3.5 Weeks Down; 11 Million to go...

Hey there!

I’ve been itching to write one of these for about a week or so, and kinda figured last week would’ve been the one. But I needed the holiday as it turned out so…

While waiting for my Complete Idiot’s Guide to Build A National Political Party in Four Years to show up in the mail, I figured I’d at least dash off a quick video game update. I’ve been reading enough good comics (and more than a few bad ones) that I’ll probably have a nice little note about that when it comes, but that nest is still being feathered (and probably makes sense to do at the end of the month when I tally my books read, right?)

So, right, the video games. Apologies if this is not what my new readers (both of you) signed up for, but what can I say? I’m just rawdogging this newsletter thing, as the American Dialect Society would want me to say. I’m off the chain.

So, last time I blabbed about Animal Well and Yakuza Kiwami. If I’m remembering correctly, my preference at the time was for Animal Well and I absolutely went on to have another great, I don’t know, fifteen-twenty hours with it? But unfortunately the problem with playing a game where the designer has said he packed enough secrets into it such that new things will be uncovered five years from now is that pea-brained guys like me absolutely hit a wall.

And because that’s actually something the designer expects, there’s enough messaging around the game that I should, uh, you know, talk about with friends, and build a community, and crowdshare solutions, and a bunch of other things I absolutely do not want to do.

And I’ll say this: one of the Internet’s best solutions to having friends (Reddit) was actually pretty great with giving gentle hints. There’s like an enormous post on the Animal Well reddit that lists all kinds of puzzles and then gives you three levels of hints for each, and each hint covered by spoiler walls so you will not see anything until you decide to spoil it. Really honoring the spirit of the whole mystery of the game. I wanted to salute both them and Animal Well’s maker as I saved and closed my game.

From there—while still dabbling in Yakuza—I purchased and enjoyed the hell out of Thank Goodness You’re Here, a video game about a tiny big-headed man dragged into doing chores for the inhabitants of the Northern England town of Barnsworth. I tend to be dubious about comedy games—my standards tend to run exasperatingly high for that kind of thing—but Thank Goodness You’re Here is hilarious, I think.

Part of that is due, I think, to working what I think of as a particularly British vein of humor—a complex mix of horny, goofy, and mean where any of those three can be the both the object, and/or mindset, of the humor. Also, if you’re a fan of engaging in media and going, “wait a minute, is that Matt Berry?” good news, because yes it is.

It’s a short game, though—longer than you would think but you’re not going to bragging about the hours played in your newsletter, however—so I finally stopped being resistant and really, really tucked into Yakuza: Kiwami.

Last time I talked about how impossible it was for me to not see Yakuza through the lens of the Grand Theft Auto games. Because Yakuza: Kiwami is a remake of the original Yakuza game (from 2005), I’m gonna be talking about my butt here a little more than usual as there were elements changed and added between the two versions.

And I should also add that while I’m a video game rube, I’ve got at least enough knowledge to mention the Shenmue games, which the same game company (Sega) released for the Dreamcast in 1999 and 2001. In Shenmue, like in Yakuza, your protagonist brawls his way through an epic storyline of families and revenge; and alternates that with periods of wandering around real-time in a section of the world crafted with an eye toward immersive reality.

But—assuming as I am (and possibly incorrectly) that Grand Theft Auto III was not itself inspired by Shenmue (not impossible considering the early iterations of GTA III were being designed for the Dreamcast)—Yakuza (Kiwami) feels like it is so strongly in conversation with GTA III, and it’s a conversation where one person keeps interrupting and politely saying, “With respect, I would do that exactly the opposite.”

Whereas GTA III gives you an urban sprawl of three islands to race about and cause mayhem, Yakuza takes place in the smallish district of Kamurocho. Admittedly, those are both decisions quite obviously tied to the main gaming element—if your game is focuses on stealing and crashing cars, you can’t just drive around the same three blocks; and if your game is all about punching and brawling, there’s no point in having your character race about in a car.

But as each team builds their game out to follow those gameplay decisions, other choices that compliment those decisions feel like philosophical differences. GTA III has a silent unnamed protagonist; Yakuza has Kazuma Kiryu, a guy I can’t imagine not being in everyone’s top five favorite video game characters, who talks and walks and acts with utter specificity. (Again, it’s an unfair comparison since I’m playing the 2024 re-master of the 2016 remake of a game from 2003, but it’s obvious that’s all on the bones of the game from the beginning.)

And unlike GTA III’s protagonist, who’s given a storyline that’s a barebones version of Point Blank once you strip off all the chore quests, Kazuma’s storyline wade hip-deep into the pathos of abandoned people reckoning with the repercussions of the people they chose to be family. (There’s a death scene in Yakuza Kiwami that’s just top-tier, helped in no small part by Takaya Kuroda’s top-notch acting.) Kazuma gets two top-notch frenemies; GTA III has the radio.

And while GTA III is a love letter to American culture written with poison pill irony by a British development team, Yakuza is a group of Japanese developers doing what Japanese creators do so well—taking a good long look around and saying, “You know what’s awesome? Fucking Japan is awesome. It’s just so god-damn awesome.” It starts with crane games and batting cages and god only knows what else, but by the time Yakuza has morphed into Yakuza: Kiwami, there’s also cee-lo and collectible card games and slot racing and soaplands and you’re rebuilding your health by going into conbinis and buying onigiri.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m GTA-pilled in the way only someone who got a PS2 the same month the game came out can be. (I saw the game being played on thirty TV screens at a big box store in France, and despite the language barrier, the counter guy and I both agreed that the game looked amazing and would take over the world.)

In fact, it was actually hard for me to separate my memories of the three games in the GTA trilogy (of which—in case you don’t know—GTA III is actually the first, confusingly enough) from one another to write this: so many of my thoughts about Y:K compared to GTA is me thinking of GTA: San Andreas which—admittedly and kind of stunningly in retrospect—came out only three years after GTA III and all but exponentially increased everything in the “first” game in the trilogy.

But as an old fart, I ended up preferring Y:K’s “these sidequests are optional; the gaming is optional; we’re not even letting you change your shirt until you complete the full game…on the other hand: wander around this neighborhood in the night! wander around this neighborhood in the rain! wander around this neighborhood in harsh and unflattering daylight!”

In what may be a very big reversal for most players, I went to Japan before playing Yakuza: Kiwami (and in another big reversal for most players, I played this game eight fucking years after everyone else) and it was weird not just to recognize the vibe of being in Japan while being in the game, but also the way the vibe was different—Y:K is set in 2005 and the neighborhood is far more trash-strewn than ours was.

(And it’s not because we were in a different part of Tokyo: our hotel was literally just right off Golden Gai, which has an analogue in Y:K, and we shopped once or twice at the neighborhood Don Quijote that’s a pretty dead ringer for the one in the game.)

But the staggering drunks; the sounds of pachinko games stunning you when the doors open; the aggressively omnipresent signage? I wonder if I had trouble getting into Yakuza: Kiwami at first blush because it so much was and wasn’t the Japan I’d seen that I wanted to protect my memories a bit.

Either that or I just didn’t want to commit to all those side games, all those quests, all those intense cut scenes: Animal Well had a hold on me because it was just one weird little thing: no cut scenes, no explanations, no side quests.

And so of course, in the end, I played a little over 25 hours of Animal Well and more than a hundred hours of Yakuza: Kiwami. I want to come back to Animal Well, once I figure out how much I can bring myself to spoil it so I can do something new without giving up the splendid feeling of isolation.

But right now, now that I’m (probably) done with Yakuza: Kiwami. I’m playing Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid. You play a ten year old spending the summer of 1999 in rural Japan. You catch bugs and fish and explore, and it’s clear the developers are clearly making a very different mission statement than Y:K, one of ““You know what’s awesome? Being a fucking kid during the summertime in Japan is awesome. It’s just so god-damn awesome.” 

What can I say? So far, they couldn’t be more right.

Anyway, if I was the type to do what I say I’m going to, I would tell you that next time I’ll talk about playing Natsu-Mon and contrasting it with the delightful baseball manga Cross Game by Mitsuru Adachi. But since I’m not, I’m not going to say it.

I will, however, say that I hope you’re well and hanging in there. 2025 has been a lot, to put it mildly. (I didn’t even get around to talking about David Lynch, who I’ve read and thought about literally every fucking day since he passed on the 15th!)

Don’t give up, ok? I’m still waiting on it but if nothing else, my understanding of one of the tenets of Complete Idiot’s Guide to Build A National Political Party in Four Years is I can’t do it alone.

(Just like fucking Animal Well.)

-Jeff