Tired of dweebs in argyle making fun of his sweet popped collar, Kazuma dispenses fashion advice with his elbows. After this photo was taken, he did a keg stand, fondled a waitress and asked if anyone in the crowd would like to give him "some up-tops."

Click here to read part two of this essay, or here to read part one. If you don’t, I’m afraid we can’t be friends anymore.

Over the past two days, I’ve been going very far out of my way to defend tedium as a worldbuilding device in Yakuza 3. I have an uncomfortable feeling about this that I can only describe as filmy, so I’m going to take this opportunity to state more explicitly what I hope was implied by part one of this series:

I do not recommend Yakuza 3. If I knew you personally—if I knew what kind of games you’ve played, what kinds of movies you like, what books you’ve read, what your natural hair colour is and the sounds you make when I run my fingers down the notches in your spine, I might—maybe—suggest you try it. But the fact is that none of Yakuza 3’s clever ideas are executed in a fashion that will satisfy most people.

Yesterday, I talked about how Yakuza 3’s tedious opening hours allowed you to get to know the world, and therefore get to care about it despite its absurdity. As interesting as that is, there’s just no getting around that tedium is—sort of by definition—the opposite of fun. In other words: the game is, quite simply, no fun for the first seven or eight hours. But it is interesting.

We’re at a point in time where games are still struggling to find expressive techniques that are unique to the medium. The Bioshocks found a way to tie shooter mechanics into a narrative theme of choice. By focusing and refining the tools you had available to interact with the game world, Batman: Arkham Asylum conveyed a sense of character as textured and robust as any of the comics featuring the grumpy man-bat. The Left 4 Deads’ splintered chronology took advantage of the repetitious nature of online play, slowly building a comprehensive backstory through the piled-up fragments, like a Phillip Glass melody. What these games have done for theme, character and narrative in games, Yakuza 3 does for setting. What Bioshock, Batman and Left 4 Dead have that Yakuza 3 doesn’t, however, is focus.

While I’m academically interested in the acclimatization period Yakuza 3 allows me at the beginning of the game, the completely random, scattershot nature of the sidequests and incidental activities mean that none of them are situated around a controlling idea or theme. One minute, Kazuma is buying a fish for a cook, the next, he’s helping an old lady with her heart medicine. Nothing save the initial choice to help a stranger adds any texture to Kazuma’s character, and there are no choices throughout the quest that let me imprint my own personality on his, save for the ones I make up myself (see part 2 of this series for an example). When I’m caught in a fight, however, Kazuma’s face-stomping, gut-stabbing, crowbar-smashing brutality seems totally at odds with the big softy who’s spent his retirement looking after orphans.

On one hand, Kazuma’s blank willingness to do good deeds and unrelenting fury for those who challenge him is part of what allows us to derive our own meanings from his interactions with the world. On the other, some player-directed reason for his choices a la the Paragon/Renegade system from Mass Effect would go a long way toward convincing us we were interacting with the world through anything but a cipher.

The problem is that none of Yakuza 3’s many events, battles and activities that coat every square inch of the game world are designed to do anything but occur, and they give us no more information about the place we’re in or the character we’re playing than we already had. Their sheer volume and quotidian nature give us many opportunities to feel as though we’re visiting a real, living place, but the fact that the game provides no feedback for our interactions—there is no suggestion that it is responding to us, however many of our own narratives we imprint on the proceedings—makes it very difficult to believe that the real, living place we’re visiting is anything more than a playground. I’m all for co-authored meaning, Yakuza 3, but—Christ—meet me halfway.

Still, a playground is clearly all Yakuza 3 has any desire to be, and it’s a damn fun one. Though there’s clearly a lot of intelligence behind the design of the game, I sincerely doubt that any of what I’ve talked about here appeared on the planning whiteboard—at best, I suspect most of this was simply a happy accident. But what if it wasn’t? What if some of the ideas surrounding setting in Yakuza 3 were adopted by a developer who gave a damn about setting or character or theme or meaning?

Jason Rohrer, Jonathan Blow, Tale of Tales and Ice-Pick Lodge have all made games that tied their mechanics to their meanings. And none of them, importantly, have ever suffered from a lack of focus. But we don’t even need to venture that far into indieville (or, y’know, Belgium or Russia) to find a developer who might have the confidence to give players a slower start. Just by way of example—what might Valve’s take on the slow start look like, with the cabal of journalists, humourists and lunatics they keep on staff to script their games? What could Bioware’s dedicated team of professional pulp writers do with a quieter, less linear prologue?

Modern games, with their seven-figure budgets and huge development staff, have an overwhelming tendency to “open big,” like a Spielberg or Abrams film, and obfuscate as much of a game’s “gameyness” with that borrowed spectacle. But unlike a blockbuster film, games—even exciting, action-packed ones—have a so far under-exploited capability to let us wade in slowly rather than shoving our heads under in the opening seconds. They have this capability precisely because they are “gamey,” because of the characteristics they do not share with cinema. It took comics four decades and, well, Alan Moore to find their unique voice as a medium, and games are due to find theirs soon. And when they do, I suspect it will sound a lot more like Yakuza 3 than Heavy Rain.