Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, Aging, and Agency

When Kazuma Kiryu walks through the Kamurocho gate for the last time in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, we can begin to audit his life in earnest: he has spent 45 percent of his adulthood in prison, roughly 31 percent as an oath-swearing yakuza, and just 24 percent – only seven years – attempting and failing to lead a civilian life.

He has thwarted ten-billion-yen heists, toppled enemy underworld gods, foiled a rogue CIA agent’s plot, exposed a corrupt police commander’s operations, and stymied an all-out yakuza war in Tokyo. When we play these games we revel in watching a criminal superhero go to work, but through it all, this series has been trying to show us the costs of such incredible feats of strength and will.

Like many before him in myths and legends from across the globe, Kazuma Kiryu can’t leave the underworld, no matter how hard he struggles. His family can’t escape his shadow. His adopted daughter lost her shot at an idol career. The children under his care at the Morning Glory Orphanage have all been branded as the children of an ex-yakuza. Every single one of his friends knows that the moment the Tojo Clan next needs him, he will – however reluctantly – answer the call and spring into action. The three years he spends in prison after Yakuza 5 will do nothing to actually cleanse him of this criminal past.

And you can see it on his face, in his eyes, the bags underneath them. The way he squints, it’s not just weariness, it’s exhaustion. He is 47 years old, and every single fucking year is catching up with him.

You can also read it in his fighting style, slower and less impactful than in years and games past. The “Dragon Engine” RGG Studios first implemented inYakuza 6 can and has been used to showcase devastating fighting animations (and in Lost Judgment it’s fully busted, turning Yagami into an unstoppable force barely halfway through the story), but here it’s most notable in how it restrains Kiryu and the player. It isn’t until the very end of the game, when I had leveled every stat up to near-maximum and unlocked nearly all of the available moves that I felt genuinely powerful and able to stand up to bosses and large health bar enemies without worrying that I was going to beef it expeditiously. Every fight was a struggle, and taking on random groups of enemies throughout Kamurocho and Onomichi sometimes felt like an exercise in sunk costs.

To wit: it wasn’t just his stats or his moves that made Kiryu feel less resilient. Throughout the game, it felt like it took longer for the actual button presses for his combos to register, and everything – including extreme heat actions – could be canceled by an enemy who timed their own big attacks just right. Dodges were often never quite quick enough or never sufficiently able to get out of an attack’s range. Certain counter moves – like one where you could forcibly disarm a guy coming at you with a knife – felt like they required a kind of split-second decision-making and accuracy that I often just couldn’t keep up with. It’s as if the game was throwing everything it could at me and saying, “yes, Kiryu is indomitable, yes he will win this one, but we’re taking our pound of flesh one way or the other.” You really feel beset upon in Yakuza 6.

By the time he walks through the Kamurocho gate, Kiryu knows his chances of receding into history and living a life of quietude are all but shot. “How do I always end up back in this damn city?” he complains, before diving headfirst into Yakuza 6‘s core mystery. Once again, greater forces than he can see are at work propelling him and the rest of the game’s cast forward. Once again, his own peace and that of the city he can’t escape rests on a knife’s edge. The Tojo Clan has lost its ironclad grip on Kamurocho, ceding part to the Saio Triad and almost all of the rest to the Jingweon Mafia. The sixth Tojo chairman, Daigo Dojima, has been arrested on suspicion of arson. New faces, brutally competing ideologies, and old prejudices are threatening once again to shatter the world Kiryu knows. And he is trapped in the undertow.

Throughout the first half of Yakuza 6, Kiryu is intent on figuring out exactly one thing: who is the father of Haruka Sawamura’s child, Haruto? With Haruka in a coma and very few leads, he travels to Onomichi in Hiroshima Prefecture, her last known location, to try and find answers. With this goal in mind, Kiryu can readily dismiss all claims that he has returned to the underworld. When he works with the Hirose Family, he insists that he’s still a civilian. When he confronts Takumi Someya, one of the usurpers of Dojima’s chairmanship, he denies that he’s back in the life. Even when he’s fighting the Hiroshima-based Yomei Alliance, the Jingweon and the Saio Triad at the same time, he says that all he wants to do is figure out who Haruto’s father is. One can’t help but be reminded of the meme, also about Kiryu, which insists that the man has never – *bones breaking* – once – *neck shattering* – killed – *gunshot to the heart and head* – anyone.

But like, I get it. Kiryu is trying desperately to hold onto the sense that he is ultimately in control of his life. He did his time, cleansed himself of his past, and is now trying to answer a very basic question before returning to his life of simple, blissful obscurity at the orphanage. Of course he isn’t jumping right back into the thick of things at the slightest whiff of danger. All he needs are some answers.

The thing about answers, though, is that they often lead to more questions. And ultimately Kiryu gets his answers, and with them the discovery that his adopted daughter reacting badly to his incarceration, running away from the orphanage and eventually landing in Onomichi inadvertently tipped over the world’s tiniest domino, the first minuscule link in an ever-worsening chain, that would lead to the most politically terrifying men in Japan knocking on his door in search of their pound of flesh.

It isn’t until near the end of Yakuza 6 that Kiryu fully realizes that he can never escape the life, that he has no real agency, and no matter what he does the people he loves the most will never know peace. Liberated by this knowledge, he defies the will of the so-called “Fixer” behind the scenes, defeats the Yomei Alliance’s new patriarch and everyone else sent to kill him, and defends his family from elimination. The cost of this victory, however, is high.

Watching the end of Yakuza 6, seeing Kiryu get riddled with bullets and still managing to shamble along in single-minded furious purpose, it’s hard not to be reminded of Frankenstein’s monster, a modern promethean marvel deadset on achieving some kind of normalcy once the people who made him this way are finally dealt with. But once the punches stop flying and the adversaries have been subdued, we – Kiryu and the player – are reminded that he is still ultimately human. For all intents and purposes, we watch Kiryu die at the bottom of a dry dock in a Hiroshima shipyard.

…

Except Kazuma Kiryu can’t escape the underworld.

As the credits roll, we are treated to several flashback scenes, including one where he is in a hospital bed receiving treatment for those gunshot wounds. Next to him on a chair is a briefcase full of money and another so-called “Fixer” there to make him go away. Take this money, the man says, and never tell anyone about the secret you now hold. If you tell anyone, we will destroy you and your family.

Instead of accepting the bribe, Kiryu – still cognizant that he himself can never get away – does the only thing he feels he can do: he tells the Fixer that the offer is no good, and that instead he wants to “die.” Make the hospital issue a death certificate. Fake a cremation. Leave Haruka and Haruto and Haruto’s father, Yuta Usami, alone to live at the orphanage in the peace Kiryu himself can’t ever have.

This ending has a lot of fans of the game upset. I don’t know how I feel about it. What at first appears to be Kiryu finally taking back control of his life may instead turn out to be yet another signifier of his utter lack of agency, this time on the game development level, as despite RGG Studios’ attempt to veer away from him with Yakuza: Like a Dragon and the Judgment series, he remains the “face” of the studio’s output. His face is the face of Sakamoto Ryōma in Like a Dragon: Ishin!; we see how he has returned to the yakuza life with his cameo in Like a Dragon; the upcoming Like a Dragon Gaiden title promises to show us what “Joryu” has been up to between Yakuza 6 and the latest entry; and the teaser for Like a Dragon 8 promises that he will be one of the major players in that game’s story. Even as the studio searches for a new main character, they still can’t let go of Kiryu. He is, like it or not, an icon in the strictest sense of the word.

So what do we do after this ending? Must the show really go on? How many years will we let pass, how much more brutal must every single fight become before everyone finally lets Kazuma Kiryu go? It’s an open question, and we probably won’t like any of the answers we get.