"At the beginning of the birth of "Like a Dragon", games made in the United States and Europe had already sold well in Japan, on the other hand, games made in Japan gradually disappeared from the list of games in Europe and the United States. At a time when these two events happened almost simultaneously, the Japanese gaming community was not very anxious about it. But I'm personally wary of this change, and I think it's going to get worse. ...... It is necessary to reflect on whether the entertainment we have pursued so far is in question. ”
—Interview with Minoru Nagoshi: The origin, evolution and future of the "Dragon" series
At the beginning of 2022, Japan's well-known game producer Minoru Nagoshi "officially announced" the establishment of "Meigetsu Studio" invested by NetEase. A few months later, Rulong Studio released a new trailer for the eighth sequel to "Like a Dragon", a new gaiden, and a remake of "Like a Dragon: Restoration". "Rulong", an IP that has accompanied players for more than ten years, has officially entered the post-famous Yue period. On the occasion of the replacement of the old and the new, this article will review the aesthetic style of Naikoshi's works and look for the innermost thoughts fixed in the author's heart from the innovative and conservative tension of this series of works.
Extreme Road Culture and "Like a Dragon"
"Like a Dragon" and "Trial" are not only highly similar in gameplay, but also share the same architecture of the worldview, that is, the "Kamurocho universe". The shaping of Kamurocho was originally highly associated with Japanese yakuza culture. Ian Buruma writes in The Mirror of Japan: Heroes and Villains in Japanese Culture: "(Gangster films)... It is a continuation of the spirit of "Zhongchenzang". But here we must be careful to distinguish between myth and reality. The gangsters in the movie are the product of the popular imagination, just like the samurai in kabuki. They bear little resemblance to the real members of Japan's well-organized underworld gangs. Although in reality "Ji Dao/Yakuza/Violent Group" all refer to the same thing, the same group of people, they are treated differently in the narrative of "Like a Dragon". From Nagagoe's precious use of the kanji "ji" in the game, it can be seen that he takes "naming" very seriously, and the act of naming itself implies a process of reorganizing the cultural order. Naitoshi integrated "Yakuza" into their respective camps under different names in his Kamurocho universe. In reality, these elements are often mixed with the same group of people, who are both sons and daughters of rivers and lakes who are loyal to their "own father" (おやじ) and "street slippers" who wander the streets of the city. In the game, the characters classified as "Extreme Dao" are a group of people who "love and light in the dark", while the "violent group" is shaped into the dregs of the real underworld.
Zhu Guangqian wrote in "Talking about Beauty": "Looking at the reflection, looking at the past, looking at the situation of others, and looking at the strange scenery are like standing on land and looking at the sea fog from a distance, not being bound by actual personal interests, and being able to play with the current wonderful scenery at ease." Looking at the right body, looking at the present, looking at one's own situation, and seeing the scenery that I have seen is like meeting the sea fog on a sea boat, only knowing that it hinders breathing, only thinking that it delays the journey, portends danger, and has no heart to play with its beauty. Looking at things with a practical attitude, they are just tools or obstacles to real life, and they can only arouse desire or disgust. To see the beauty of things themselves, we must jump away from the practical world and appreciate their own images in the spirit of 'doing nothing'. In short, there is a distance between beauty and actual life, and in order to see the beauty of things themselves, it must be seen at an appropriate distance. In the narrative of "Like a Dragon", "Extreme Road" is "the sea fog standing on the shore and watching", because it wears a nostalgic filter of warm feelings, it has become a wonderful scenery worth playing. Although the violent groups on the streets of Kamurocho have also undergone artistic processing, the overall shaping is still more realistic. Compared to Kiryu, who wanders between different forces to fight crime and thwart the upper echelons to gain power, the organized crime group fights and extorts protection money in the laneways of the Jinmurocho neighborhood is really not handsome. "Kyokudo" and the violent group, two sides of the Japanese underworld, are cut apart and narrated separately. The former is overshadowed with romantic nostalgia, and is often accompanied by concepts of justice such as righteousness, compassion and love; The latter, as a villain, acts as a beaten experience pack, highlighting its disruption of normal social order.
In general, "Extreme Dao" is a nostalgic narrative, and nostalgia is often associated with identity, which is the interpretation and reinterpretation of the past from the present. As Ivan Morris said, Japanese heroes usually go against the trend of the times, they exude a strong sense of nostalgia, and they are lonely and depressed because they are contrary to the times. Retrograde is a metaphor for a sad resentment at the bad and a nostalgia for "the past is always better than the present". Nostalgia is widely present in the "Dragon" series of "Back Pot Man" protagonists, who often go to prison for replacing their uncommitted crimes for others, and return to society after a long prison life, only to find that things are right and wrong, and the happy life they thought they could return to has come to naught. Naikoshi knew very well when portraying the character of Kiryu that Kiryu's charm came from his behavior as the core of the gang, but he always tried to break away from the gang. Kiryu's contradictions and the wandering of his identity further distance him from the real-life underworld and give him the motivation to be more easily identified with the player during the game. In short, the player controls Kiryu in the game God to block the killing of the god and the Buddha to block the killing of the Buddha, not for the mundane purpose of ordinary underworld "collecting protection money", but for the "righteousness" of action.
It's all crazy gameplay and character building
From the setting of the game's story background back to the game mechanics, the "Like a Dragon" series has undergone a drastic innovation in the seventh generation, and the rest of the works are mainly action games. The dramatic and somewhat surreal combat system of Dragon Studios makes up the highly stylized gameplay mechanics of the Dragon and Trials series. Mingyue once said in an interview: Western games are very competitive, if you invest 5 billion and I invest 5 billion, you invest 10 billion and I follow up with 10 billion, it will become a bottomless pit. I want to make games with content unique to Japan and games that cannot be made in the West. For the goal of stylization, Naikoshi chose gangster themes with strong local cultural colors in the narrative, and used many cross-media techniques in form - cinematic scene scheduling and comic-style camera movement, forming a completely different style from North American games.
In addition to the strong cinematic sense in combat close-ups and cutscenes, the opening scene of "Dragon 0" also borrows a comic-style storyboard.
Action games are representative genres of the Japanese video game industry, such as the action games produced by Dragon Studios may not be the most gorgeous, the most percussive, and the most refreshing to mow, but the unique style makes it recognizable. Mingyue once said in an interview that the original target group of the "Like a Dragon" series was adult male players, but I did not expect that many female players and young groups also liked our games very much. If he were in a more demanding creative environment, he would definitely be accused of "teaching children badly", but fortunately, Japan's unique cultural atmosphere is particularly tolerant of depicting cruelty. As Kabuki actor Goro Sakato Mitsu said, Kabuki portrays cruelty as beautiful and uses beauty to purify it.
The game mode of the "Dragon" series is distinctive, and it inherits many of the aesthetic characteristics of Japanese gangster movies.
Compared with the new gangster film called "documentary film", Kazuma Kiryu's adventure has the color of the traditional gangster film "Renxia Movie". Naikoshi apparently retains respect for the sacred motifs of gangster literature (Kyodo, benevolence, and faithfulness), and Kazuma Kiryu is by no means a nihilist in The War of No Kindness. Even though he is surrounded by gangsters who have lost faith seeking profit and avoiding harm, Kiryu himself holds loyalty to those who have shown him kindness—such as Shintaro Kazama, who raised him. Those who play the role of the protagonist's "father" in the "Like a Dragon" series are all burdened with the sin of being ashamed of the protagonist, but will eventually be forgiven and restore the authority of the "father" identity. But when the authority of the "father" is restored, the figurative father will die again, and with it will disappear the sins he committed as a father, leaving an abstract "righteousness" for the protagonist to feel and believe.
Film scholar Tadao Sato borrowed the Buddhist term "impermanence" when describing the "aesthetics of violence" in gangster films. In this type of gangster film, violence is integrated into the film in an exaggerated way. The combat system of the "Like a Dragon" series presents this impermanent aesthetics of violence. It allows the player to use all the props around the protagonist (sticks, bicycles, tables, chairs, knives) to attack enemies, fight enemies to the flesh, sticks to blood, and cast skills that, if translated into reality, are enough to beat a healthy person to a disability. While it's uninteresting to emphasize realism in fictional stories, the fighting style of Like a Dragon is so exaggerated that it's easy for players to have narrative dissonances: the protagonist, who suffers a "fatal wound" after a brawl, only needs to turn to an underground doctor or eat a full meal in a street restaurant to return to life.
The exaggerated fighting style made people doubt the physical structure of the characters in the game for a while.
"Everything is overheated, everything is crazy", Podwell's comment on Hong Kong movies is very suitable to describe the aesthetic style of the game "Like a Dragon". Considering that Meigetsu intends to pay tribute to the film director Quentin Tarantino, whom he loves very much, it is not surprising that because the latter's film style is inextricably linked to Hong Kong cinema, such as Dragon Studio's action game design has such a strong Hong Kong film color.
The narrative of the "Like a Dragon" series is also very close to the Hong Kong film style of the 80s of the 20th century, the main line is very rough and lacks polishing, and the description of the characters' motives is unconvincing. Kazuma Kiryu is a typical "big male protagonist", he is a model of loyalty, righteousness, justice and love. On the contrary, other characters (especially villains) lack distinct character characteristics and are very instrumental. This shortcoming is especially evident in the first to fifth parts of this biography, and Naikoshi obviously also has a clear understanding of the lack of early character development in the "Rulong" series, and perfected the supporting characters in the early works by publishing the prequel "Rulong 0" and remaking the old work and improving "Rulong: Pole".
The reinvention of Akira Kinyama's character can be described as the beneficiary of the patching of the plot by Akira Kinyama (even without the prequel, Gorō Majima's popularity is already good, and Akira Kinyama can be said to have no shaping in the original work) - the new story line depicts the collapse of an ordinary person, which also makes Akira Kinyama a popular character in the "Like a Dragon" series. Akira Gimyama's popularity stems from the fact that he is the shadow of the light ("Light and Shadow" in the subtitle of "Rulong 7" also replicates this mode of character opposition, which is enough to see Naikoshi's love for this way of shaping character relationships), and he constantly makes the mistakes that ordinary people would make, unlike the perfect Kiryu who can survive every desperate situation, and Geumsan will be defeated by difficulties and at a loss like ordinary people.
So far, Akira Kinyama is the only character who has saved the character creation by constantly patching.
The male protagonist Kazuma Kiryu (including the protagonist's heir Kasuga Kazuban) pinned on the creator's idea of "ideal person", that is, in the face of temptation, betrayal and setbacks, he has never wavered in his adherence to righteousness and protection of love. Then, the plot design of "all crazy" was greatly converged in the "Trial" series (of course, it is still retained at the gameplay level), and the main story of "Trial" changed the style of the "Like a Dragon" series from precision polishing to the style of the main drama. The grievances and feuds of the children of the rivers and lakes are diluted, and the author begins to try to confide in the game in a more straightforward social reasoning drama way.
Change and change: the gray space between institutions
The protagonists of Naitsu's creations have a fixed membership: they all move between different communities and are not completely subordinate to a single community. Kiryu is a former member of the gangsters who broke away but not completely broke away, and although he briefly became the third generation of the Tojokai but abdicated on the day of the succession ceremony. The word Yakuza "originally means the smallest number among popular cards" originally referred to the stray minority and marginalized groups in society. The original "Like a Dragon" established the protagonist duo of the series: the underworld who is not brutal enough and the white road who is pushed to the edge (Ito in the police and Kiryu who is removed from the organization). They are outcasts in two established communities, struggling to survive in a world dominated by conspiracy theories in Like a Dragon.
There is a hint of conspiracy theories in the Kamurocho universe, and although not as extreme as urban legends such as Freemasonry/Illuminati, Brotherhood/Knights Templar (the world order is controlled by individual organizations), Naikoshi has always imagined in his stories an interest group above the market, which affects the lives of ordinary people with an "invisible hand", and the mafiable gang members will always be driven by power and interests to become the tools of these groups to achieve their goals. From the original Jingu Kyohei to the 7th generation of Aoki, these self-righteous politicians will eventually become the object of negation, and the protagonists will put their distorted lives back on track by eliminating their influence (it is worth mentioning that the protagonists portrayed by Naikoshi, whose motives for their actions usually refer back to themselves, are drawn into a "larger conspiracy" and have to act for self-preservation, rather than for the sacred mission of the grand narrative). Once this pattern is broken, there are problems with the motivation and even shaping of the protagonist. For example, in "Death of Judgment", Yagami Takayuki is depicted as a private investigator who intervenes in the investigation out of a sense of justice, and because the screenwriter's penmanship cannot create a character who goes to the soup for justice, he can only repeat "To get justice for Mr. Ze" a dozen times in the process of advancing the plot - although it does not look good for players. Although it is a conspiracy theory setting, if the game author carefully polishes the characters, he can still convince the player with three-dimensional characters and sufficient motivation (the image of Ryo Aoki in the 7th generation is relatively complete, which can make players identify with Kasuga when facing him), but as long as you are not careful, some characters may be portrayed as Chuji Ill Jumping Beam Clown (such as the original Jingu Kyohei), and the story direction will even be exaggerated to such a dark plot as "The Battleship Yamato Appears" in "Ruryu 6".
The main story of "Dragon 6" "Looking for the biological father of the grandson" and the secret battleship "Yamato" that separated the water and suddenly appeared, making players shout blood.
"The Eye of Judgment" is a turning point in the creation of Naikoshi and Ruryu Studio. In this work, Naikoshi and Ruryu Studio not only drastically restarted the new story line, invited well-known movie stars to play the protagonist, but also made changes including the overall style. The composition of the protagonist group created by the "Rulong" series has also been inherited into the "Trial" series, but the position of "protagonist + partner" is reversed - the first protagonist in the "Trial" series has become a lawyer symbolizing the rule of law, and his partner who assists him is a former member who was expelled from the Dongcheng Society. The transformation of the protagonist's identity brings the center of the story from the pleasure of the extreme road to a deeper social reasoning. "The Eye of Judgment" takes the serial murder case that appears on the streets of Kamurocho as an opportunity to lead to an inside story of the tripartite collusion between government and business caused by the development of Alzheimer's disease drugs. The depth of the story of "The Eye of Judgment" is a leap forward in the "Kamurocho universe", and it includes "justice" in the theme discussion. The slogan of the work is "Murder Weapon Named Justice" (正義という名のmurder器), and the famous line uttered by Takuya Kimura: "When a person becomes the most cruel, it is when he thinks he is righteous" is an interpretation and criticism of "committing murder in the name of justice".
In the story, Yoji Ikino, who works at a medical research center, believes that he is about to successfully develop a special drug to cure Alzheimer's disease, and is eager to skip the process prescribed by medical ethics and quickly transfer to clinical trials. Ikuno reverses the stereotyped bad guy character in the previous work, and the screenwriter blames his paranoia on his obsession to defeat the disease. Based on a true case in Caretaker Killing: Confessions of a Desperate Family Member, his story describes the countless tragedies that Alzheimer's disease has brought to otherwise happy families – and if Ikuno's research tackles this incurable disease, it will save thousands of families. The hypothesis that "a terminal illness may be cured" gives some rationality to Ikuno's crime (so much so that many players empathize with him). The existence of the professional killer "Mole" who takes pleasure in killing people further dilutes Ikuno's crimes (like the protagonist Takayuki Yagami, "Mole" Kuroiwamitsuke is also played by popular actor Shosuke Tanihara, and is explicitly shown as the protagonist's nemesis throughout the play), he attracts the player's hatred value, after all, a cold-blooded killer is more likely to arouse the player's adrenaline than a thin, earnestly spoken researcher.
The "Trial" series revolutionizes the villain characterization paradigm of its predecessors: to bear all the condemnation with an extremely evil "avatar", which to a certain extent pardons a complex and contradictory, flesh-and-blood but misguided bad guy character, allowing players to lament their fate that will eventually lead to tragedy. Although the game has already sealed Ikuno's crimes in terms of plot, in order to make his plot of defeat and self-inflicted evil more convincing, a perfect victim is also added to his victims. However, there is still a debate among players about whether his actions have a certain degree of justice. Many players understand his distress and even support his actions ("The lives of a few gangsters are less important than the cure for Alzheimer's disease"). The divergence of views between players gives the "murder weapon called justice" proposed by "The Eye of Judgment" the power to break the fourth wall, allowing people to see that people like Ikuno who have become cruel because they claim justice are between us.
Even if his rebuttal does not stand up to scrutiny, Yoji Ikuno's claim has won the approval of some players.
All in all, from the "Like a Dragon" to the "Trial" series, Mingyue's creation contains two approaches of change and immutability: change is first reflected in the form, including the change of the protagonist's identity and the change of story type, from typical gangster literature to serious dramas with gangsters as a condiment; What remains unchanged is the value he embodied in it, that any established system will inevitably breed darkness. Under the same values, the only difference between the two is that compared to the "Like a Dragon" series, which blames the conspiracy of the upper class politicians, "The Trial" depicts in a more delicate way how specific evils erupt among seemingly ordinary and even righteous people. In the "Kamurocho universe" of Nagagoe, the system and justice may take advantage of you, organizations and groups may betray you, and gangster Kazuma Kiryu and lawyer Takayuki Yagami must break away from the strict system and become freers in order to gain inner peace. As always, Naigetsu loves to shape the marginalized outside the system and has the greatest expectations for them. He regarded the gray space between black and white as an antidote to those social contradictions that could not be solved by conventional means, so much so that in "The Death of Judgment", which is based on the "rule of law", he gave Sang Mingren, the "private law sanctioner" who was obviously a criminal, a happy ending.
Looking back at these characters portrayed by Meietsu, what is the behavior that is affirmed in the gray space? In a word, it is Hannah Arendt's "personal responsibility under dictatorship." In Arendt's argument, either the accusation that "all Germans bear original sin" or that "the sin lies only with the ruler alone" is an evasion of responsibility. Displaced to the modern society in which we live, it is neither blindly subordinate to established groups (government organizations/gangsters) nor completely slipped into nihilism. In other words, taking "The Eye of Judgment" as an example, at which point can tragedy be avoided? In this story, there is no point where "once you cross this line, you completely go the wrong way", but it depends on the choices of each specific person: Yoji Ikino can overcome his obsession and conceit and abide by medical ethics; Ryusuke Kido should resist the temptation to replace the research results of his subordinates; Okubo Shinpei should respect justice, instead of throwing corpses at his own risk, becoming a tool used by the real murderer ... It is not some heinous secret organization, but everyone's fault and mistake constitute a huge serial murder case.
epilogue
From the silent changes in "Like a Dragon" to "Judgment", and then to the drastic reform of "Like a Dragon 7" (all-round RPG, jokingly known as "Persona 7"), it can be seen that although the niche work "Like a Dragon" series once entered a difficult situation and went high and low because it was difficult to attract new players, as a producer, he is constantly improving in production skills.
In Archipel's interview, Naikoshi said that "RPG's "Like a Dragon" was originally just an April Fool's Day trick video, but because of a lot of likes, it was simply made.
Naruto is invaluable in keeping the game's characteristics while adding some innovation, and visibly improving the aesthetic when choosing the script. The bottleneck of the "Dragon" series from niche to more niche is more due to the more complete decline of Kyokudo culture in Japan than the problem of game quality. Like the disappearing Westerns on the big screen, cultural elements such as cowboys and gangsters became popular because they were given romantic colors, and also declined because the "dreams" attached to them (westward movement, righteousness) gradually faded.
When Meigetsu created the first generation of "Like a Dragon", the way to cope with the bad luck and the withering of the market was to subtract at the beginning of the design: abandon the goal of internationalization, abandon the child player, abandon the female player... To this day, he himself said in an interview: Although the series is still releasing new works at the rate of one a year, will there be no such character (Kazuma Kiryu) now? Even if it is also a gangster, it is completely different from 15 years ago.
So Naikoshi made another subtraction, this time he "abandoned" both Sega and Kyokudo culture. With the proclamation that "if all my thoughts are guessed by players, I will lose", Naikoshi said that what he wants to do now is to bring hope to people in the post-COVID era, to make games that can dispel the confusion and insecurity in their hearts and make them feel that "when everything is over, life will come back". Although Meigetsu has not yet announced the project plan after leaving Sega to start a new business, this declaration is really moving, and I can't help but look forward to what kind of innovation he can make, so that people who are already mentally scarred in the post-Covid era can find some comfort in entertainment.