Game Review: Yakuza 0 (RGG Studios)
Yakuza 0 almost killed me.
At the very least it dismantled me, exposing the feebleness of my self-constitution and assumed psychological resilience. My dietary quotas, my literary and intellectual quotas exposed themselves as options to the diatribe that is Kamurocho-Sotenburi. My completionist mindset has led me astray into becoming a dopamine-driven slave to everything Yakuza has built itself to be. It is implicitly Japan's answer to a Fortnite or Roblox, itself becoming a digitized means of existence rather than a story to pass through. It is an endless entertainment hub within a piece of entertainment, a bafflingly ambitious smorgasbord of all things Sega and Japan, the cumulative product and perfection of the Yakuza formula.
I didn't play Yakuza, I lived in Yakuza for a month, every waking hour becoming either for necessary classwork or Yakuza time. It's a game so compartmentalized that I was able to play Yakuza every day for a week for entire nights while never actually playing Yakuza. You can spend an entire night trying to master some antiquated racing arcade game then press the back button after 2 hours of play to see Majima as dreary-eyed as you are. I got way too good at the Disco game for how much it annoyed me at first, memorizing all the song patterns, only for none of it to matter after leaving the Maharaja. It's a self-contained proxy for the absurd task that is playing video games. I hate gambling in real life, I think it's psychologically disgusting that it exists. Did that stop my completionist fixations from leading me to spend an hour+ on each of the gambling mini-games to earn the capped yet compulsory profits needed for a single completion point? No, for I nonetheless jumped between fury and ecstasy, deconstituted myself to the very junkie I loathe all for an infinitesimal 1/40th of a character upgrade I would never use. The malady of fixation devoured me, as the list of priorities kept my head spinning in any direction that wasn't exercising mental and bodily autonomy, in pursuit of 100% completion points. The disjointed means by which I would try to accomplish 5 tasks at once within Yakuza observably began to transfer to my method of approaching real-life tasks. I developed a habit of punching, kicking and blocking air when standing around my house not doing anything. I experienced a psychological loss of self that even now upon finishing, I can not say I'm entirely free of. I just hope, once I wrap the bow on this package, I never have a game ever do this to me again. But the complex is still there, ain't it?
I wouldn't call it voyeurism, but the depth of existence within Kamurocho and Sotenburi quite literally places you psychologically there in a world where the stakes of money are practically absent and the social pressure of having a body also gets absorbed into an indestructable stoic himbo, for whom eating is an option and death is reversible. The full brunt of escapism has struck me and it is intoxicating. This is my first time ever within any game title where I forgot I existed while playing. I'd close the game at 4AM with pounding headaches, red eyes and obscene thirst and hunger, where I'd then go on to have dreams not entirely separated from life experiences lived by proxy of Yakuza. It keeps you so mentally occupied that it's a psychological tour-de-force within a game I think I spent less than $10 on. It's a baffling addiction, a baffling quantity of effort anyone hardly profits from, almost anti-capitalist in how it hypothetically endlessly provides while never asking for more. I'm fully convinced one could actually role-play a human life within the bounds of Yakuza 0 and not get bored of it for a good month. Is this the end goal of creating games? Is this the end goal of their psychological practices that convince people to deem a game great? Is this all just a massive corporate effort to give us peasants the stakeless privileged life that we drool after by stifling perceived inexperience? It must be, for Yakuza 0 is maliciously good.
Is it heavily misogynist, has horrendous queer representation and is a tinge racist? Absolutely. I *had to* skip through 30 p*rnos, and probably spent 4 hours of my life between talking to bikini-clad models at a telephone club talking about their breast size and hunting down digital cardstock of fetishized models for a pervert. Nonetheless, something must be said as to how effectively Yakuza can consume, itself become the medium of video games within a single shrink-wrapped package. As I approached the final few chapters, my completion list in the mid-90% range, 100 hours in, I noticed how my tireless running between objective markers was replaced with walking, how I started to stand still in parks and just look at the neon vistas. I took deep breaths and tried to feel out what the air would feel like, smell like, as I paced around the same Tokyo/Osakan blocks I had ran through 20 times before. I began to read the signs (I've been studying Japanese) and appreciate the windows and un-enterable businesses. I had forgotten what had drew me to this world, this series. Lost the very essence of the world to the menial tasks it brimmed with. I learned Mahjong, Shogi and gained a gambling addiction all because I was escaping, running from, the very story and environment I bought the game to appreciate. I haven't really written anything on the fantastic story or characters, have I? Perhaps that's because that's not what Yakuza is to me. Perhaps Yakuza to me is the obsessive consumption of distractions to me. Shit, I don't need to spell this out, do I?
As I write this review, I have the game paused right before the final boss, my completion list at 100%. I don't know what lies on the other side of this, whether the book closes like the death of my miniature meta-life, or whether I crawl on within it's serotonin-soaked claws, acting for no predetermined objective within the world, with no purpose but my own perpetual desire to only exist in this meta-life. Either way, I feel legitimate grief, and it makes me feel sick that I do, that the game is about to end. It's been an amazing ride, at least in some of it's compartments, one that's undeniably changed me and my relationship to video games, but one that's halted me, deconstructed me, and showed me the phoniness of my composition. Enough with this sub-story of writing this review and it's means of extending my relationship with the experience, it's time to cross that final veil, to return control to the Majima who's been standing idle within SEGA arcade.