I love games that are firmly rooted in a sense of place. For the past year-and-change, I’ve been slowly working my way through the Yakuza franchise, and part of the reason it has taken me so long to get through that series is that I’ve spent so much time off the beaten path of the narrative in the labyrinthine sidewalks and alleyways of Kamurocho, Ryu ga Gotoku Studio’s fictionalized rendition of the Kabukicho entertainment district in Shinjuku.
Despite not technically existing, Kamurocho has become a place I recognize, in the same way you might recognize your own city or town. I can navigate it without needing to look (too hard) at a map, I know where the pawn shop and the tax-free store are, and I can take you to my favorite restaurants.
Even when Yakuza travels to other locations, like Okinawa or Fukuoka or Yokohama, they’ve managed to build that same sense of place into each of them. You never spend enough time in those places (aside from Ijincho in Yokohama, the primary setting of Like a Dragon) to feel fully settled in like with Kamurocho, but you can tell that the development team put the same level of care into making these places feel just as lived-in, regardless.
They do this, in part, by populating each place with people whose lives are rooted here. Whether they live or work in the area, the people in Kamurocho or Ijincho or Ryukyu (Okinawa) or Nagasugai (Fukuoka) have a vested interest and stake in what happens in their communities, and this shines through in the games’ legendary substories.
What I find particularly fascinating is that, while these areas are often physically grimy or portrayed in an unsavory light with respect to the rest of society, much of the Yakuza series in particular is about the resistance to sanitization in these places, that is to say, resistance to assimilation, gentrification, and ultimately erasure of so-called “gray zones.” After all, where else but Kamurocho can you help a dominatrix perfect her craft, race pocket circuit cars for prizes, and bowl so well you win a chicken named Nugget who becomes your business manager in a single night? While also fighting a crime syndicate?
Another franchise that really does it for me is The World Ends with You. Full disclosure, I wrote the Polygon review for NEO: The World Ends with You, so I won’t get into any spoilers I didn’t get into there. But TWEWY‘s sense of place is incredibly strong. Like Yakuza, the Shibuya that makes it into TWEWY is not the same as the Shibuya of real life; the names of businesses and people have been changed, any resemblance between the game and real people is purely coincidental, etc. etc. You get it. But the fictional community the team at Jupiter and H.a.n.d. created feels just as rooted-in-place as Kamurocho. Why would we get a storyline about the fate of Ramen Don, the best ramen shop in Shibuya according to the first game, in NEO:TWEWY if we weren’t meant to spend time considering Shibuya as its own character?
This is, itself, kind of a cliché of literary and film criticism, a stand-in for “the writer of this text was really good at describing a city that felt populated and alive, and it evoked a fuzzy feeling in me.” But with TWEWY, it’s an apt one. In both games in the TWEWY franchise, the ultimate aim is to save Shibuya from destruction. In this respect, it’s very much a standard video game location as it relates to typical narratives, but by introducing us to the people who make up the heart and lifeblood of Shibuya and entangling us in their lives, we’re given a reason to care.
I don’t mean to suggest a divide between this and games that don’t do this. Not every story needs to microfocus in on its setting, and there are plenty of great games that don’t. Xenoblade Chronicles, for example, is an incredible game that, when it focuses on setting at all, is more interested in the grand battle between the Bionis and Mechonis played out in miniature across the Bionis’s surface than it is about almost anything in the starting town, whose name I only vaguely remember. Breath of the Wild is interested in Hyrule, sure, but not specifically any one place in Hyrule (except maybe the castle where Calamity Ganon’s been trapped for a century). The appeal of these games is different from the appeal of games like Yakuza and TWEWY, and that’s alright!
There’s something to be said about how games introduce you to their setting. In the aforementioned Xenoblade Chronicles, for example, you spend a good couple of hours in the starting town doing just a mess of tasks, but the focus is on the tasks, not necessarily the town. in Yakuza 0, my first introduction to Kamurocho, the opening “mission” is a walk through the streets to a bar in the Kamuro Shopping Area with our buddy Nishikiyama. In NEO: The World Ends with You, the first “mission” in the prologue is to meet your buddy Fret at the 104 building, then go to Dogenzaka for either ramen or curry – your pick. Umurangi Generation is all about immersing yourself in specific places around Tauranga. They may bear no resemblance to those places in real life, but you can still forge connections with what shows up in the game. Hell, Disco Elysium makes you spend the first day hungover and rambling around Martinaise, getting to know it.
These are legitimately memorable moments for me, and they go beyond throwing things to do at me. The games want me to soak the atmosphere in just as much as they want me to pay attention to the story, the mechanics, and anything else going on; it’s my pleasure to oblige them.
