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  • Locked thread
SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

PunkBoy posted:

I hope Saejima's section brings the return of beating up deadly animals with your bare hands.
You punched a TIGER. You got 2 meats!

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SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

The Welper posted:

Isn't the secret for Dead Souls to NOT aim when you're using a gun? That is the manliest manly way.
It's been awhile, but I seem to recall finding it a lot easier using one of the alternate control schemes, and then just toggling between aiming and not aiming, and squeezing off shots between. So in a crowd of zombies, hitting the aim button (snapping to the nearest enemy), firing, releasing the aim button, hitting the aim button again, firing again, and so on.

I might be misremembering, but I recall feeling like it was clumsy as hell for the first half hour or so, then changing how I was approaching it, and then it just sorta took care of itself.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Neo Rasa posted:

Apparently some actual popular crime novelist wrote the story for Yakuza 2 which is why it's longer and has such a bigger array of characters that each get their little moment while the rest of the series was handled internally. I love the other games just as much but it would be awesome to have a really sprawling Yakuza Papers style tale. "The Yakuza Papers" is awesome if any of y'all haven't watched. It's a seventies film series that's basically the Japanese version of The Godfather, taking place from the forties on which follows a few people through the entire modern rise of the Yakuza in Japan after WWII. They're really good. Similar to Kenzan and Ishin, almost every character in the movies is an analogue to an actual person's life and situations from the forties.

The story in movies in general is pretty much true as is. The first movie at least, Battles Without Honor and Humanity should be required viewing for any fan of the Yakuza games. If you get the set with them all it has a timeline/relationship chart which I'm sure inspired the Yakuza games themselves to let you track who works for/killed/is in a relationship with who. :3: Also it's a raw as hell Yakuza flick that was directed by Kinji "Battle Royale" "Shogun's Samurai" "Fukasaku in the early seventies. Why are you still reading this and not watching it. :(
The Battles Without Honor and Humanity films are awesome, but they don't have a lot in common, in terms of their approach to yakuza culture, with the Yakuza games. The games, and particularly guys like Kiryu and the `period' games, are lifted straight out of the mainstream genre of Japanese yakuza films (called ninkyo eiga or chivalry films). The Fukasaku yakuza films (the Battles Without Honor and Humanity films he cranked out between 1973 and 1975, as well as films like Graveyard of Honor (1975), Yakuza Graveyard (1976)) defined a new, revisionist take on these films. Instead of the stern, serene, honour-above-all yakuza that characterised ninkyo eiga and Yakuza games, Fukasaku's yakuza were calculating, self-serving, greedy, and so on, and no effort made to sugar-coat their problems.

poo poo like what people were just talking about in Saejima in Yakuza 4 are exactly the kind of thing Fukasaku's films were a reaction against. There's no moment of sudden redemption, no deep and abiding code of honor that ennobles the thugs and assassins, no adorable orphans being rescued and their innocence perpetually preserved. The recurring image in the Battles Without Honor and Humanity is the bombed-out ruins of Hiroshima, and that's the approach Fukasaku's yakuza films take to their subject matter---they're part (in Fukasaku's vision) of the bullshit idealism and institutional lies that defined pre-war Japan, which lead to and were destroyed by the war.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

oblomov posted:

I couldn't get into Hana-bi. It just dragged for me. Loved Sonatine though. For Miike, in general some of his movies I do love, but sometimes, man the violence gets way, way too much. Yakuza trilogy though was pretty good.
Miike isn't at his best when he's playing it straight. His best yakuza films are the ones that are fever-dream deconstructions of the genre, like the surreal Gozu (2003) or the Dead or Alive trilogy, which starts out as a more or less straight-ahead cops-versus-yakuza film and then the first film ends with what has to be the apotheosis of all final showdown scenes. And then the trilogy goes even further off the rails from there.

And if we're talking about surreal deconstructions of the yakuza film, Suzuki's Branded to Kill (1967) is worth mentioning. Definitely not for everyone, it's difficult to even talk about. But it's as dense a commentary on yakuza-film-as-Japanese-pop-culture as you can find. Worth noting for highlighting the (huge) influence the Bond franchise had on Japanese yakuza narratives of the time.

SubG fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Dec 25, 2014

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

oblomov posted:

Yeah, Dead or Alive ending was something else... Good tip on Branded to Kill. Will see if I can find it.
If you find it too impenetrable, Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter (1966) is somewhat more accessible. It's more of a `straight' yakuza film coloured (often literally) by Suzuki's lack of concern for conventional storytelling mechanics. And, since we're sorta playing connect-the-dots between various yakuza films, characters in Fukasaku's also comparatively straightforward yakuza film Blackmail is My Business (1968) whistle the theme to Tokyo Drifter (the protagonist in Tokyo Drifter does as well, as a stylistic conceit).

Suzuki actually directed a bunch of yakuza films that follow the subject matter more or less closely---he worked for Nikkatsu, one of the grand old film production houses of Japan that had, by the '60s, been reduced to cranking out low budget exploitation fare. They really just wanted run-of-the-mill noir and yak films, but Suzuki keep giving them these psychedelic arthouse things. Finally they just fired his rear end (after Branded to Kill) and locked away his films, until there were lawsuits, public demonstrations, student activism, and a whole media circus leading to the films finally being made available again in 1971.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

precision posted:

People pay very large amounts of money to get into and then drunk at clubs and bars whose only function is to bring people (of both sexes and all sexualities) into proximity of other people who will either pretend to be, or actually be, way into them.

The Japanese have just approached the issue with the no-nonsense directness that our primarily European heritage has always taken great pains to obfuscate.
Now explain soaplands.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

What's hard to explain? A girl takes a bath with you and you fool around.
Precision was attempting to explain why going to a bar and paying someone to pretend to like you instead of going to a bar and, you know, making actual friends is somehow or other an example of glorious Nippon's delightful directness or something. I was asking for him to try to put the same spin on the rest of Japan's sex industry, which is more or less entirely built around skirting technicalities in the legal prohibition of sex and cloaking the process in formal euphamisms. Like soaplands.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

What are you taking about? Other than penetrative sex all this stuff is legal.
Well, it's not so much legal as it's not illegal. But whatever. That actually just emphasises the point. That is, despite the fact that it's a tolerated segment of the sex trade it's still culturally approached with indirection and euphemism. If you go to the Netherlands a legal whorehouse it's not a `soapland', it's a whorehouse. Display windows facing the street showing off the whores. That kind of thing. The Swiss have public facilities generally called `sex boxen' for street prostitutes to use. Germany does something similar.

I mean I don't give a poo poo and it's a silly goddamn derail, but I just don't see the Japanese as being any less circumspect and indirect about their sex trade, and things like hostess bars and soaplands just make them look more so to me.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

A soapland is pretty unambiguous about its purpose. I just don't see what you're getting at.
Like I said it's a silly derail and I'm not going to drag it out any further, but I think it isn't at all unusual to have to explain things like soaplands and hostess bars to people who aren't familiar with Japan's sex trade, but nobody in human history has ever had to have an Amsterdam brothel explained to them.

I also think European laws on prostitution are way the gently caress more straightforward than Japan's---Japan's entire sex trade is more or less designed around the fact that vaginal intercourse is explicitly prohibited but the law is silent on everything else. If you look at Germany, where prostitution is explicitly legal, or in e.g. Norway where the law was recently changed to prohibit buying but not selling sex, it seems (to me anyway) like something that's much more structured around actually dealing with the issue directly rather than dancing carefully around it. But whatever.

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

In any case I think you're missing the point, which is that a hostess club, which is explicitly not a "fuzokuten," is more direct about its purpose than analogous Western institutions. Whether sex shops are or not is beside the point; they aren't really in the same category.
That's actually very much the point. Unless we're pretending for the purposes of this conversation that clients at hostess bars don't pay for `dates' outside the club, during which sex happens. Because you know, that's according-to-Hoyle prostitution. The fact that Japan pretends it isn't is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

precision posted:

No, I was saying that Japan's direct approach to the concept is weird to us because America's idea of the bar experience is derived from the European idea of the public house, or "pub". So in America we don't think it's weird to pay a $20 cover, and then $10 a drink, so that we can be around attractive people and loud music, even though at that point it bears no real resemblance to going to a pub, which people still do only they're called "dive bars" now.

The Japanese, being comically direct and literal about certain things, streamlined and mass produced the idea. At least when you drop $100 at a host club, you're guaranteed to have a hot guy talk to you and laugh with you. In America, you can drop $100 at a club night and leave without having exchanged more than two words with anyone.
I think going to a bar to hang out with your mates is one thing (and happens in places other than dive bars), going clubbing to dance with hot members of the appropriate sex is another, and hostess bars aren't either. Therefore the simple and what I would have assumed obvious reason hostess bars appear weird to Westerners is not, as you seem to be trying to say, because they're so familiar (but optimised or however you want to say it) but rather because they are not familiar at all. I'm also not sure why we should attempt to evaluate either going to bars or clubbing in terms of how well they reproduce the experience of ye olde European public house, as I imagine very few people in either kind of establishment are attempting historical reinactment. But whatever.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

mikeycp posted:

I would play an entire game of Sane Taxi.
Do you have a Dreamcast? If so, I have some good news for you.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Yechezkel posted:

What the hell... :mad:


I don't know what the game is expecting, but ichi-go ichi-e is a four character idiom (they're called chengyu in Chinese, I don't know that the Japanese name is). It means something like `one moment, one encounter', and it's what your coach/instructor/whatever will tell you if you start giving up when you get behind in a game or whatever. The idea being that you only get one chance, so make the most with whatever you have.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Zaggitz posted:

Its a nutrient found in strawberries.

Strawberry parfait
Anthocyanin is actually a very common pigment in plants. If you see a plant whose leaves have turned red in the fall, chances are the red pigment is anthocyanin. Same with things like purple cabbage and red lettuce. :science:

Now someone tell me when Hokkaido decided to crossbreed all its deer with velociraptors. I mean yeah a buck in rut will occasionally charge, but holy gently caress I've been deer hunting for a lot of years and never once had one of 'em keep me busy while another was sneaking around to attack from behind. And I think they're working with the blink bears that teleport in whenever there's a big sika melee.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

MrLonghair posted:

The deer in the parks where you can buy them crackers to feed? They are like a horde of hungry angry five-year olds who have been told you carry candy.
Yeah, deer in general are assholes, but they're usually assholes the way your college roommate is an rear end in a top hat---doesn't think things through, always mooching off of you, can never seem to learn from past mistakes, and so on. These Hokkaido deer appear to all wake up in the morning wanting to fight.

I really think a lot of it is that the way wildlife spawns in the game is...wonky. It seems like there are specific spawn points, and the game doesn't give a poo poo where you are in relation to any of them when it decides whether or not to create new critters there. So a buck that would run away if spawned further away will end up immediately charging you if it spawns right on top of you.

In general while I love the Yakuza games it seems like they could use some more interface/usability tweaks. Like the whole hunting/trapping thing is more of a slog than it should be just because of the way the inventory system works. There's no real puzzle/gameplay involved with poo poo like antlers and deer skins not stacking in your inventory since you can just send poo poo to the item box from the field if you're already full. But there's a popup dialogue every loving time it happens, and if you're already full and you take down a bear then that's like four dialogues/fades into and out of the item selection thing every time. Same with resetting traps---you have to gently caress around with sending each animal part to the item box and then select something else to send to free up a space to take the trap into your inventory, and then not mash X again immediately (because you'll jump back from the trap spot) and then mash X after the `Check' indicator comes up, and then select the trap. So it's this fiddly dialogue navigation task every time you want to just take everything and reset the trap which is what you want to do every time anyway.

I mean it's not a dealbreaker or anything, but the fact that there's so much poo poo that's obviously very well-thought-out makes the silly intro-to-UI-design mistakes stand out more.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
In the first chapter I had an accessory, forget what it was, that prevented encounters. Is there anything like that available in the other chapters? I'm getting pretty loving tired of having to curbstomp Town Thugs every couple of steps while I'm covering the entire loving map collecting map fragments as Saejima. Especially since I've already hit the level cap and so don't need the experience.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Policenaut posted:

I still am kind of baffled that they keep including the meals for completion but offering no way to easily eat them. In previous games, you could go on a date and it'd let you order as much food as you could afford but they fixed that for this one so sometimes I just get into fights and do nothing for a minute so I take enough damage to get something out of it.
That's what the appetite stimulation consumable is for. As far as I recall, it's a new addition---in the older games you could consume the raw fishing bait to knock a hp or two off so you could pound back another bowl of noodles or whatever. Here the whatever-the-gently caress-it's-called takes you for a hefty chunk of hp, which lets you polish off three or four dishes at a go.

Still not as convenient as binge eating when quote dating unquote hostesses, but whatevs.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Captain Novolin posted:

Some contain just plain old healing items, but a lot have cool items that she'll never be able to use, so it's not worth picking any up. Everywhere she can go, akiyama can go, so there's no reason not to wait for him to show up.
...except for the dumb design decision that allows the player to gently caress themselves if they haven't read a guide before playing the game.

I mean I've been enjoying Yakuza 5 so far, but it seems to have more kinda bullshit design decisions than the previous installments.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Captain Novolin posted:

the locker key stuff was way worse in 4, where you could pick them all up with akiyama (i did) and then suddenly there's none for any of the other characters

E: wait there were a few in areas you unlocked with certain characters, but still, you could gently caress yourself there, too
Yeah, but there at least you have the final chapter in which everything is shared.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

pick-e posted:

After doing some thinking and toying around in premium adventure mode, I feel Yakuza 5 is a bit of a disjointed trainwreck in many ways and this is without bringing up the plot.

There are four different collectibles, right? Why is it to collect Lottery Tickets you need only walk/run over them? That's great and how it should be for all of them. Instead, you have to press a button for Garbage, Map Pieces, and Locker Keys. Why? And why must we continue to sit through the archaic 'crouch down to get key then slowly rise back up' animations?

Then there's getting enough exp to level up after clearing a substory. You have to sit there and wait about 10 full seconds until the X button prompt shows up in the dialogue window so you can move on.

It's great that they removed material farming and weapon mods, but in its place they added weapon leveling and paying to level up the weapon shop which are whole new levels of unnecessary bloat/padding.

Two of the three new cities are hampered by invisible walls, and all of them are hampered by lacking in shortcuts between blocks.

Even the brawling is kind of made more annoying with the addition of Climax Heat and its easy, often unwanted activation. It's a decently fun game but boy is it far more flawed than most of the previous ones. I don't even know if I should be "hype" for Yakuza 0 after playing 5.
I like a lot of the overall design in all the Yakuza games, but the nuts-and-bolts interface stuff is often just amazingly clunky. A page or two back I commented on inventory management in the hunting stuff, but it turns out that's nothing compared to the tedious nonsense involved in training chickens in Shinada's chapter. Every time you want to train a chicken that's like a six or eight button clicks, including having to e.g. navigate a list to select the bird you want to train, then navigate another list to select which trainer, then navigate the inventory screen to select the item to pay with. Since it's just an incremental bump for each item you pay, based on how much the trainer likes the item type and how expensive the item is, there's really no reason why they shouldn't have just let the player select multiple items at once. That is, it isn't an inventory management puzzle, it isn't a timing puzzle, it isn't a question of selecting what order to do things, or anything like that. But not doing that turns training a bird up to max, which you have to do several times, from being something that's a couple of button presses to something that's hundreds of menu-navigation clicks. It's just a bullshit tedium tax on the player because the interface is so loving terrible.

On top of that it's annoying that you can only pay with stuff you have in your active inventory. I understand the reason for limiting e.g. the number of healing items and weapons and so on the player can cart around at once, but with stuff like things you pay the chicken trainers it's just an annoyance. Which is particularly glaring because you can sell poo poo out of the item box at the pawn shop, for example.

I mean despite all of this the Yakuza series is one of the few game franchises where I actually look forward to a new game getting released. But holy poo poo guys hire a new UI designer.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Serious Frolicking posted:

I don't see why you can't send stuff to the item box from anywhere at any time, instead of only one thing at a time and only when you are full.
From a gameplay perspective I really don't see why there are inventory limitations at all, except maybe for combat-specific poo poo like healing and combat consumables. But for poo poo like plates and random collectibles out of the UFO catcher or whatever, it's hard to see how inventory management adds anything apart from annoyance. It's not like there's a lot of strategy involved with planning out your inventory, and there aren't any real gameplay challenges associated with ferrying poo poo back and forth to save points. It's just irritating busy work for the player.

And it doesn't help that the menus and poo poo are bafflingly slow.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

lets hang out posted:

this ufo catcher with the bat you have to get in a hole is insanely hosed up
For both the dong-shaped UFO catcher and lining up pool shots I found using the remote for my receiver as a straight edge/visual guide helped. Like just holding it at arm's length to give a straight line to judge poo poo on the screen against.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Captain Novolin posted:

I'm trying to get the pachinko completion mark and jesus christ these jackpot animations are so loving long. Near as I can tell I'm barely getting any balls out of them, too

e: my jackpot counter was like 4 but I won literally no balls off them, gently caress this poo poo
Were you adjusting the ball speed thing for the jackpot mode?


Unrelated to that, what determines the difficulty and duration of the little QTE you have to do to throw or avoid being thrown by tough opponents? In the Raiden fight in the Victory Road finals, for example, the first couple times (in a single fight) it's normal---just button mash X or O as appropriate and it works. But after the first couple of times it becomes functionally impossible---it doesn't even get done displaying the QTE prompt before it counts it as failed and he either breaks the hold (if I'm trying to throw him) or completes the throw (if he's throwing me) immediately.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Captain Novolin posted:

I got the ball speed pretty well dialed in so i didn't really mess with it. I turned it off when my reels got full but that was about it. Even looking at the balls won counter i didn't get anything.
I don't know about all of the machines, but in the Aladdin ones you have to adjust the speed between normal play and when you're in a jackpot. The game actually points out where you should be trying to get the balls to land, but the only instructions it gives you are in Japanese.

Where's the balls won counter? The in-game display shows the balls you currently have, total spins, spins since last jackpot, and the number of jackpots so far. If you mean the thing listed under completion, I think that only counts net balls won per pachinko session, not total balls won. So if you blow a thousand and one balls getting to your first jackpot and get a thousand back, as far as the completion score goes you're still at zero.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Stelas posted:

I'm pretty sure if you drop to help there's a mostly translated guide to the game and where to aim.
I meant the instructions it gives you verbally when it actually happens.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
Man, the Jo Amon fight is some straight up bullshit.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Serious Frolicking posted:

Anyone know how to make Raiden show up in the coliseum? I fought him as Kiryu, and now he is supposed to be in a cutscene at the coliseum front desk but it never triggers.
I think you have to qualify for the finals with each of the other characters.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Samurai Sanders posted:

Yeah. Their poo poo belongs in fiction and not real life, and hopefully someday that's the only place it will be.

Edit: by the way, who else has watched Battle without Honor (dunno if that is the official translation of 仁義なき戦い or if there is one) movies? They're all on Amazon Prime here in Japan so I watched a few and drat if they aren't just nonstop manly men running around and loving each other up over stupid petty poo poo, and in thick Hiroshima accents I can barely understand. I wonder if 6 will take inspiration from that and be the messiest game yet?
Yeah, the Battles Without Honor and Humanity (which is how it's usually translated in English) films own. If you dig them, it might be worth it to look for Fukasaku's other revisionist yakuza films, e.g. Graveyard of Honor (1975) and Yakuza Graveyard (1976), the former of which was remade in 2002 by mega-prolific director Takashi Miike, who also directed Like a Dragon (2007), the screen adaptation of the Yakuza games.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Random Hajile posted:

Consider that a blessing. It's like Miike heard that the Yakuza games had substories, and for whatever reason then decided to focus the majority of the film's running time on a few really dumb ones. Tossing in the absolute bare-loving-bones of the Yakuza 1 plot between the substories felt like Miike just threw his hands up and said "Oh yeah, there was supposed be some Kiryu guy doing a thing, wasn't there? Whatever, gently caress it."
The dude has made four or five feature films every loving year for a quarter of a century. That's not Miike throwing up his hands, that's just how he do.

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SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Random Hajile posted:

Nah, I've seen a few of his other movies. He can tell an actual story when he feels like it. This wasn't that.
That's kinda my point. His poo poo is all over the loving map and if anything, that's the unifying quality of his overall style. Hand him a video game and tell him to make a film out of it, and if the result doesn't look very `faithful' to the source material or whatever, that's not him phoning it in. If he turned something out that looked pretty much just like a cutscene from the game or whatever, that's what Miike phoning it in looks like.

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