[DoctorEldritch]

@ZaidH Good to have you back, even if just briefly for now, hope your tasks for Feb/March are going well!

About Majima, I remember we mentioned how he has this "Jocker" quality of allure due to his lack of a proper past, so I think you're right.

Gameplay-wise, I am not sure. It is good to experiment, I guess. Incidentally, while Yakuza is on hold, I started playing Persona 4 Golden, which is nice (very Japanese school life there), and turn-based system there is decent, though I can't work my head around all the Personas you can create, it is a bit too pokemon for me.

But the reason I am bringing it up is that next part, Persona 5 has 2 incarnations: Persona 5 Royal, which is also turn-based, and then there is Persona 5 Strikers, which is a continuation and takes place half a year after Royal, but with reworked combat system which is more hack-and-slash. So Yakuza is not the only series that is experimenting like that, it seems to be common.

Yakuza 6 is a bit of a swan song, it seems to me. It does not hook because it is particularly engaging, but more because it is "the last hurrah", at least, it seems that way to me. But we can pick this up in more detail when you are finished with it, as you said.

I would not say they stepped it up dramatically, it's just that instead of all those numerous keys, now you need to find keys and safes around, but there are not as many of them. But what I was talking about is the safe on the roof of the New Serena. This one needs no key, but instead, you need to type in the code. But the code itself is not anywhere in the game, to find it, you need to read the Yakuza comic on the official game site, and since it's been so long since the game launched, it is hard to find now. I had to look through some forums to find the code, not sure if you got it, but if not, I can give you that code to open the safe.

[ZaidH]

That's rad! I love P5 to death, but I've heard that some aspects of P4G are still way better when compared to the sequel. Hope you have a jolly good time playing it 😁 Both Yakuza and Persona are Sega franchises, so big kudos to them for taking risks. They recently did the same with the Sonic franchise, with Sonic frontiers being a semi-open-world game. Seeing how people wanted Kiryu to be featured in the Tekken games, I wish we can get a Yakuza fighting game in the future 😤

Lols that safe thingy reminds me of those drink Mountain Dew to get DLC codes campaigns 😂 This seems like a more tame version of it.

[DoctorEldritch]

@ZaidH I am not sure if P5G is really a proper "sequel", I do not think any Persona games, all the way 1 through 5, are very related to each other? Like Final Fantasy or Tales Of, maybe? The concept is similar but the story and characters and setting are different. Though there are some cross-game cameos.

About fighting, actually, I read somewhere that one point about Kiryu that they stressed is that "Dragon of Dojima does not hit a woman". Even so much so that in Yakuza Like a Dragon, when you need to fight Kiryu, he does not attack female members of the team. So we're unlikely to see him in a fighting game unless they make a "boys only" version of it (or someone mods him in). But it may change, of course.

Those campaigns are amusing and interesting, but I do not like how they are short-lived. A good game can be popular for a long time, but campaigns like that do not last forever (Don Quijote case and point), so how to get extra content when it is over? Some games address it by including in GOTY and the like, but not all. And even that Yakuza comic is not that easy to find these days, even though it is digital. I like campaigns like that but wish they would think more about the long-term when doing them as well.

[ZaidH]

Oh yeah, P5 is definitely not a sequel. That was poor wording from me 😅

Actually yeah, I don't want to see Kiryu and Haruka duking it out 😢 It will be interesting to see how this parental dynamic will be handled in Tekken 8 (Jin and Jun Kazama 😆)

Agreed about the campaigns. It's a good thing that COD games were called out for this weird marketing move. Short-term unlockables and multiplayer trophies need to be a thing of the past.

[DoctorEldritch]

@ZaidH That, and Kiryu is, perhaps, too deep of a character to be used in a fighting game. I do not personally know much about Tekken 8, but @GoLLuM13 is an expert, maybe he'd be able to tell us about any parental dynamic in the Kazama family.

About campaigns, true, COD was a microtransaction pit. But there are also better examples out there. Just today, Marvel's Avengers released a final trailer as they are closing shop and stopping game support in September:

But the cool thing here is that with this, they also released Patch v2.8 which made all game shop goods free. Those are mostly emotes and costumes and cosmetics, but still, this is a better way to send off the game. Let's hope more developers will do something like that.

[GoLLuM13]

@DoctorEldritch I'm far from being an expert, but you can say I'm a fan 😁 The Kazam/Mishima family is super complicated, but I guess they will sort out everything with the Iron Fist like always 😜

[ZaidH]

The Kazam/Mishima family is super complicated, but I guess they will sort out everything with the Iron Fist like always 😜

Huh, the Tekken and Yakuza games aren't that different after all eh 😂 Fist speaks louder than words.

And wow, that's some mighty fine gesture from Crystal Dynamics 👏

[DoctorEldritch]

@ZaidH Personally, I prefer not to have conversations that would call for an ice pack (or in cases with Kiryu, probably an ICU visit), but some conversations seem to just be that way.

Though I sometimes wish that in Yakuza they'd at times put more emphasis on the martial arts philosophy. I really like that every big character in Yakuza has a distinct fighting style, but their lifestyle does not allow them to properly follow the philosophical doctrines behind styles, I am not even sure styles in those games have that element all that much.

Komaki and Dragon of Dojima have something like that, but more due to Kiryu being the main character, so it is easy to associate his fighting style with his personal philosophy, but this is not the case with the rest of the characters, they fight however they are comfortable with irrespective of whatever philosophical aspects those styles may have. I understand that Yakuza as a series is not that fitting for this kind of thing, but one or two characters like that in the mix, martial art masters or something, would be nice. A bit of what they did in the Jade Empire.

[DoctorEldritch]

Now when I think about it, I was hoping to see more of that in Shenmue, but so far it plays more as a detective story than fighting. Though I am not too far, so maybe there are more martial contests ahead. The main character is an heir to the dojo, after all.