A dash of hope in a StoryBundle, and Revisiting the Yakuza games
The Hopepunk StoryBundle and Yakuza 4
Just in time for the usual holiday shopping season, you can pick up this awesome StoryBundle featuring the Andlios Collection: Books 1 - 3!
I’m super pumped to be featured in this, as it’s cool to be recognized that my books are all about people coming together for a greater good. You can pick it up here.
My kids have all this week off from school and it’s been… a lot, although yesterday were parent/teacher conferences, which went very well. It’s always nice to see your kids actually behave at school and engage with their work, as opposed to the usual stuff we see at home.
I’ve fallen down the well that is the Yakuza games once again, choosing to play Yakuza 4 on my Steam Deck. I figure, since I own all the games at least once (twice in a lot of cases), I should go through the PS3 ones I haven’t played yet. I started to play 3, but it was running sorta sluggish, then started 4 and it was also running sluggish, but I kept going. I found out the games have some odd issues with being CPU hungry and don’t do well adapting framerates, so either turning my Deck back to 60hz or dropping the framerate helped immensely. This means I should go back to 3 at some point, but I’ve still gotta get through 4. I also, ahem, bought the Judgment games during the Steam sale…
This game was one of the few I’ve never touched and serves as a fantastic counterpart to Yakuza 0, taking a deeper dive back into the 1985 incident involving Majima and Saejima.
A while back I wrote about Yakuza 7 and how the protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga’s, inherent goodness helped make the game shine. What’s always striking to me when playing these games is how it humanizes everyone. It’s a game series that on the surface should be hyper-masculine, ultraviolent and ridiculous, and while it can indeed be those things, it never does so at the cost of being cruel or unkind.
These games all treat queer, BIPOC, disabled and homeless people with a certain kind of grace that wouldn’t be expected. Playing through Yakuza 4 it’s reassuring to once again see all of these values front-and-center in between beefed up dudes tearing their shirts off to expose their intricate back tattoos before powerslamming, stabbing, shooting and kicking each other into oblivion all in the name of honor.
Goodness should be everywhere and something we’re always willing to boost and embody.