Yakuza 7: revisiting old representation concerns
This text contains major spoilers for Yakuza 7, otherwise known as Yakuza: Like a Dragon, as well as for Yakuza Kiwami. It also contains mentions of sexual harassment and racist stereotypes. Proceed at your own discretion.
I wasn’t exactly kind about the Yakuza series last time I wrote about it. It was a text born from deep frustration over what Kiwami (or, really, Yakuza 1) brought to the table: an ending that felt more like a cheap attempt to draw tears from players’ eyes, with what was at that point in the game the third dying body in Kazuma Kiryu’s arms (and he never remembers to apply pressure to their wounds for longer than two seconds), than something truly emotional. And a lot of that ending’s poor quality stemmed from the hand-wavey treatment of Yumi Sawamura — a character so important to the plot, yet with such ridiculously undercut screentime.
(Before I dwell on it too much, you can find my full tirade about it here.)
Admittedly, though, I gotta give it a little bit of a rest. Kiwami was a modern remake, but the story behind it was over a decade old by the time said remake got made. Surely something must have changed in the writers’ mindset when going about a new story now, no? Like maybe “if we’re trying to get the player to feel emotional about female characters as much as we do with our male characters, maybe just ‘awwww, poor thing’ and a surprise evil ex being presented on the last chapter isn’t enough and they need their own arcs too”? I like to say to my friend, “is it a Yakuza game if the misogyny doesn’t hit?”, as our own inner joke — but, going into 7, AKA Like a Dragon (straight after Kiwami, due to issues trying to play Kiwami 2. Sorry to any timeline purists), I was expecting something of a change. Come on, it’s a game from 2020 — and, as much as right-wing weeaboos want to believe otherwise, Japan doesn’t live in a bubble!
And I’m pleased to be able to report: despite shortcomings, this one delivers. Up first, to discuss the female character concern. While I surely felt some underdevelopment (especially from the love interests, who seem to only exist to be love interests, and Eri Kamataki, the optional party member who all but vanishes from the main storyline, except for the business management minigame; but I can kinda forgive it because they are all pretty much self-inserts for a certain contest’s winners), things certainly feel on their way to something more. Gender concerns are very much addressed, especially by the game’s new female main character: Saeko “Sacchan” Mukoda, a cabaret club manager who joins Ichiban Kasuga’s ragtag JRPG party to find the truth behind her boss’ death.
Saeko is a “strong female character”, that’s for sure, but not in a patronising way. She occasionally takes jabs at people she perceives as doubting her because of her gender, which usually feels like a setup for her having to be saved — not here, though. While the group does come to her aid after they find out about her being harassed by a crime boss who tries to lick her armpit, of all things (which she herself lampshades: according to Sacchan, most perverts just grope or make gross comments, but this guy…), it’s not in a “save the helpless maiden” way: it’s in a “let’s help our friend out” way. She could absolutely defend herself, but help’s always welcome, and she doesn’t deny it.
On a more meta way and involving Sacchan still, there is a short, easily missable bit of dialogue you can stumble upon when wandering through the nice greenery of Hamakita Park. In it, Saeko mocks Ichiban for whining about having to walk around all the time, making a snide remark about his “masculinity” or lack of thereof. Surprisingly another male character, the much older ex-detective Koichi Adachi (Saeko’s age is never confirmed, but she seems to be around her 20s, or early 30s at most; Adachi is 59), tells her that she can’t just say things are “manly” or “girly”, because times are changing, and people are more sensitive to gendering behaviours like that. She says she never cared much for it, but will mind her words from now on — as such, instead of mocking Ichiban for being unmanly, Sacchan just says he’s pathetic. It’s funny, and helps establish her sarcastic personality.
Another highlight in the female character field is Seong-hui: the first female crime boss in the series since Yayoi Dojima (who was really just standing in for her son Daigo until he took the chairman post), she helms the Geomijul (lit. “spider web”), a strand of the Korean mafia that thrives on an intricate net of intel and a top-of-the-line money counterfeiting service, with a sharp outlook and an imposing presence. A survey conducted by the Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu revealed that she was readers’ most wanted addition to their parties, surpassing even mainstay protagonist Kiryu himself. However, some were disappointed by her low narrative presence: her right-hand man Joon-gi Han is the one to join the group, due to her becoming busy with rebuilding destroyed Geomijul paraphernalia, and most information about her as a person is only obtained through the grapevine. Given that she survives the game and becomes the boss of a second criminal faction, though, it’s safe to say that later entries can still let her have her time to shine.
On other representation issues punctuated by the Kiwami text, the LGBT+ field does not really get much. Aside from the entire existence of the Host job, a gender-locked male class that allows its users to charm enemies (which, by Yakuza series tradition, are always male too), and the Night Queen job, also gender-locked but for female characters, letting users provide stat bonuses for their fellow female party members through sexual acts, the closest there is to an LGBT+ character is Tianyou Zhao, the softspoken leader of the local Chinese mafia, the Liumang.
Zhao is, in all but name, meant to be a successor of sorts to the renowned, ambiguously bisexual, recurring protagonist/antagonist Goro Majima, just like Ichiban is Kiryu’s next-in-line. The game includes a minor hostess club mechanic to increase friendship with your male companions (Saeko feels uncomfortable with the idea of meeting girls that worked at her own club, and Eri is just not interested), and, out of all applicable party members, Zhao is the least excited over the idea of paying to be in the company of hot girls. There is also a fair amount of sexual tension between him and Ichiban, again just like Majima and Kiryu before them: during Zhao’s Drink Links (a mechanic through which the player can witness short conversations between Ichiban and his party members, similar to Persona’s Social Links or Danganronpa’s Free Time Events), Ichiban can hit him with the prospect of getting naked to check out each other’s bodies, an idea Zhao does not fully turn down, except for the fact that they’re in a public space.
The implications are all there, but the game isn’t overt about if Zhao likes men or not. Though, the way things are implied for this Chinese mafia boss is certainly an improvement over how Majima’s own sexuality was presented: while the latter was an example of the “queer-coded villain” trope in spades, acting flirty with Kiryu in what felt more like it was meant to be a compliment to his balls-to-the-walls personality than actual well-intentioned LGBT+ rep, Zhao’s more down-to-earth aspect sells him more as, like the kids on Tumblr say, “literally just some guy”. Feels a tad bit less cartoonish.
So far, so good — baby steps for both groups, but getting somewhere. And then there’s the third group my original text mentions: black characters. On this front, Yakuza’s as disappointing as ever, I’m afraid: the only representations of this group you’ll find are a bunch of enemy NPCs whose flavour text is about how they are immigrants who tried to make it big in Japan but ended up in crime, as well as mainstay literal punching bag Gary “Buster” Holmes, this time coming back to introduce a system called Poundmates, where you can use Ichiban’s battle turn to call for help from characters you meet in both the main quest and side quests. At least this time you’re not forced to fight him for story progression, but he still only appears through his strength and gets nothing more than that as a character. (On a side note, Ichiban’s hair, the result of a botched punch perm, is referred a couple times as a “black power” in a mocking fashion, not to mention all the times it’s compared to a shrub. Ugh.)
But through all of the attempts and all of the times it falls on its face, the social minorities that get the most positive attention are as briefly mentioned in my original text: the homeless and sex workers are the two groups that are simultaneously the ones that helped Ichiban the most in his lifetime and the ones that the major antagonist group, an NPO called Bleach Japan, think are rotting society to the core. The main villainous figure of the game outright claims people who lose their homes are “less than garbage”, while Ichiban’s homeless friend Yu Nanba declares that these people are not in this lifestyle because they want to. The core message of Yakuza: Like a Dragon is “where you’re born in life doesn’t matter, as long as your moral compass is in the right direction”, though it’s less a game about class warfare than it is one about not losing sight of one’s humanity.
Basically: the Yakuza series has made great strides since my lovely experience with its revamped first installment, but it’s definitely still got a ways to go, from taking a second look at those racial stereotypes it’s injecting in the game to maybe not selling DLC of the fascist movement’s tees as cosmetics for the people in your party (might I mention it very much includes the groups they hate). I’ll gladly follow it where it goes next, while for sure never letting a critical outlook escape me.
