Post Script
What other open-world games can learn from Yakuza’s approach to side stories
Around a third of the way through Yakuza: Like A Dragon, we stumble across a sidequest involving a sickly young girl who’s waiting for surgery. Her upstairs window overlooks a tiny park, in which stands a large tree, from which a single persimmon hangs precariously. She believes her fate is somehow bound to the golden fruit’s – that should it fall before her treatment, then she’ll surely die. And so, kind-hearted soul that he is, Kasuga vows to check in on the tree from time to time to make sure it’s still there.
Every time he returns, however, someone is close to dislodging the persimmon, from a sumo wrestler practising his art to a wannabe sniper practising his aim, and a young man nailing a voodoo doll to the trunk. Secretly watching on, the girl is cheered by Kasuga’s efforts and we later discover she’s made a full recovery. (The sumo wrestler, meanwhile, has been added to the contact list on our Poundmates app, ready to be summoned into battle at a moment’s notice.)
The variation in tone from sentimental to absurd is typical of a Yakuza sub-story, though it’s more often the other way around – such as the case of a curiously aggressive pawn shop owner who refuses to tidy up his garbage-strewn store front. Kasuga soon discovers his hoarding is a result of the grieving process: he’s mourning his late wife by refusing to throw away any reminders of her. The clean-up results in your being able to sell items, which proves invaluable in the early game. Yet in both cases, the real reward comes from the feeling of having helped someone work through their problems.
The same applies when we check in for a spot of karaoke at Survive bar, and take the opportunity to bond with our party. We listen as Nanba confesses to have replaced a bottle of legendary whiskey with the cheap stuff, and as Saeko expresses her concerns about her twin sister. The answers we give might boost Kasuga’s character traits, making him less susceptible to status effects in battle, but we’re really just here to get the chance to know these people a little better.
The quality of the writing here (this is surely a strong contender for the year’s best localisation) is enough to tempt us away from the main quest, but these optional activities and sub-stories also represent an opportunity to get to know Yokohama better. Many invite us to revisit the same places multiple times, or follow a single quest to familiar landmarks – such as the tale of a homeless man who asks a soup-kitchen volunteer out on a date, where we wait for night to fall before heading to a vintage cinema whose own sub-story we’ve already completed.
It’s rare in open-world games that we’re made to wait for the conclusion of a mission like this: sidequests are often made to be completed in one go and then forgotten. Their arrangement encourages us to plunder individual areas, tidying those messy map icons away until we’ve picked the place clean. Ijincho, like Kamurocho, is different. In encouraging us to come back later, these stories convey the idea of characters having lives outside your involvement. And in inviting us to return to familiar haunts, we feel less like a tourist ticking off landmarks on a checklist; instead, the place comes to feel more like, well, home.
That’s why we believe more sandbox games would do well to take their cues from the Yakuza series, to allow their virtual spaces a sense of continuity beyond simple utility. As silly as it can seem when you’re trying to dissuade a man from relieving himself in the river, Like A Dragon’s side stories work hard to make us care about Ijincho and its inhabitants. In doing so, they ensure its cast of oddballs and even the less salubrious locations will stay with us long after we bid sayonara to Yokohama.