thots on yakuza 4's big dumb plot twist
i have finally finished yakuza 4. final play time was a bit over 50 hours. i enjoyed my time with it, even though i think it's a bottom heavy experience. once you get final chapter of saejima's section the game drops in quality for a while and doesn't really recover until kiryu gets back to tokyo. my overwhelming opinion on the game is that in a both literal and figurative sense, yakuza 4 is the most yakuza game. the literal side of that statement isn't particularly interesting. (you're telling me a game that tells 4 concurrent interweaving narratives and a bunch of new content is the biggest game in the series? wooooow dude.)
the figurative aspect of that statement is i think more indicative of the game's strengths (and regrettably weaknesses). yakuza games are sort of by their nature games of excess. these are a series of game that are made in a criminally short period of time, with a game coming out every year for 5 years straight. while they are often by their very nature iterative sequels, it's still an unhealthy amount of work to put on a developer. it's knowing this that you can see the cracks in the games.
spoilers from here on in.
we gotta talk about plot twists. spoilers from here on in. i've remarked with friends that consider yakuza games to be the closest equivalent games have to daytime soap operas. melodramatic stories that are made as quickly and cheaply as possible. when you're trying to deliver the absolute maximum bang for buck you can, you have to add complications to the narrative. in come plot twists.
yakuza games are well known for their twisting narratives, with each game constantly adding new wrinkles to what you thought, often in an exponential fashion. the last third of a yakuza game is twist city. notable examples from prior games:
- haruka is the child of jingu, a politician who wants the ten billion yen
- a secret korean crime syndicate implanted sleeper cells all over tokyo
- sayama and ryuji are both actually korean and also brother and sister
- tereda is also a secret korean but he knew it all the whole time the bomb was fake
- tamiya never wanted to pass the military expansion bill
- kazama has a secret twin brother who is also part of the cia
for the most part, i was fine with all of these, since they were spread out over 3 games and were reasonably justified. however, because of its 4 part narrative structure, yakuza 4 essentially packs 4 games worth of twists into one game. i'm not going to list all of them, but it's important to highlight how this affects the games pacing. it's like a roller coaster ride. the game brings you all the way up, adding on dumb shit on top of other dumb shit, and boom you're back to square one with a new guy. it you're burning through the game it can get exhausting.
but there is one series of plot twists that are so baffling that it even breaks some of my laughing enjoyment of the plots. it's the type of plot contrivance that robs characters of their emotional moments and feels like implemented just to do some backend cleanup for future games. it all involves the crime taiga saejima was arrested for in 1985.
as i've mentioned previously on this blog, saejima killed 18 men in a ramen shop as part of a plan to get his family patriarch in power. without getting super duper into the weeds on it, it's revealed that he didn't actually kill anyone. he thought he did! but he was given guns with "experimental rubber bullets" that were known only to members of the police. after he left the scene of the crime, the architect of the plan, katsuragi, gets up from the pile of unconscious men, and executes them with real bullets.
now, side stepping the obvious baffled responses (why didn't saejima notice there was no blood? like yeah the idea of a rubber bullet was protected secret but you would think he would've at some point notice that he had no blood on him etc etc etc), this is still a terrible reveal. my assumption is that this was done for 3 reasons. 1) to really hammer home that saejima was set up the entire time. 2) redeem him in the eyes of any skeptical players, since he didn't really kill anyone. 3) make it possible for him to continue being a player in the series without having to answer the question of why he's not in jail.
for the first two points it was unnecessary. even just having majima not show up and being fed bad intel is set up enough. and regardless of if he actually killed anyone, he still thought he was killing them. but even that's an irrelevant point, since he was, in my eyes, thoroughly redeemed long before the rubber bullet reveal. there are multiple times that he shows genuine remorse for taking the lives that he did, saying he did it only out of an intense loyalty to his brother and the man who saved his sister's life. i don't need him to not be a killer on a technicality to still like him. as for point 3, there's far better ways to handle that issue than doing it that way, rgg.
but fine, whatever, i'll let it slide. BUT THEN. towards the end of the game one of the secret plot twist villains of the games kills another secret plot twist villain of the game by shooting him point blank in his office. but aha! he didn't actually kill him. there were rubber bullets in the gun, you see! 🙂
like at the point this story turn comes, it doesn't even make sense. it's not 1985 anymore, people, especially the ones in this narrative, know what a rubber bullet is and who has them. why would calm collected arai just assume the man he murdered in cold blood was dead with zero blood splatter or pooling. you can make the argument for saejima, being he's young, acting impulsively, and completely running on adrenaline. with arai, it is a motivated, calculated move. it makes no sense.
this kind of sloppiness really feels like something that would only come from a game made under such tight deadlines. i really enjoyed yakuza 4 despite these issues, but this one thing is just a big glaring neon sign on tenkaichi street that's impossible to ignore.
akiyama is still bae tho.