SHE NMUE & YAKUZA
From the city to the suburbs, YAKUZA and SHENMUE perfectly capture the minutiae of Japanese life.
WALK THE STREETS OF KAMUROCHO AND YOU’LL HEAR MUSIC LEAKING FROM BARS.
It’s interesting how two of the most atmospheric, detailed and wellrealised worlds on PC – Yakuza’s Kamurocho and Shenmue’s Yokosuka – are among the smallest. Each game presents a painstakingly recreated, but economical, slice of Japanese life, rooting their fantastic stories of revenge and conspiracy in a lavishly mundane reality. In both games, a grimy Tokyo real estate office or a budget travel agent will have as much detail, if not more, as the story’s more glamorous locations.
In the Yakuza series we explore a semi-fictionalised version of Kabukicho, Tokyo’s infamous red light district; in Shenmue, the port city of Yokosuka. By the standards of most games, these are small spaces. But by focusing on a few streets, rather than an immense, continent-sized sprawl, the developers of each game are able to flesh their worlds out with a much higher level of detail.
Walk the streets of Kamurocho and you’ll hear thudding music leaking from bars and the deafening rattle of pachinko halls. Vending machines and an ocean of neon glow in the night, cats slink down alleyways and barkers try to lure passing salarymen into the district’s endless rows of seedy nightclubs. Dense crowds of people roam the streets, and when it rains the neon lights reflect in the puddles, filling the image with a vast variety of colour.
RECREATIONAL RECREATIONS
Yokosuka, located 40 miles south of Tokyo, is much quieter, with leafy suburbs and a shopping district, Dobuita Street. Here, every NPC follows a routine. Workers slurp ramen at lunchtime, shop owners pull their shutters down at night. It feels like a living community – and one that exists whether you’re there or not. Kamurocho and Yokosuka couldn’t be more different as settings, but they’re similar in how they both focus on the small details that make a city unique, which creates a powerful sense of place.
At the tail end of 2019 I spent a few weeks in Japan, and as a fan of both Yakuza and Shenmue, I couldn’t resist the urge to visit both locations for real. First, I took the subway a few stops from my downtown Tokyo hotel to Kabukicho. The moment I walked through its iconic red gates, I was stunned by how accurately the developers of Yakuza captured its essence. The hostess clubs, the endless neon, the convenience stores, the tiny restaurants… it all looked, sounded, and felt amazingly familiar.
A few days later I took a train to Yokosuka. When I arrived at the station, I saw the port and a docked warship – a scene straight out of Shenmue. Half an hour later I’m walking along Dobuita Street, which has become something of a pilgrimage for fans of Yu Suzuki’s game. It’s set in the 1980s, so the modern version of the street is quite different. But it still has that small-town Shenmue feel, and I even saw some sailors. There’s a big US Navy base nearby, and Dobuita is a popular shore leave hangout.
Of the two locations I visited, Kabukicho is the most like its videogame counterpart. Yokosuka has changed a lot over the years, although when I drifted away from the main street into the nearby suburbs, I could see more of the game as I walked between traditional Japanese houses.
I’ve always been impressed by the attention to detail in Yakuza and Shenmue, but experiencing these places for myself has taken that to another level. A lot of game worlds are all about the bigger picture, with grand vistas and dramatic scenery. But the beauty of these two games is how the micro is just as important as the macro. Neither of them have the extreme fidelity of a world from a big budget blockbuster game. But they arguably capture something more of the truth and essence of a place by taking the time to focus on the little things that make it special.