“Cool Japan” is a tourist marketing and international relations soft power term used by Japan to refer to how they benefit when people from other countries think Japan is cool, so they try to push the Cool Japan image. The idea that Japan is a nerd wonderland where anime and video games are born emerged on its own in the 90s, but it’s since become, like, an officially supported project of the Japanese government. As far as I know, Sega doesn’t work with the Japanese government at all when making the Yakuza games, and I’m positive the government would not have chosen to put so much emphasis on red light districts and organized crime if they were commissioning the game from scratch, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn if Sega, like, accepted grant money in exchange for having a guy from the tourism board be part of the project’s leadership, because the fundamental premise of the Yakuza series is basically that it is a digital vacation to Cool Japan.
Like other digital vacations (principally Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed), a healthy heaping of bad guys in need of violence is dolloped generously across the place you’re vacationing in to give you cool things to do while you’re walking around downtown Tokyo (or, in some of the games, other cities throughout Japan), and the game’s main plot focuses on giving you a reason why all these guys are trying to beat you up while you’re trying to find the arcade. The main plot for these vacation-y type games often grates badly against the vacation vibes, with Far Cry 4 in particular (and from what I recall, Far Cry 5 as well, although I don’t want to commit to that when I haven’t played it in years and never finished it) feeling like its main plot is a completely different game from its open world.
Yakuza skirts around this because it’s called Yakuza, and its setting is not just Tokyo generally, but specifically Kamurocho, a fictionalized version of the Tokyo red light district of Kabukicho. Its main plots are certainly not accurate depictions of the Yakuza, but they do feel like pretty much exactly the kinds of stories I would expect to hear while taking a walking tour advertised as “legends of the Yakuza” through Kabukicho. The stories are embellished to the point where only a very gullible person would take them at face value, but they do have some connection to real history and sub-cultures and they tie themselves heavily to the people and places you’re walking through. They’re not concerned with accuracy, but they are concerned with being here, in the place you are taking the tour, walking the same streets, using the same buildings, and a degree of authenticity is imposed on them by that gimmick.
The game’s side quests (or “substories”) feel even more like stories from a walking tour in that they trigger semi-randomly while you’re walking around and are usually a brief vignette of an interesting thing that might happen in Japan. Some of them are things that would only happen in Japan, and some of them are just an interesting thing that could’ve happened anywhere but actually did happen on the specific street we’re walking on now, so the guide is telling you about it real quick because it’s like a five minute walk from the site of the famous “Empty Lot” that different Yakuza families fought a small war over in the 80s to the office building where Kazuma Kiryu beat up thirty people in what was allegedly an attempt to break up an embezzling scheme within the Tojo Clan of the Yakuza, and the guide needs something to keep those five minutes from dragging too much so they tell you a story about how we’re now walking past the restaurant where Goro Majima pretended to be dating a young woman he had never met because he happened to fit the fairly outlandish appearance she had made up to convince her father that she wasn’t single and she had persuaded Goro to help her keep up the bluff for one night while her father was visiting.
And Yakuza’s open world mechanics emphasize the vacation even more strongly. You recover health by eating food. You can go into convenience stores to buy snacks and the Japanese equivalent of 7/11 hot dogs to carry around for health regeneration mid-battle, and you can also go to various street stalls and sit down restaurants to eat food for a larger health boost at a specific location. The game tracks which menu items you have and haven’t ordered at each shop and encourages you to try them all. The eating animation is exactly the same no matter what you buy, which is a disappointment, but the game struggles as hard as it can to convince you to treat these restaurants not as a way to exchange in-game yen for health, but to instead view them as simulated dining experiences with the restaurant design, the way waiters or stall owners interact with you being reasonably verisimilitudinous, and by building a tracker for 100% completion into the interface for choosing a meal and thus encouraging you to actually look at the menu instead of just hammering the first item over and over until you’re maxed out.
The game has a dozen-odd weird minigames scattered about. There are arcades where you can play games or try to win something from a claw machine, casinos where you can play card games, bars where you can play pool or darts, karaoke places where you can play rhythm games that display all the button prompts for the XBox controller even though mine is Playstation, and people to play traditional Japanese board games like Shogi and Mahjong with.
None of these things have anything to do with being a Yakuza and many of them seem out of place with the personality of the character you’re playing, to the point where part of what makes the main plot and substories feel like things you’re hearing about in a walking tour is that the protagonist of the main plot feels like a totally different person from the easily distracted guy walking around helping little kids get the new Dragon Quest game on release day and playing Shogi with old men on the side of the road. This is probably the biggest weakness of the Yakuza games.
Open world games gravitate somewhat in the direction of being a digital vacation to a place because that’s basically what an open world is, but where the Assassin’s Creed series feels like vacations to periods of history, the Just Cause series feels like vacations to action movies, and the Far Cry series muddies its vacation vibes with main plots that emphasize how the country you have come to is a horrible and depressing place best avoided, Yakuza feels like its actual goal is to be a simulated vacation to a specific Tokyo neighborhood.
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