![]() He flies in the face of Kiryu’s hyper-masculine, emotionless portrayal with an ostentatious fashion sense (he’s rarely seen without his snakeskin jacket) and a kind of gleeful sadism. Majima making the expected choices, though? Could never be him. The stoic Kiryu no-sells every joke, and always takes the honourable–often predictable–route. ![]() Which is not to say that Kiryu’s sections aren’t fun in their own way, but playing as Majima feels freeing in both the combat mechanics as well as the story. Playing it all from the perspective of Majima is exhilarating in the way that playing as Kiryu rarely is. This kicks off a convoluted (in a good way) story about loyalty and the palace intrigue of the various warring yakuza clans. In fact, he’s so good at it that he earns the moniker “Lord of the Night.” It is, as the episode is called, a gilded cage though, and Majima is still under the thumb of the Shimano family. So Majima’s working off his debt in the most popular nightclub in Sotenbori, The Grand. After years of incarceration and torture in a prison called “The Hole”, Majima is offered the opportunity for redemption with the Shimano clan, but only if he can earn a 100 million yen quota as a club manager in Sotenbori. In a parallel storyline, we’re finally given an origin story for Majima in which he develops from a young, serious 24-year-old former mafia member to the deranged, sadistic personality for which he’s best known.Īs a young yakuza, a failed hit on another clan costs Majima his eye–cruelly gouged out as penance for insubordination to his own clan, the Shimano Family–and his freedom. Yakuza 0, a prequel to the original Yakuza game, depicts Kiryu’s rise through the Tojo Clan after having taken the rap for a murder he didn’t commit. Majima leans more towards the role of antagonist in the earlier games, but is a playable character in Yakuza 0 and in an alternate storyline in Yakuza Kiwami 2 (a complete remake of the original Yakuza 2 and my favourite game in the series). But each installment game has the two alternatingly facing off in a flurry of machismo in order to prove…something, and then helping one another when the chips are really down. Both characters exist well outside the law, though Kiryu treads a lot closer to the institutions of justice (despite being a former and sometimes Yakuza, hence the series title) than Majima does. I say that the Majima and Kiryu relationship is like Batman and the Joker, but it’s actually a fair bit more chummy than that. Remember when Batman and the Joker would just hang out together, shirtless? He plays the perfect counterpart to Kiryu’s often-humourless (even in the face of the patently absurd situations he often finds himself in) persona and always finds a way to upstage the “Dragon of Dojima.” Nicknamed “The Mad Dog of Shimano”, Majima’s hilarious but deranged style and unpredictability has made him one of my favourite characters, not just in video games but in any narrative art form. Though Kiryu is the main protagonist of the Yakuza saga, kind of a stoic and self-serious version of the modern Batman portrayals, his sometime-nemesis Goro Majima is very much his Joker and is equally as important. But it’s also very much it’s own thing, introducing a complex and wide-reaching story and a fully fleshed-out world of side characters and relationships. I’ve described it in the past as a version of Grand Theft Auto that supplants that series’ American cultural references and nuances with Japanese ones, while retaining the same chaotic energy that underpins it all. Perhaps only second to that feisty little blue hedgehog, the saga of Kiryu Kazama and his rise through the ranks of the organized crime world in the fictionalized Japan is one of the game company’s biggest accomplishments, and is one of my favourite game series. ![]() The Yakuza video game series is one of the most long-running and popular franchises in Sega’s arsenal.
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