{"id":4501,"date":"2006-10-26T21:53:28","date_gmt":"2006-10-26T11:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=4501"},"modified":"2014-05-03T19:31:55","modified_gmt":"2014-05-03T09:31:55","slug":"yakuza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=4501","title":{"rendered":"Yakuza"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"yakuza\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Platform:\u00a0 <\/strong>Playstation 2<\/em>
\nDeveloper:\u00a0 <\/strong>Sega<\/em>
\nPublisher:\u00a0<\/strong> Sega
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

There is plenty that has been written about Sega’s Yakuza<\/em> game.\u00a0 A spiritual successor to the ambitious Shemue<\/em> series, Yakuza<\/em> made waves in Japan as one of the first videogames to explore the topic of Yakuza gangs and it is also one of the most expensive videogames ever made.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, in my mind, I think the Western translation of the game will go down as one of the best examples of validating Sony’s desire to introduce BluRay as the storage format of the future in gaming.<\/p>\n

Yakuza<\/em> follows the story of Kazuma, a man who murders his oyabun (crime boss) and is imprisoned for ten years.\u00a0 When he is released, he finds that his girlfriend is missing, his brother is now one of the leaders of a yakuza family and everyone is searching for the missing cache of $2 billion yen and a mysterious young girl that is somehow connected to everything.<\/p>\n

As mentioned earlier, Yakuza <\/em>is a spiritual successor to Shenmue<\/em>.\u00a0 The game eschews its Quick Time Event oriented gameplay but retains the graphical style, the 24 hour (non real time) clock, easter eggs and mission structure.<\/p>\n

Based unofficially in Shinjuku’s red light district in Tokyo, the level of detail Sega has achieved in recreating a bustling populated Tokyo district is a stunning achievement on a 7 year old piece of hardware.\u00a0 There aren’t many games that look like this.\u00a0 The constant gloomy wet weather and neon lights in a decaying city reminded me most of Westwood’s PC adaptation of Blade Runner<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The game divides its progression into story chapters.\u00a0 Within each chapter there is usuallya couple of objectives that need to be met to further the story.\u00a0 Most of this is usually combat driven and the game controls in a similar fashion to conventional side scrolling beat ’em ups with hoards of identical enemies.\u00a0 The unique gameplay theme really plays to Sega’s advantage here though as each battle is preceeded by a short splash screen and a musical interlude which seems to be very deliberately evoking the soundtrack to Kill Bill<\/em>.\u00a0 So while it may be yet another Random Battle With 8 Identical Yakuza guys, the feeling that you’re about to unleash a beating not unlike what The Bride doles out to the Crazy 88s somewhat aleviates the usual tedium of level-grinding.\u00a0 This is helped by Sega’s successful portrayal of Kazuma in the cutscenes as a supreme badass.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the game still ultimately disappoints.\u00a0 Here was a game that was receiving serious plaudits in Japan for its insight into the how the Yakuza<\/em> operated and for telling a compelling story within this unique environment.\u00a0 When bringing the game to the rest of the world, Sega was faced with a conundrum.\u00a0 There is not enough memory on a DVD to have voice acting in both Japanese and English.\u00a0 While films such as Amelie<\/em> and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon<\/em> have largely removed the barriers and concerns that most Westerb audiences would not watch a film with subtitles, the same cannot be said of the videogame industry which continues to dub every Japanese game that leaves its shores with no option of retaining the original language and using subtitles.\u00a0 While it may not be much of a big deal in fantasy RPG title with no grounding in real life culture, it is crucial to making a game about the Yakuza<\/em> feel authentic.<\/p>\n

Sega took the dubbing option with Yakuza<\/em> and it suffers terribly for it.\u00a0 There are some big name actors recruited to play the roles but the translation is dismal.\u00a0 What should’ve been an artful and sensitive treatment of the Japanese dialogue is turned into mush.\u00a0 A lot of the cultural references seem to have been flushed out and the swearing in the game is ridiculous.\u00a0 The game is structured to have random battles and when half of them are started by enemies yelling out ‘Hey, fuckface!’ it gives the game an aura more akin to Team America<\/em>.\u00a0 The swearing in this game is really clumsy and far too frequent.<\/p>\n

Will Sega ever manage to perfect this formula?\u00a0 Shenmue<\/em> didn’t quite get it right either.\u00a0 I hope they keep trying and Sega is to be commended for making a project like this in the first place.\u00a0 And when it they finally perfect this formula and get it right, it’s going to be one sweet game.\u00a0 As is stands, Yakuza<\/em> is still a very good game but a disappointing one also.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Platform:\u00a0 Playstation 2 Developer:\u00a0 Sega Publisher:\u00a0 Sega There is plenty that has been written about Sega’s Yakuza game.\u00a0 A spiritual successor to the ambitious Shemue series, Yakuza made waves in Japan as one of the first videogames to explore the topic of Yakuza gangs and it is also one of the most expensive videogames ever …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":14345,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[155,825,501],"class_list":["post-4501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-playstation-2","tag-sega","tag-yakuza"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4501"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14347,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4501\/revisions\/14347"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}