Sega Previews Yakuza 4 at NYC Gaming Event

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Parent Category: Gadgets

Category: Video Games

Published on Saturday, 12 March 2011 01:43

Written by Jordan Bleckner

Gamers are a unique breed, aren't they?  After a long day of life's labors, they sequester themselves in a room and launch into a digital nirvana of their own making. Gamers are their generation's ultimate escapists. Retreating for hours into their own pixelated paradise, they've had fantasies of war, battle or driving a Ferrari on the moon.

I have been fascinated by this notion of tech-escapism, but that interest really peaked about a year ago when I read about what medical pros are calling "The Avatar Blues." This is a temporary depression felt by nerds when they left the theater after their first screening of Avatar in 3D. If you longed for the beauty and eye-popping wonder of Pandora's flora and fauna, than you are a plagued with this ailment.

The very kill-or-be-killed environments that game developers at companies like Sega have been concocting for nearly three decades are still based on this premise. Five new games previewed last week at the Sega Spring Event Showcase, held in a congested penthouse suite at the Shoreham Hotel, was swathed in sweaty palmed gamer geeks.

Decades before master film director Martin Scorsese romanticized the American crime syndicate so admirably in films like Casino and Goodfellas, there was another internationally recognized organization of violence, tattoos, brightly colored jackets, and bad attitudes -- the Japanese Yakuza.

For years, tales of Yakuza fed eager Japanese filmgoers who craved serial gangster thrills.They were as popular in Japan as buddy cop films were here in America. The very popular Sega company has an ongoing soft spot for this criminal niche and are now back with their latest installment of the franchise, Yakuza 4.

In their heyday, Yakuza represented the very ideal of Herculean macho ruthlessness, but unfortunately it didn't carry over very well into the latest edition of the game. While retro-looking and physically brutal at times, it felt more like a throwback.

The stimulation and cultural immersion just wasn’t there. Getting into street fights and using a bicycle to brutalize Japanese henchmen was as enjoyable as usual -- which you can do in the game along with using other street-wise weapons -- but it felt as if I was playing an old school beat-‘em-up at my childhood roller rink circa 1996.

Designed by admired Japanese video game producer Toshiro Nagoshi, the game maintains the same visual aesthetics of the series' previous Yakuza titles. If you’ve played a Sega game in the last 15 years, you can recognize his style of modeling a character and respective environment immediately.

As for sound construction, the game's designers didn't reinvent the wheel. The game was all diegetic. Flashy and exaggerated in some cases, most, if not all, of the sound effects were environmental such as the bells and whistles of an arcade game, the Japanese chatter as you travel through the night, the distant bass of music playing from a nearby club, and the necessary sound of blows being landed upon enemies. The voice acting and written text seemed silly and unconvincing given that they had a year to translate everything, but aside from that it sounded fine.

Unnecessarily rated as M, the game features a basic combat system but has lots of environmental variables that make for head-squishing, bone-crunching good times. When in combat mode, which has to be triggered by a thuggish encounter or various QTE’s -- because you can’t go around just beating women and children -- you can throw punches and kicks and the occasional high flyer.

After attempting various button combinations to no avail, I ended up mashing buttons to take down my opponents. Some brandished knives, others baseball bats, and one even attempted to use a taser, but I quickly disarmed them and used the weapons. I didn’t see any gun play, but the full version will have many weapons, both projectile-oriented and hand-held melee weapons. The lack of guns in the demo reflected Japan's strict gun laws, so there aren't many guns in the hands of anyone but the police.

I got a good feel for the game during the demo, aside from translating a War and Peace-sized book of Japanese slang, cultural references, and dialogue. Most of the energy put into the game was in a set of highly sexualized mini-games which take place at the various massage parlors strewn about the seedy recreation of Kabukichō, a well-known entertainment and red-light district.

You go into these ‘massage parlors’ in order to feel good, yet it turns into a mini-game where you have keep the masseuse (an attractive Japanese woman) feeling good by pressing X and the Triangle button; it just didn’t make any sense to me.

There is also a pool, table tennis (it has a button specifically for zooming in on your opponent's cleavage during play, which is distracting and trite), karaoke with real Japanese pop songs, and other games to eat up your yen and distract you from the narrative.

Being able to enter and interact with most of the stores and shops seen in the game, as well as purchasing various items of interest, is a nice addition. There is no driving in the game at all, so buy some padded shoes in one of those shops because you're doing a lot of walking.

Since this is the fourth title in a series that I didn’t know had sequels, I wouldn't consider this title buzz worthy. I respect Sega's designers and developers for trying to maintain their societal heritage, but in the end it just fell flat and was choked by the very Japanese environment it was trying to maintain.

I'm in no way a Yakuza expert; I only had a glimpse of an otherwise fully developed, multifaceted interactive media piece, but from what I saw it doesn’t seem likely to win any Game of the Year awards. There is still a month until release through Sega, so hopefully I'll be proved wrong.

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