What I Played This Week (11/22/2020)
The format for this week’s post will be a little different. I played, but am not going to spend any energy writing about, Hearthstone and Mini Metro. I have some more thoughts about Hearthstone’s new progression system that maybe I’ll get to next week when I’ve had another week playing with it. But today I want to talk about what I’ve spent most of my gaming time with this week: The hottest new Yakuza game: Yakuza Kiwami 2. I am aware that Kiwami 2 used the engine built for Yakuza 6 and a lot of these thoughts probably apply to both Kiwami 2 and 6, but I haven’t played Yakuza 6 and only have 0, Kiwami 1, and Kiwami 2 to compare between.
I’ve been playing Kiwami 2 a bit differently than how I played both Yakuza 0, and Yakuza Kiwami 1 (abbreviated as 0/K1 in the rest of the post) and I’m still trying to work through why. In 0/K1, Sub Stories were things I would do if I ran into them, or if they were particularly compelling I would seek them out and finish as much of a single story as the game would let me. But in Kiwami 2 I’m planning my routes around Sotenbori and Kamurocho based on where the sub story icons are on the map, and I hate it. I miss the organic moments of running to the next story marker, or the drug store, or wherever and stumbling into some weird person trying to take Kiryu off to some weird room to shave cats or something. Even the sub stories that start by walking near the starting area are no longer surprises because I see the white speech bubble icon on the map and walk towards it to make sure I start this new sub story. I haven’t been legitimately surprised by the start of a sub story at all in this game, which is a huge disappointment.
Putting sub stories on the map in Kiwami 2 is now a skill that must be unlocked by the player in the stats page of the pause menu. It was the first skill I unlocked after the page was tutorialized, the skill is very cheap to unlock and is at the top of the list in the Life Skills tab. I believe it was put there to make sure players unlock it at the beginning of the game and are aware of why there are new icons on the map. When this happened I thought “This is the first of the games to actually put these icons on the map, and I hate it. Can I turn it off?”. But when I sat down to write this post I did some research and found gameplay footage from Kiwami 1 that showed big exclamation marks on the map saying where substories were, the older games just didn’t call it out as an unlock to make it happen. The fact that I was made very conscious of the fact that my action caused sub story icons to appear on the map made me both more aware of their presence and less like they were organic things happening in a living breathing city. Also, I can’t un-learn that skill to take the icons off the map, I checked.
A portion of the map in Yakuza 0
A portion of the map in Yakuza Kiwami 2
The map is overall more detailed in Kiwami 2 when compared to 0/K1, the buildings are represented by 3D models that change perspective as the map is moved around, the icons for various activities and shops point to specific spots instead of just coloring in the whole building as the restaurant or shopping or game color. The Kiwami 2 map even has icons for where the doors in and out of the enterable buildings are. All these extra details make me want/have to pay more attention to the map than I did when playing the previous 2 games. Because Kiwami 2’s map is “better”, I find myself relying on it more, and spending less time organically exploring the city.
In Kiwami 2 there are also many more NPCs that are “talkable”. In 0/K1 if you saw a person with the “You can talk to me” icon, you almost certainly should talk to them because they either had some absurd request to make of you, or (more rarely) they were going to give you Pocket Tissues. But in Kiwami 2 there are tons of people to talk to, most of which will just say something vaguely related to whatever is happening in the story at the time. This made me stop talking to people unless I know they are a sub story giver or I was in a unique area during a story mission and they might have something interesting to say. Even without the icon on the map the prompts to start sub stories aren’t usually “talk” they’re “investigate” or “Examine” or something to that effect, so once you learn the difference in prompts the surprise of a sub story starting is removed again.
The one change that I think makes the biggest difference between the 2 styles of implementation is that in Kiwami 2 the icons for new sub stories are differentiated from the icons for existing substories. In 0/K1 they both used the same exclamation point icon, but in Kiwami 2 the icon has a different color. This makes walking up to a substory icon even less surprising.
This isn’t to say that I’m not enjoying my time with Yakuza Kiwami 2, I’m loving it. It’s gorgeous to look at, the main story is harrowing, the sub stories are wacky and hilarious. It’s everything you could want out of a Yakuza game. I plan on eventually playing all 7 (8 including Judgement) games, I just really love the games this team makes, I just wish the zany-ness could surprise me more often, like it did in Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami 1. I just wish I was being more surprised by the sub stories in Kiwami 2.