Despite never playing them until recently, I have adored the Yakuza series for a while. It’s uncomplicated: despite being a story centered exclusively around bad guys doing bad and serious stuff™, the Yakuza series freely skips back and forth over the line between overbearing dramatic seriousness and absolute gleeful tomfoolery. It doesn’t hurt that Kazuma Kiryu, one of the series’s main protagonists, is fundamentally a good person, even as he’s working so hard to become a yakuza. He walks around Kamurocho, alternately getting in fights with thugs and helping random people make their lives better and get out of small pickles. It is one of those rare games that, I feel, acknowledges that life continues even during Exceptional Moments. Ignore the small stuff to your own peril.
I admittedly haven’t played very far in Yakuza 0, but then I haven’t really been playing any games right now. Sure I started Final Fantasy XII, and Animal Crossing, and Pokémon, and many more, but I can’t really pull myself together enough to play a game to its completion right now. I’m out of steam.
I watched Studio TRIGGER’s Promare the other night. Now that I think about it there’s some tonal similarities between Yakuza and Imaishi and Nakashima’s latest full-length feature. If you’re not familiar, this brief description should suffice: 30 years after a portion of humanity becomes mutated to breathe fire thanks to an extra-dimensional fire spirit hive mind, firefighters have become the police, counter-terrorism task forces, and intelligence agencies. Promare is the story of one beautiful buff himbo firefighter discovering that he serves a fascist megalomaniac with serious Jehovah’s Witness vibes and deciding to rebel against the system with his fire-starting terrorist twink bf. There are some seriously stark moments in Promare; images evoking ICE raids and anti-Muslim bigotry in the years following 9/11 show up quite frequently. It’s odd how sober these moments are drawn compared to the bombast of the mecha/Burnish fights. Of course, it’s a movie by Kazuki Nakashima and Hiroyuki Imaishi so it shouldn’t be surprising that by the end of the movie everything is drills, and giant mechs, and unlimited power originating from the “burning soul of a firefighter.” It balances its incredibly serious moments with absolute gleeful tomfuckery. It very much lives in the spirit of former TRIGGER/Imaishi protagonists: “Nonsense? That’s how we ROLL!” – “Who the HELL do you think we are?”
One of the albums of my late childhood was from this band from Japan, PAINTBOX. It’s a punk record, ostensibly, but it’s filled with just… so much. The album is called Trip Trance Travelling. Listening to it oscillate wildly between hardcore and psychedelic and traditional Japanese folk just… it energizes me.
Everything about our present moment is ridiculous and I’m not doing so hot in all of it, I will level with you. But it’s in these moments that I find myself seeking the comfort of watching absolutely dumbassed characters face down fate, destiny, history, the world, etc. and win. And it’s in these moments that they’re particularly effective at comforting me. I want to believe that they’re signs a better world is possible.
Listen to ”Raw Ore” below.