15 reviews liked by OsoMark


To live is to not run away

The original Yakuza, the game that transitioned Sega out of the in-house console era onto the PS2, opens with this line. It embodies the spirit of the entire franchise that would come to be. Yakuza’s spirit was that of the romanticized Bushido code mixed with the rich atmosphere and contemporary setting of Yakuza crime movies. What distinguished Kiryu from the real-life yakuza was his way of life: his tenacity and insistence on walking the path laid out for him.

Yakuza 0, as a tenth anniversary celebration, looks to explore that tenacity, that insistence on looking past the inflating yen of the late 80s, and direct Kiryu and another man with a common conviction—Goro Majima—toward their personal truths.

> Through this whole ordeal, I saw a lot of people try to set things right. It blew me away, man. Not just yakuza. Civilians too. It really drove home just how green I still am.

The streets of Kamurocho in ‘88 were dirty and grimy. There’s a bed of trash coating the sidewalk, and gaudy lights and excess are laid out everywhere. It’s the kind of environment that breeds monsters willing to tear each other apart, tooth and nail, for a spot of land about the size of a doghouse. Perfect space for a 20-year-old Kiryu, aimlessly following the whims of others and vaguely following his adoptive father’s footsteps.

Kiryu’s philosophy and way of life is slowly being brought to the surface. Every surprise attack he gets from Kuze, every slimy wishy-washy opinion from Awano, and every piece of shit thing a yakuza takes the liberty of doing to those he cares about pushes him over the edge. There’s a level of reverence 0’s Kiryu plot has towards the character’s legacy as a whole – filling in some of the missing pieces of characterization that understandably couldn’t be explored in the original ‘05 game.
Kuze specifically is masterfully crafted as a benchmark for how Kiryu is doing, and his level of resolve. He’s a stubborn old man that tries to constantly beat Kiryu down through raw strength reminiscent of his boxer days. He’s the crown jewel of Kiryu’s antagonists in his simplicity and brutality. Tachibana was able to confide in a young Kiryu, but it took his death for a switch to flip in the kid’s head – he’s going to stop the lieutenants with his own two fists even if it costs him his life. Walking away, the old man’s able to acknowledge Kiryu as fit for the job.

Shibusawa isn’t nearly as competently written as Kuze, but his ability to challenge Kiryu’s beliefs and sense of direction by highlighting the futility of honorable yakuza and Shintaro Kazama’s disregard for the idea forces Kiryu to make a personal change – he’s no longer his oyabun’s puppet but wants nothing more than to carve out his own fate.
As he gets his last drink in at Serena, Kiryu throws on a gray suit: it’s not a pure white, but black isn’t particularly fitting either. It’s grounded by a passionate, burning red collared shirt underneath.


> Watchin’ you, I figured out just how important hangin’ on really is.


Soutenbori is similarly drowning in excess, but a level of sophistication comes from the sprawling cabaret scene and laid-back food-focused economy of Osaka. The indulgence of the settings hides the truth: it’s a jail for a Majima in his mid-20s, treated like a toy, and referred to as “Shimano’s project."

Yakuza 4 sets the groundwork for Majima as more than comic relief but establishes him as a broken man using the facade of the Mad Dog to get through to the next day. There’s a certain level of reverence both Majima and the story itself share in regards to the alleged “slayer of 18," Taiga Saejima.

Majima’s arc has a lot of highlights, one of the most prominent being the parallels drawn between a young, recently traumatized Goro and a young girl limited by her psychosomatically triggered blindness. Makoto grounds Majima’s story and forces him to punch above his weight and be shaped into more than just a hitman. The implication in Yakuza 4’s cutscene where he and Saejima prepare to gun down the Ueno Seiwa clan is that this isn’t their first time doing something like this. Saejima himself has done some dirty shit and no way his sworn brother hasn’t tagged along.
Unfortunately, Makoto is frustratingly passive throughout most of the story. She is entirely aware of this, but this self-awareness doesn’t really sway me over to loving her character. It doesn’t help that her big statement of independence is where she foolishly puts her life at risk in front of a cabal of hardened yakuza.

Sagawa is excellent and stands as a checkpoint for Majima to look at as he grows and experiences the storyline. He’s always right around the corner, taunting Majima and being a stick up the guy’s ass. It’s unfortunate that no one else really has the staying power he does consistently throughout the narrative. Lao Gui feels like a last-minute addition that is hamfistedly Majima’s final boss.

Goro Majima’s story is one that pushes the guy into his own twisted way of life – even if he pushes everyone away from him and destroys his ability to be engaged with seriously. As a mad dog, nobody can throw him into a bullshit scheme. No one can trick and deceive him, nobody can pull out weird underhanded tactics, and no one can ever toss him into an alley and gouge out his eye.

Majima is not Kiryu. I wish this could have been further reinforced throughout Zero. This might be a bit of a hot take, but I genuinely wished Majima had taken out Lao Gui with his own two hands. Sera bullshits him with weird excuses like “Makoto wouldn’t want to carry that weight”, knowing full well the girl still resents the Dojima Family deeply and openly expresses a desire for their destruction. Majima’s big poignant moment could have been giving Lao Gui a quick gash to the head with a knife, refusing to take orders from anyone he doesn’t feel like. Majima didn’t have a Nishiki-type figure to stop him at the moment – Saejima is in jail. I was really hungry for the more unstable, vicious Majima we see in Yakuza 1, and the lack of these moments in the main story make it hard to believe the guy organically transitioned into that older iteration.

While Zero continues this exploration beautifully, its characterization of Majima doesn’t quite strike the balance of moral grayness in his earlier iterations with the more archetypal heroism of past RGG protagonists—he's forced to be a Kiryu-type in substories, side content, and at points in the main story.

The grind of the bubble

Zero is in love with the legacy of the franchise, and as a last-ditch effort to encourage newcomers, it pushes the player into engaging with its side attractions. As this isn’t my first time experiencing the game, it really got on my nerves.

Majima’s Cabaret Club Czar starts off as a fun minigame that espouses traditional Yakuza protagonist beliefs of fair play and fair treatment of women. It takes the awful cabaret hostess minigame from Yakuza 3 and 4 and flips it on its head, making it an enjoyable bite-sized experience you can knock out in 3-minute intervals.

The different women you interact with are really likable and fun to be around. Their presence is made clear through the cabaret “practice” dialogue you go through with them, and the outings like pool, disco, and karaoke feel very emblematic of the era. I think my favorite hostess was Ai.

It follows a very predictable pattern that side content tends to follow in these games in the same vein as Yakuza 5’s racing. You’ve got five big bads that each answer to an even bigger bad, and after beating the shit out of each of them, they join your side. While you can see the progression from a mile, you’d have to be a real cynical person to not get even a grin out of the interactions.

The problem is, like most of 0’s side content, you’re pushed into doing an entire session of the mechanic starting the game out, and if you want to meaningfully level up your skill tree and remove its blockages, you really have to thoroughly and consistently engage with it. CCC is grindy, and if you’re not doing it on the side, you’ll have to just dedicate days of your life to catching up if you want to really level up the game’s styles.

You end it with the Mad Dog awakening, which is less a thematic parallel and more a gesture of fan service.

Looking at Kiryu’s Real Estate Royale, things are a lot worse. While CCC was a minigame that demanded your active attention, Real Estate Royale is entirely passive and expects you to dedicate real life time to it. The subplot with your two coworkers and the Five Kings is a less engaging version of Majima’s. Real estate is far more inflexible to different players’ preferences on how they engage with side content. The expectation is that the user would be tending to real estate on the side between the plots, but not only does this fundamentally break the airtight pacing of the main story, but it’s far too common for players to be too engaged to care for the extraneous bits of a completely disconnected narrative. There’s also an irony in the core mechanic being real estate and accumulating absolute mountains of money that eclipse anything the main story is fighting over.

RER also expects you to accumulate a lot of money through purchases of various properties in the seedy Kamurocho underbelly. If you haven’t figured out the common fan strategy of cheesing Mr. Shakedown and getting multipliers off your collection of money, you’ll have to manage by grinding the real estate mechanic itself, gambling on janken half-naked wrestling games, and hopefully running into a couple Nouveau Riche enemies.

At the end, you’re greeted with the legendary Dragon of Dojima style, but about one-third of its usual speed thanks to Yakuza 0’s heat meter system.

That brings me to combat.

Zero’s combat in some ways tries to clean up the extravagant and incredibly long heat moves and over the top nature of Yakuza 5, the last mainline game with the traditional fist-to-fist brawler combat. The multiple style approach from the samurai spin offs Kenzan and Ishin was implemented here and in theory it’s a great idea. You have different approaches to handling combat scenarios and different flavors of enemy. However, the experience is held back entirely by an asinine decision – tying the heat meter’s increases to an increase in speed. This means if you have an empty heat meter, you’re incredibly slow. This happens quite a bit entering fights after having drained your heat on a previous encounter or boss fight, and it makes it increasingly more difficult to even land a hit in.

The point of Heat is to reward the player for staying on top of combat fundamentals by granting them the ability to pull off high-damage spectacle. It was nailed as early as the first game, but somehow they managed to take a step back in Zero? Like I mentioned above, Dragon of Dojima becomes a completely unviable style in this game simply because of how it’s clearly not designed to be played at .75x speed. The style you busted your ass for isn’t really worth using at any point in the game.

A true love letter

Despite it all, Yakuza 0 is an incredibly competent love letter towards the Yakuza franchise as a whole. Its consistent tone, airtight pacing, and avoidance of over-the-top twists characteristic of this franchise helped push Yakuza into the modestly successful franchise it's currently become in the West. Without this game, me and a lot of other people wouldn’t even know it existed. Zero raised the bar for maturity in the series’ storytelling and the games that would follow took the lessons from Zero to great success.


Gaiden is the indulgent, confident love letter and send-off to not only Kiryu, but the old style of RGG Studio, one-on-one fights to the death and all. It's able to bridge three games together and tie their plot points and themes together in an incredible 15-hour product.

Yakuza 5's expansive, sprawling side content and focus on ambition and finding direction and the future. Yakuza 6's melancholy send-off to the past and willingness to bring Kiryu's old life to a close. And Yakuza 7's strength in the connections and bonds we've made throughout the journey.

However, the main game that lets Gaiden hit as hard as it does is 3: the one where Kiryu shifts towards a father figure and irreversibly changes his life in the same vein as his oyabun.

Kiryu's journey has become one where the Dragon is chained down -- forced to submit to the whims of those around him. He's been neutered, and the pain and suffering he has to withstand can't reflect openly or impede on his job. Of course, this can only go so far, and it really is impossible for this guy to not stubbornly stand behind his ideals.

At its core, this is an experience that could only exist out of love for a long-running series vicariously experienced and developed, and the level of quality present here is even more surprising when you take into account this being a spinoff -- presented as an appetizer for the main meal coming in January.


It was perfect. Perfect, everything, down to the last minute detail.

When I think of the beginning of my teenage years and the games that occupied that space as I grew older I tend to think of a few different ones.

Assassin's Creed, Oblivion at my, at the time, best friend's house (R.I.P. Max), Heavenly Sword, Blazblue Calamity Trigger and most importantly of all I think about Mirror's Edge.

Mirror's Edge upon its first announcement blew me completely away. It came at that time of my early budding explorative amazement with art and different mediums where I would look at an E3 show or trailers online or discussion of different things and I, all wide eyed and still not that aware of what the medium can fully do yet, go like "holy shit VIDEO GAMES huh? What can this medium do? What CAN'T it do? Holy shit! That Killzone 2 trailer is TOTALLY real!"

In the case of Mirror's Edge I'd never seen first person platforming and parkour quite like this. I'd never seen a game try to be this and try to do anything like this. I hyper fixated on it, I thought about its wonderful usage of color in the trailers and gameplay I'd see of it, I remember wanting to know more about the dystopian 1984 ass world it takes place in, I wanted to run, I wanted to jump, I wanted to wahoo even all while radly jump kicking a cop off of a rooftop. I was spellbound by this game made by those wildin Battlefield devs that I didn't know much about at the time and what they were going for. It just hit something for me in a really special kinda way.

Eventually I was able to get it and to say my expectations were met and exceeded would honestly be a complete and total understatement. I played this game to fucking death, I wanted to get levels down, do no gun runs, get the best routes and lines down that I could. It excited me and while I didn't have a lot of people to share that passion with as a kid, I at least had my older sibling who shared that passion with me. I think I even remember kinda wanting to do parkour too but being too afraid of pain to ever bother trying lol.

So for me picking this game up is picking up a lot of memories I guess. Like a sort of time capsule, I remember the couch I played it on, I remember playing it with my sibling and trying to beat each other at the races, I remember playing it late into the night on weekends and my blink and ya miss em summers. I would take it to my Dad's place when we had to go, I would watch videos and runs of the trials other people online were uploading at the time.

I would play some other things too but this game just didn't leave my mind a lot for a good few years. It in a way was a comfort game for me. It made the bad and hard things that I had trouble dealing with and had difficulty fully grasping in my life not seem so bad to me and it gave me the genuine escape I tended to look for in those days. I would always return to it and give it a few more playthroughs. I just absolutely fuckin loved it.

Eventually though I put it down and didn't return to it for a long time. I would get it through a Humble Bundle years ago at this point again on PC but wouldn't really get too deep into it again. I picked up Catalyst too (though I forget if through a sale or bundle years ago too?) and have still only barely played the beginning of it. I think a part of me especially at that later time (about 2015-2018) was trying to get away from these feelings that I associated with bad things from my life that I was only then fully coming to terms with and trying to figure out how to really deal with.

Embarrassing experiences and personal things that with hindsight hits in a way that I don't wanna describe. It hurt to remember these things around that time, dealing with anything quite head on felt fairly impossible to me and this game was tied to a youth that I felt and honestly still feel was somewhat false in ways. Looking at this game I felt a sort of void and I didn't want to feel that anymore. Honestly I just didn’t wanna think about anything, I think in a way I became the void I wanted to escape without realizing it. So I just let it sit there in the pit of my memory, faint nostalgia and personal pains for a long while.

So I couldn't really tell you why I decided to just replay this today. After making videos I tend to like to chill with things I play for myself and review here or on letterboxd or whatever, detached from videos, and just write even more for myself and for all of the wonderful people who follow me and read all of this shit I write. But honestly I don't think that's fully why. I think maybe that wide eyed middle school MCR listening wannabe goth 7th grade self that's in there somewhere carrying all of the good and bad memories alike wanted to play it again and get me to see what I loved so much about it.

Playing this again I see it. The wonderfully smooth parkour that feels like a dream once you get the flow down. The levels that feel so great to learn and replay over and over again, the sense of height and verticality as you look down at the world below you from the high rooftops above. The wonderful art direction, the melancholy yet intense score just all of this comes together that makes something very special to me.

Even its imperfections just make me feel so happy for some reason. The clearly crowbarred in sloppy ass gun combat that doesn't fit what the game is really going for, some of the level design being a bit messy and somewhat flow breaking with the parkour (looking at you sewers) the first real go around, ledge grabs where sometimes I feel like I should've had that jump right and instead I completely plummeted to my death, the kinda empty and messy story. It all just makes up what Mirror's Edge is to me. An innovative testing ground of ideas and ambitions from a team clearly wanting to try something different than what they felt the norm of FPS games were and to me that just makes it special. Like Gravity Rush, even its imperfections add to the overall charm and humanity of the project itself. It just connects with me in a very particular kind of way.

Even though I just knocked the story, I also gotta admit that Faith and her want to get Kate out of the situation she has been tricked into resonates with me in ways that I don't wanna go into. Just know I relate to Faith in a lot of ways and although not the most fleshed out it just hits me in a very particular way.

This whole replay of the game just reminded me of a lot of things too. A lot of people that I miss. The places I haven't been to since the last time I left California. How much time has passed since then. How much time continues to pass as I and the people I know get older. All that I still wanna do with my life and the dreams and goals I have for myself and my future.

I miss those days and late nights on the couch with my sibling doing runs of this game. I miss that couch where I kept doing my best to get the pacifist achievement runs. I miss the couch where I completely beefed the speedruns cause I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be at them. I miss those days and some of those good feelings that come with them but I carry the memories with me forward as I continue to live on, both the good and the bad ones. I live to keep those memories alive, to find joy in the things that younger me never got to experience or always wanted to see or play or go through or listen to.

I guess in a huge roundabout sorta way I’m saying that Mirror’s Edge is why I love video games and art in general. Or it’s at least one of the many reasons. I love connecting to works on such a deep level like this. I love feeling like a piece of art is speaking to me in a way that it may or may not for someone else. I feel like I’m giving back to myself because I’ve needed to in ways and I feel like playing this again has just helped me even see that I needed to reconnect with that in a way. I needed to know that it’s okay to feel all of this right now. All these feelings of doubt within life choices, within where I am and why I’m still here and what matters the most to me, of what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown and changed and continue to grow and change. The fear I have of the future and things that could happen to me or the people around me but my desire to still take it on regardless and try to keep pushing forward regardless.

It’s easy for me to just feel kinda stuck sometimes and even just running through the same thought processes on loop while I’m trying to understand why exactly I’m feeling that way. I didn’t expect this at all or even realize this would happen on this replay after all of these years but I’m really happy that it did what it did for me. Honestly writing this and just sitting with these thoughts did too. Maybe a bit indulgent on my part but fuck it this is Backloggd! We all indulge a little!

At the end of the day I’m honestly just glad to Still be Alive ya know? (Corny I know but I wanted to end on a nice note and I wanted an excuse to link the song! It’s really good! I used to listen to it on my Sansa MP3 Player on my way to school!)

This is just so slickly presented, so focused and perfectly lean. The handling is like coasting through a dream, every drift and turn feeling like you're entering a zen state when you perfect a track and hit those perfect slides. The music, the endless summertime vibes this hits on oh so wonderfully. That opening FMV that had me spellbound within its vibes.

Each track with the perfect kind of coastal dreamlike hypnotic sense of wonder, each car feeling distinct to drive and fun to master. The type of game that you throw on when all you wanna do is fuckin vibe and lose yourself in pure 1999 circuit racing bliss.

The stories while light keep your attention through each GP and provide a nice bit of sentimentality between each race. Everything about this game appeals to me in such a hyper specific way. None of the other Ridge Racer games that I've tried or played have hit for me quite like this game does. It hits everything it does in a way that no other arcade racer ever has. I realize now that I've been looking for this game my entire life and I'm so happy that I've finally played it. Namco really couldn't lose in the 90's. Making 2 of my favorite games ever (Ace Combat 3 Electrosphere my beloved....) absolute fuckin peak.

I've been sitting here just honestly trying to figure out how best to put words to this game after finally finishing it with my girlfriend. There's just nothing like Killer7. Even the few things I've played Suda was involved with post Killer7 aren't like Killer7. Killer7 is Killer7.

Killer7 has dug its way deep into my core and deeply affected me. Like taking some mishmashes of Resident Evil and older adventure games to create something so wild to tell a story this all over and about shit like the US war machine and its consequences with our allied nations (especially Japan), the CIA and government in general doing shady shit and selling people "the American Dream" ad nauseum while committing another warcrime atrocity at a country not too far away that has a resource that shithead fascists want, the way that art speaks to reality which speaks back into art with a cyclical kind of neverending spiral.

It's crazy, it's bombastic, it's fuckin special. Everything about this game, aesthetically, emotionally, textually just fuckin meshes together so perfectly. Every aspect of this was just going so absolutely perfectly. The sound design, the music, the aesthetics, the gameplay is so considered fuck.

The personalities and quirks of the titular 7 shine so spectacularly as a result. Everything about this game oozes charm, pizazz, style and depth that outside of the context of a video game just wouldn't work the same way at all. Even apparently unfinished it still strikes as hard and as strongly at all of its aspirations that it is trying to.

It leaves so much for you to take in, interpret and sit with and I absolutely adore that for it. I didn't get everything within Killer7. The second playthrough I end up doing for a video will probably help some things I missed better click into place. But even with the things I didn't fully get or understand, so much of it clicked to such a perfect degree. This game just settles in the brain as a true fuckin standout, a once in a lifetime experience. It may not be for everybody but to me I will always see it as an absolute achievement that this team constructed together.

I wish I could play this for the first time again. This is fuckin kino.

todos los días doy gracias por la existencia de Ron Gilbert

Omori

2020