Design Lineage - Yakuza - It's (not) Shenmue for 'normal people'

The creator of the Ryu Ga Gotoku (Yakuza) franchise, Toshihiro Nagoshi, has left Sega. It's the end of a long tenure at the company dating back thirty years and with dozens of classic games that he acted in some major position on. Nevertheless his lasting legacy will be gifting Sega one of the franchises that has kept it afloat in the lean years following their exit from the console market, the aforementioned Yakuza. Yakuza's place in the world is often a bit misunderstood though, as many see it as the successor to another franchise by a Sega visionary, Yu Suzuki. I want to dispel this idea since I think it misses the point of both Yakuza, and Shenmue, the other game in this equation.

So let's start with a bit on Shenmue. Shenmue was a game that entered production in the mid 90s on the Sega Saturn. In the pitch process it started as essentially an adventure/RPG spin-off of the then wildly popular (in Japan at least) Virtua Fighter franchise. Shenmue became famous very quickly for the wild amounts of money spent on its production, a number reported to be in excess of $70 million for a game released in 1999. That'd be in excess of $100 million adjusted for inflation. What was Shenmue spending all that money on? Detail. Shenmue was very much an early open world game in terms of structure, but it was also an attempt to innovate in the Japanese Adventure Game genre. Deliberate and slow paced, many areas were created with the intention of being useless to the player, existing only to sell the idea of a real world just beyond the margins. Shenmue'll get a more proper writeup later when I actually play the things through rather than sampling them but suffice to say Shenmue's deepest soul exists in the concepts of mystery, adventure and life simulation elements. The general plot thrust is protagonist Ryo trying to find and take revenge on his father's killer Lan Di, but the actual gameplay is a slow investigation very occasionally and briefly punctuated by action. Ryo will spend much of his time talking to passerby asking if they know of some new person or term he's searching for and they'll give their best recollection about it, if he's lucky they may even give him directions or an idea of where what or who he's looking for is. In his off time he can do things like part time jobs, spend money on gachapon machines or play old Sega games. During all this time the game world is slowly moving forward on its own internal clock, the game technically has a time limit but it exists more to keep the player focused rather than to put heavy pressure on them. During climactic scenes Ryo may be called on to fight in a manner most resembling Virtua Fighter (in the first two games) or nonsense (in 3).

Let's contrast Yakuza then, Yakuza is a series of RPGs centered on convoluted mystery plots between various factions starting from different Yakuza clans but in some cases rising to entire national governments. Structurally the game's up to "Like a Dragon" (Yakuza 7) most resemble a modern successor to River City Ransom which, for the unfamiliar, is an NES RPG/beat-em-up hybrid. In both cases a lot of time is spent wandering through a persistent but segmented world with some shops for healing and beating people up for money. What Yakuza does not structurally resemble is Shenmue. Shenmue is a very non-linear, slow paced adventure where the player is always on the clock. Yakuza's a game that, while having open-ish environments is always sheparding the player forward, the clock is essentially never ticking in Yakuza. There do exist side activities in Yakuza like UFO catchers and classic Sega games, so that's one in the similarity column. When Yakuza decides to do action (in contrast to Shenmue this is about once every 10 minutes) it resembles nothing so much as creator Nagoshi's prior game Spikeout: Battle Street, a 3D Beat-em-up from the waning days of the arcade that was also ported to Xbox shortly before the first Yakuza game was released. In terms of their actual construction the two share very little. So why has Yakuza had the reputation of being "Shenmue for normal people" or "Shenmue done right" by the particularly dismissive?

The perceived similarity is largely due to both series sharing a focus on atmosphere. The atmosphere's are very different other than a heavy focus on Eastern Asia (Shenmue starts in Yokosuka, Japan but quickly moves into Hong Kong and broader China in the sequels) but they present a greater illusion of an environment people live than most open world games. Many more buildings are freely enterable, drawers can be rifled through, there was an entire procedure dubbed the "magic room system" meant to allow these to be generated and then looked over by hand rather than having individual developers personally populate every room. It's worth noting that Nagoshi was one of the credited directors on Shenmue 1 and thus would have been intimately familiar with that project's design and goals, but while Yakuza likely took ideas from it in broad strokes it uses them to different ends. The illusion of Kamurocho and the other boroughs that show up in Yakuza is the goal. You don't need to feel the sense of place as anything more than a general vague atmosphere, so the construction is much thinner. Shops with purpose can be entered, those spaces are detailed, they can afford to be individually crafted because relatively speaking there's only a few new ones in each game. Shenmue is all about the slow pace and exploration of these small (relatively speaking) open worlds. Yakuza was designed as an Action RPG with a semi-open world structure to create a sense of space, structural cohesion, and work within a budget. Shenmue was an adventure game designed to capture both what is thrilling and what is tedious about investigating a mystery. It is a game full of the slow to-do of walking around and talking to people until you find someone who has some lead you can go on. It shares much of the spirit of that very flag based, procedural Japanese adventure game I'm so obssessed with whose tentacles we see crop up so often in the things I care to write about.

I can totally see it though, why someone who was there for the veneer of atmosphere would declare one to be a game that does the other right. I love Yakuza, that veneer is all I personally need. It's just that it causes the series to be recommended to people who probably won't like it even leaving aside the stark tonal differences. It also flattens what Shenmue was attempting to achieve since it is fundamentally a more frictious experience by design. To describe the smoother Yakuza experience as it done correctly creates the appearance that Shenmue was that way by accident. The nature of Shenmue 3, whatever its triumphs and flaws, shows that those games were as they were by choice and that the addition of further small aspects of life simulation is considered core to the series makeup and appeal.

Really both of these series deserve further essays and I definitely intend to do them (Yakuza really really needs a more in-depth breakdown anyway, and a possibly separate essay on its failures when it comes to minorities) but I don't want this issue to cloud them. These are very different games whose appeals cross over in small ways that have been overblown. If you like the "feel" of a bustling city I do wholeheartedly recommend Yakuza (barring the aforesaid issues with minorities special generalized warning to essentially anyone who is gender non-conforming/queer, the series is trying to get better there but it's slower than it ought to be) but if you want something like Shenmue the recommendation needs to be carefully tailored to what you liked about Shenmue.

A last shoutout to twitter user Spacetwinks who tweeted about this shortly before I wrote out my thoughts. I didn't read his full thread but it got me off my ass to write something I'd been meaning to for months. He's a very accomplished writer who will inevitably write a better take on this read by more people than this ever will but I'll link the thread in any case.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/1448313825904762883