll have moved on from Yakuza by next week.

    General Tactics

    Though far from predictable, Jo Amon has a few characteristics and strategies that he carries with him into every fight. These are generally if not always applicable to any given Amon battle:

    • Health Bars Out the Wazoo: As brawlers, the Yakuza games are very fond of displaying full-length enemy health bars and then adding more bars on top, usually of different colors. It's a genre staple that goes as far back as Final Fight, if not even further. Amon frequently has way more health than any other opponent, and so you'll see several extra hues that don't appear anywhere else in those games. Even so, that might not always be the true extent of his HP - Jo Amon is very fond of rising back up once he appears to be finished.
    • Komaki Style: Among Amon's many talents, one is mimicry - the ability to copy the movesets of the enemies he faces. After being trashed by Kiryu in the first Yakuza, he returns in every subsequent game with the same fighting style that Kiryu himself possesses. This not only evens the playing field in terms of fighting prowess, but also means that Amon can use Tiger Drops just as effectively as Kiryu, and can occasionally block them as well. For those not acquainted with the Tiger Drop it's a frighteningly effective counter move when you have the timing down, capable of destroying most bosses in seconds. Still works well on Amon too, most of the time.
    • Heat Shield: An odd and very annoying trait Amon uses in many of his fights is an orange shield that appears around him when his health is critically low. This seems to diminish the attack strength of any move or weapon used against him by something like 80% - you're doing chip damage, at best, for the remainder of the fight once it appears. Worse, is that his hits seem to actively lower the player's heat gauge, making it harder to finish the fight with heat actions.
    • Hurricane Kick: Just run when he starts on his Tatsumaki Senpukyaku shit. It's a devastating and unstoppable move that can whittle your health to nothing in a blink of an eye, and is something of an Amon trademark. He'll only start busting it out once he's in critical Heat mode though.

    Yakuza

    I'm going release order here rather than in-game chronological order, since I want to chart the evolution of the Jo Amon fight. Since this is your first encounter, it's comparatively sedate, though still full of the typical bait and switches. For one, he pulls the fake death trick several times during the fight, each time popping back up with a new weapon: first a handgun, then grenades, then finally a tanto. It's really more of an endurance battle than anything else, and you only have nine inventory slots to work with in terms of accessories and health items.

    One odd note with this encounter: most games give you a special accessory for defeating Amon, but this one just gives you ¥10,000,000. Hard to imagine what you might still need money for, beyond replacing everything you used up during the fight, but it doesn't hurt walking around with that much cash.

    Yakuza 2

    At first blush, this fight is even more straightforward than the last, with Amon using a mix of tanto, grenade, and handgun attacks from the outset. Besides some powerful charge specials, there's not a whole lot to the fight until you get his health down to about half, at which point the usual bullshit begins. This starts when he pulls a pair of 24th century Halo pistols out of nowhere and starts nailing you with gun kata. He's also more evasive at this stage, always creating space to pop you at a safe distance. This is then followed by a pair of orange lightsabers once he's close to death, which cannot be blocked as they stun upon hit (very easy to just get stun-locked to death here) though thankfully the fight is over as soon as you knock off the last health bar: no resurrecting mid-fight like the Undertaker.

    Yakuza 2 is also where they start to establish just how single-minded Amon's quest for vengeance has become: he stole the Komaki Technique from Kiryu's teacher, Sotaro Komaki, in order to unlock its secrets to use against Kiryu. He'll also tell you how he "swam 10 laps around Iceland's frozen cliffs" to train for this fight. Definitely fleshed out his personality more this time around.

    Yakuza 3

    Yakuza 3's Amon immediately starts with the double lightsaber Star Wars cosplay, and like last time each hit is likely to stun you just long enough for the next hit to land. After that, he's back on gun kata and high evasion, though you thankfully don't have to go through several fake-out deaths before he gives up. The gun kata attacks can be really tough to avoid though, and tend to send you flying across the arena if you get caught in them. Real fan of Guile's Flash Kicks this time around also. Most dangerous of all is his occasional grenade toss (that look like spherical cartoon bombs) that scatters lots of explosive AoEs around the arena that can really rocket up the damage if you're caught in multiple instances at once: this explosive mine trick of his will continue be the worst part of most Amon fights moving forward, since it's very easy to lose track of what he's leaving around the arena while you're keeping your eyes on the target.

    Yakuza 3 is also where the Amon meta story goes from good to great. To beat Kiryu, Amon commissions a Back to the Future Doc Brown lookalike to make a virtual reality video game machine that Amon can use to fight Kiryu as often as he likes until he's finally capable of defeating him. The good doctor eventually escapes after Amon kills an assistant, figuring his best chance at survival is to befriend the real Kiryu out in Kamurocho in the hopes that it'll deter Amon from chasing him down. That we now have futuristic sci-fi ridiculousness working in Amon's favor is where the legend of the frustrated assassin starts to really ramp up. The best part is that Amon admits Kiryu is the better warrior because of how well he can accumulate experience points, to which Kiryu has no response.

    Yakuza 4

    Yakuza 4's big new innovation involved Kiryu sharing the protagonist spotlight with three others: Akiyama, the smooth operator known for his sharp suits, fast kick-based martial arts, and effortlessly accruing large amounts of money; Saejima, a hulking yakuza jailbird with a fearsome reputation; and Tanimura, a mostly honest cop looking to do what's best for the maligned Chinese community in Kamurocho. Because there are four protagonists, there are four members of the Amon Clan to fight them: Akiyama takes on Kazuya Amon, who is equal to his speed; Saejima's foe is Jiro Amon, who is equal to his implacable bulk; and Tanimura fights Sango Amon, who is equal to his technical skills. It's also worth pointing out that each Amon "brother" looks like Jo Amon in a different wig/hat, so it might just be he cloned himself to boost his odds of winning. I wouldn't put it past him.

    Kazuya is an evasion demon; he doesn't hit all that hard, but there comes a point in the fight where you'll simply whiff with every attack, including Akiyama's lightning fast Chun-Li kicks. Counters and Heat actions are generally the only ways to finish him off. Jiro's thing is that he has an enormous enchanted sledgehammer that hurts like hell if it connects, so you have to be a little more evasive with Saejima than you normally might and wait to pick the best moments to strike. Sango's whole deal is that he brings a SMG into the fight, which miraculously becomes two SMGs once he loses half his health. Tanimura's good at counters though, so his fight's probably easiest of these three.

    The Jo Amon showdown with Kiryu is naturally the most challenging of the bunch. It starts with Jo attacking Kiryu with his own fighting style followed by the return of the fake out death, as he comes back with a second full bar of health upon defeat. After this, he'll randomly cycle through the attack patterns of his three brothers, while occasionally shooting black laser beams from space with his mobile phone which are close to insta-death attacks. I mean, if the Amon Clan can afford full body virtual reality machines, they've probably got the juice for an Akira-style orbital laser station.

    Lore-wise, not much is new besides Jo Amon thinking he can win if he brings his brothers (or clones) along for a four-on-one fight. Kind of a wuss move if you ask me, but I guess he's getting desperate.

    Yakuza 5

    Like Yakuza 4, the Amon Clan takes into account the fifth game's multiple protagonists to present a suitable Amon opponent for each. Most notable of these is Noa Amon: the teenaged "archrival" of perennial abductee Haruka Sawamura and fellow musical performer. She takes on Haruka in the same manner Haruka fights all her aggressors: with a dance-off. Apparently, centuries of generational combat knowledge and harsh training regimens makes Noa the perfect pop idol as well as the perfect killing machine.

    There are two things I love about Noa. The first is that she summons the same orbital laser that we saw in Yakuza 4, except it's only used here for pyrotechnics to throw Haruka off her routine. The second is that she, along with every other Amon Clan member, wears all black and has a pair of sunglasses, except hers are heart-shaped because even as a scion of an unstoppable family of assassins, she's adorable. Maybe she should think about joining Babymetal?

    The Kiryu vs. Jo Amon fight is as cheap as ever, of course. His new gimmick this time is to turn golden (a version of Kiryu's "Dragon's Pride" mode, which is repurposed in later games as Extreme Heat mode) which makes him invincible (unless Kiryu has also activated his Dragon's Pride) and leaves trails of fire whenever he dashes around, which forces Kiryu to stop, drop, and roll to put it out. These power-up states are temporary, but seem to happen more frequently as Amon loses more health bars (I think he has like ten in this fight?). Closer to death, he'll start psychically throwing umbrellas at you, which after orbital lasers is kinda underwhelming but still well within the realm of fantasy, to put it mildly.

    Yakuza 0

    As Jo Amon will not canonically fight Kiryu for the first time until 2005, his fight in Yakuza 0 is against Goro Majima. Despite the new opponent, Jo Amon still fights in Kiryu's Komaki style. Of course, Kiryu has yet to learn the Komaki style by 1988, but then continuity isn't really something you need to worry about with Jo Amon, along with the laws of thermodynamics and the amount of damage a human body is theoretically able to withstand. Amon pulls out a tanto for the second part of the fight and adopts Majima's own Mad Dog of Shimano style, but getting into a knife fight with Majima is generally considered a bad idea. Hell, you're screwed even if you bring a gun to a knife fight with Majima.

    It's advised to only use counters or heat actions in this fight. Why? Because Jo Amon has a counter to any normal attack where he hops back and appears to hit you with shuriken, but what he's actually doing is replacing the curatives in your inventory with pocket tissues and poison. Quaffing a "Staniman Spork," as opposed to the full-heal Staminan Spark, will drop Majima's HP to 1 and greatly reduce his heat gauge. It's a clever bluff: you're meant to think the pocket tissues are what he's replacing your inventory with, so you don't even notice that the near-identical poison potions are there too until you fall afoul of one. Drinking poison is bad enough without considering also that you've permanently lost a healing item with which to recover the damage.

    However, if you think Jo Amon's inventory shenanigans is pure trolling, then nothing's going to prepare you for Kiryu's fight against the Amon Clan's patriarch So Amon. Not only does he walk into combat with an enormous cannon (weird coincidence that this and Bloodborne launched the same month) but he'll eventually summon a helicopter to drop patio furniture on you, and then psychically toss whichever chairs and tables missed you on the first sweep. The helicopter also drops bombs and invincibility pills for So, but you can get to the latter first to turn the tables, so to speak.

    One little side-note here: the theme for the Amon fights in Yakuza 0 is Fiercest Warrior, which was introduced for the Amon fight in the jidaigeki spin-off game Ryu ga Gotoku Ishin. I guess because people liked it so much, it more or less became the Amon theme from that game onward (Yakuza 0 was the next to come along, but it also appears in Yakuza 6 and the two Kiwami games).

    Yakuza 6

    I was shocked to discover that not only were the Amon fight prerequisites greatly ameliorated - you only have to complete two specific substories instead of all of them - but Jo Amon showed up with only a single health bar. Of course, whatever false sense of security I had brewing was soon whipped away once I found out what Amon's new trick was for his Yakuza 6 appearance: drones and Roombas, each affixed with bombs and ready to get in your face or underfoot whenever you tried to close the distance for an attack.

    In fact, the robot bombs do so much damage that they're pretty much insta-kills no matter which difficulty you're on. Only way to really survive them towards the end of the fight is to trigger your Extreme Heat mode, since you can't die while it's active. Beyond the explosive consumer electronics, this fight's about as normal as Jo Amon's been for a very long time. I guess it's true that some of the franchise's magic had worn away by this game, shark-punching aside.

    Bonus note: Amon can be recruited for the game's Clan Creator system, where you fight little RTS battles on the streets of Kamurocho and the new setting Onomichi. Once you've completed the attached story to that mode, Amon shows up with his own armies as a series of ultra-tough bonus fights. Curiously, some of these fights even involve multiple Jo Amons. I guess he really did clone himself.

    Yakuza Kiwami 1, Yakuza Kiwami 2, Judgment, Yakuza Kenzan, Yakuza Ishin, Yakuza Dead Souls

    This is going to sound a little hypocritical, but since I've yet to play any of these games and may one day do so, I'm loath to look up what happens in their Amon fights. There are so few "oh what the hell is this garbage" moments in video games these days what with accessibility and quality-of-life features being so much more preponderant. I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad thing that designers are trolling their players less frequently but I'd like to hold onto the surprise of Amon's other nasty tricks a little while longer, especially since there are fewer equivalents willing to screw around with the player outside of the occasional Undertale. So, um, sorry for spoiling that same surprise about seven times over above? Uhhhhh... gotta go!

    (By means of a send-off/apology, here's a medley of Amon themes from all his appearances. My favorite is probably the Kiwami 2 one. They really went all out with it.)

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    Justin258

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    I haven't read this entire thing but I must know if the title is a pun on Amon Amarth, whether related to the band or the location in Middle Earth.

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    Mento

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    #2  Edited By Mento  Moderator

    @justin258: Seems likely.

    I could've also gone with something less sweaty too, like "Ranks Amon The Best." Or I could've skipped using puns entirely like a normal person might.

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    Justin258

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    @mento: I, for one, am quite glad to see an Amon Amarth pun out in the wild.

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    Teddie

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    The Judgment Amon fight is insane, mostly because he spends half the fight attacking the framerate.

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    Efesell

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    The Judgment Amon is pretty wild in general, it might be my favorite.

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    htr10

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    Awesome write-up. I’ve beaten a couple of the Yakuza games and had no idea about Amon.

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