For a long time, the yakuza and right-wing politics have been deeply intertwined. It’s faded somewhat in recent years, but without the relationship, it’s likely that neither would be where they are today.

David Kaplan’s Yaukza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld, explores the relationship in great depth. I apologize to Mr. Kaplan if my summary is not entirely accurate. Even before the war, there was a relationship between those who live outside the law and those who believe themselves above the law. Yakuza tend strongly toward ultra-nationalist, and helped push the war effort in that direction.

After the war, it seems they picked up right where they left off, each group using the other for their purposes. While the yakuza often used right-wing organizations as fronts for less-legal and more-violent activity, the ultra-nationalist LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) would use the yakuza for their less-appealing needs. In the middle, the two mix, with yakuza occasionally becoming becoming politicians and LDP members attaining their seats through yakuza influence.

The godfather of this relationship is a man named Yoshio Kodama. Kodama worked for the ultra-nationalist Japanese government during the war moving supplies, eventually becoming involved in the drug trade going at the time, amassing a fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Remember, this is taking place in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Kodama was jailed after the war as a Class A war criminal, but was let out shortly after to help fight against communism.

Kodama used his network to the benefit of the very conservative US occupation. Of course, the intelligence gathered helped his own ends as well. The strike-breaking efforts served both parties’ quest against communism, and much of that strike-breaking was done by yakuza groups ordered in by Kodama when he was the Justice Minister of Japan. At one point, Kodama even attempted to unite the many smaller gangs of Eastern Japan into a single group called Kanto-kai (Kanto being the eastern section of the main island). He also helped create truces between some other major yakuza organizations.

Imagine those conspiracy theories where old guys in suits sit around and decide everything for us. Kodama and his colleagues were exactly that. They’re referred to as – and referred to each other as – kuromaku. The word comes from Japanese theatre, where someone would manipulate the stage from behind the black curtain, or kuromaku.

Like I said, much of this was happening while he was in a position of real political power. Under his rule, the LDP flourished and so did the Yakuza.

Before I start getting into what I've learned about the Yakuza, I wanted to go into a few of my inspirations. I have a hard time calling myself a yakuza fan. That implies admiration for the people, beliefs, and actions. I'm curious about yakuza. The culture and people are intensely interesting and, well, pretty mysterious.

With the tight stranglehold the yakuza has on the media in Japan, much of what people see is what they want people to see. Movies, fiction, and films rarely depict yakuza negatively. Of course there are always villains, but there's more than one redeemable character. Hell, even the villains are often redeemed at some point.

So, I've been curious for a while about the organizations and everything surrounding them.

What really lit the fire was, of course, a video game. You know which one.

This guy here, with the awesome dragon tat, is my boy Kazuma Kiryu, the main protagonist of the Yakuza series. In Japan, Yakuza is called Ryu ga Gotoku (龍が如く), or Like a Dragon. Presumably because Kiryu is like a dragon in the way he acts and fights. The games, as you'd expect, depict the classic media image of the yakuza. The lonely anti-hero, the relentless badass. The loyal brother, bound by blood. There is literally no one on earth cooler than Kazuma Kiryu. I'll go deeper into the games in a later post. There are pages waiting for you. Pages.

Oddly, the Yakuza games lead directly to the next source of inspiration:

Mr. Jake Adelstein. (check out his site, Japan Subculture Research Center)

My first introduction to Jake Adelstein was his awesome review of Yakuza 3 - as reviewed by real yakuza. This blew my mind. From zero to legit in a few mouse-clicks.

Adelstein is, essentially, what I didn't know I wanted to be when I grew up. Adelstein applied to the Yomiuri Shimbun (a major Japanese newspaper) - via the standard Japanese route, not as an international reporter - and got in, becoming the first American to work as a Japanese-language reporter for a Japanese newspaper.

Adelstein was put on the police beat and over years, developed strong relationships with both police and yakuza. His autobiographical book, Tokyo Vice, was a huge inspiration to me as a former student of the Japanese language, a journalism graduate, AND as someone with an ongoing interest in yakuza culture.

Jake Adelstein is cooler than Kazuma Kiryu, by the way. In 2005, Adelstein uncovered information about one of the heads of Yamaguchi-gumi receiving a liver transplant in America. Investigating further and documenting his findings resulted in Adelstein receiving a notice from some intimidating men in dark suits: "Erase the story or be erased, your family too."

Not that having a contract out on you is cool in real life. It's having the balls to uncover and reveal the information that led to the contract and then maintaining that nerve when it's really tested. Standing up to a man who has potentially hundreds of men at his beck and call.

There have been other things over the years, too. Neuromancer and Shadowrun were many nerds' first introduction to Japanese organized crime. Beat Takeshi's many movies - Sonatine chief among them - are modern yakuza classics.

It isn't the men of the yakuza clans themselves that inspire me, but rather everything about them. How they got to where they are as a group, why they do what they do. Jake and the Yakuza games just helped lead me here.

This spring, I will be hosting a panel about the Yakuza at AnimeDetour (Specific date/time to come, con is from March 30 to April 1). Between now and then, I intend to use this blog largely to catalog and organize my findings and thoughts regarding the topic, so that when it comes time to plan the panel itself, I have extensive notes to come back to. I hope to post something daily, whether it is a list of books to read, a definition of a concept specific to the yakuza or to Japanese culture, or maybe a short profile of someone significant to the topic.

For those that don't know, the Yakuza is Japan's organized crime syndicate. Their version of the Mafia. They play much the same role in Japanese culture, but have a history and culture of their own.

So for the next few months, the video game posts may go into a bit of a winter hibernation while the Yakuza-related works takeover. Posts on the topic will be tagged as "yakuza."

So, welcome to... Tattoos and Pompadours.

I really like game soundtracks, but I’m also incredibly picky about which ones I like. As far back as Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill on PSone, I was already importing soundtracks.

Most games have what I would call workable soundtracks. They get by, convey the correct feeling, but are rarely memorable.

This year, two soundtracks have stuck with me – one movie and one game. The movie Drive’s soundtrack had a sort of ethereal ‘80s feel, augmented by the pink cursive text in the credits and the driver’s awesome jacket. The soundtrack completed the picture.

The same goes for Bastion, easily my favorite game soundtrack in years. While I wouldn’t call myself a country fan per se, I find myself drawn to the elements of country-esque music that conjure images of the Old West. One of my favorite bands is Calexico, and the Red Dead Redemption soundtrack is still in regular rotation on my list even today.

Bastion takes that old west feel and twists it to fit into a fantasy setting. Supergiant calls the music “Frontier Triphop.” The visual that conjures in my head matches Bastion’s setting and style perfectly. Everything has more twang to it than you’d expect. The music often sounds like it’s filtering through from Who Knows Where, taking on the same dream-like quality as those stages.

Bastion is worth checking out, if anything, just for the music. That it’s a fun game and a gorgeous game on top of that is bonus.

The soundtrack for Bastion can be picked up on Amazon (link above) or on the Supergiant Games’ site where' it’s available in FLAC format for you audio nerds.

This review originally appears on GamesAreEvil.

Acquired via Developer

I don’t usually think I have a lot in common with Beavis and Butthead, but after playing Yoostar on MTV for Kinect, I know there’s at least one thing: We’ve all seen way more Jersey Shore than necessary.

The basic conceit of Yoostar – whether it’s on MTV or not – is simple and works pretty well; The Kinect captures an image of the player’s room, and then the player steps in and reenacts a scene of some kind. The game cuts the player’s shape out of their room and drops them into the clip: “Video Karaoke.” You can be any number of spikey-haired gentlemen, such as the Terminator, Edward Cullen, or in the case of Yoostar on MTV, The Situation. Like I said, it works pretty well. Yoostar does a great job of taking the player’s image out of their room in real-time and dropping it into whatever clip they’ve chosen.

Instead of going with the usual general pop-culture schtick, however, this iteration of Yoostar focuses specifically on, you guessed it, MTV. Modern MTV, that is; not MTV back when they still had music videos to play. You can be The Hills’ Spencer, and his creepy flesh-colored beard. You can be X-to-the-Z Xzibit on Pimp My Ride. The Situation might even ask you to jump on a grenade. As if it wasn’t enough to act like an idiot on camera (which I encourage), you get to act like an idiot on camera acting like an idiot on camera.

Most of the content on the disc is stuff I find entirely reprehensible. Yoostar on MTV is, largely not for me. There are people who like these shows and watch them religiously. Those people will LOVE the game. I think there must be a few older geeks on staff over at Yoostar, because some really weird stuff made it onto the disc. MTV’s The State and Human Giant, specifically! This was, far and away, the highlight of the disc. The State is an ancient show by TV standards, hailing from the early ‘90s, while Human Giant is a bit more modern (and one of the first shows to feature Aziz Ansari from NBC’s Parks & Recreation). Both shows are really funny and the clips chosen are great. Better yet, even more clips from the shows are on sale as downloadable content. Who’d think I’d be considering buying DLC for an MTV clip game?

There are also a number of music videos available for an experience a bit closer to tradition karaoke with artists like Lady Gaga  (ba-ba-ba-ra), Weezer (Pork and Beans), Snoop Dogg (Drop It Like It’s Hot), LMAFO (Party Rock Anthem), and that 50 Cent guy.

Like I said, there’s so little for me here, and so little for anyone who isn’t a big fan of MTV’s recent and current programming. Yoostar on MTV is a perfect example of something made just for its fans.

One of my favorite games of all time is, without question, Resident Evil 4. I own it on GameCube (Picked up day 1), PS2 (Used), Wii (New, heavily discounted), and now Xbox360 (Xbox Live Arcade, full price). You don’t buy something four times unless you really love it. Like every special edition of your favorite band’s best album, or this year’s release of Neon Genesis Evangelion, now with 5 seconds of previously-unseen footage.

Resident Evil 4 is a joy to play, mechanically. In very few games does pulling the trigger and seeing your shot hit come with such a strong sense of satisfaction. So much has been said of RE4, and every 10-100-A+ score is absolutely deserved.

There’s just this one thing.

No matter what year Resident Evil 4 comes out in, no matter what system it comes out on, that knife fight is the worst thing in any game that year.

This isn’t just a gripe about RE4, honestly. It’s a gripe about any game that does stuff like this. Dead Space has a sequence with Isaac defending the ship from asteroids, like some hokey Star Wars rip-off. Let’s reach back—way back—even. The speeder level in Battletoads.

What all those games have in common is that they’re generally well-loved, mechanically-sound games, each with an incredibly irritating section in the middle that’s completely different from the rest of the game.

After hours of over-the-shoulder gunplay, RE4 suddenly pits Leon against his former comrade, Krauser, in an epic knife battle. This would’ve been an awesome cutscene. One to go down in history as the coolest knife fight ever. Instead, the developer chose to turn it into a quick-timer event.

Here’s the thing. Quick-timer events aren’t bad by their very nature. The grand-pappy of QTE games, Shenmue, actually got it right. Instead of punishing you with an instant death followed by a load screen, a missed button-press in Shenmue resulted in an alternate cut-scene and possibly another fight. Annoying, but not world ending. Ryo Hazuki was pretty great at karate.

Resident Evil 4, though, uses QTEs and misses the point of them entirely. Resident Evil is supposed to be deadly; I get that. Making QTEs deadly, though, just results in lots of do-overs. I’m terrible at QTEs. Whatever button you put on the screen, I’m probably going to press the opposite one. It’s just a thing with me. So don’t punish me.

I’ve nearly broken controllers on four different consoles because of one game. And then they’ll release RE4 on another system and once again I’ll forget about the knife fight, have a great 10 hours of game, and then everything turns red as my vision fades…

Video game visuals in the last couple generations have become a sort of arms race by different developers to make the most realistic-looking-but-not-real thing. It all looks so similar that the visuals of most games aren’t worth talking about.I can’t say that stuff is lazy or uncreative. It’s hard work. Games like Battlefield and Gears of War are gorgeous and full of rich detail.

What they lack is vision.

I love games like El Shaddai, Ico, Rez; games that are daring enough to imagine a gorgeous new world and developers brave and talented enough to make them work.

El Shaddai’s director, Sawaki Takeyasu, had intended to make the game look like a painting while still looking lively. The side scrolling levels make me think of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The thick lines and bright pastels show strong influence from those prints and remind us of some of Takeyasu’s previous work, Okami, though it never feels derivative.

El Shad-ding Dong

The art standard to the third-person gameplay, on the other hand, glows. Literally, everything glows. It’s gorgeous. The world has an ethereal look to it. It looks like everything I could imagine a battle of angels would look like. It isn’t always bright, exactly, but it always glows.

When I walk into my local comic-shop, the owner knows I’m looking for art that’ll roast my eyes. And also Batman, but mostly the art thing. I don’t buy a whole lot of comics, and if I was the same way about games, I’d probably spend a lot less money. But El Shaddai would still be in the stack.

My wife loves squash. It’s one of her favorite foods. She bought a sack of it this fall big enough that I would’ve fit into it. I can’t stand squash. My mom cooked it for years, always telling me it was a new recipe. So I’d be polite and try it. That’s how I was raised. But I reached a point; I realized something.

My mom’s a great cook. So is my wife. But I still don’t like squash. It has nothing to do with their cooking skills or the skills of whoever made it. I just hate squash.

Zelda’s the same way for me. I’ve tried it over the years – Legend of Zelda II, Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess (I didn’t have a Super Nintendo growing up. I never really played Link to the Past very much.)

No matter what sort of flavor it had, though, it still tasted like Zelda. For a lot of people, that’s exactly the point. That’s the reason to come back. For some reason, it just doesn’t work for me. Sorry Link. Zelda isn’t bad; it’s just not for me.

Geralt of Rivia: The Last Champion of PC Gaming?

Well, not likely. But he’s certainly the posterboy for it right now. The first Witcher title was a relatively low-key affair. Built on Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights engine, Witcher came from the relatively unknown CD Projekt RED, based in Poland. The first release was buggy and had some glaring problems surrounding a solid PC game.

In the first instance of the “CD Projekt RED is awesome” initiative*, however, the developer released a huge patch for the game that fixed translations and animations, improved textures, and chopped the loading time by around 80%. The problems were pretty egregious before, but even so it’s not often a developer will go back and invest a million dollars in a game they’ve already released.

I loved the first game. I’ll admit, it took me four tries to actually get past the first couple hours, but once I did, you could hardly tear me away. It’s easily one of my favorite PC games. So you can expect that I had high hopes going into the sequel. Good thing CD Projekt RED is awesome.

The sequel arrived this spring with a brand new engine, some some of the best PC graphics out there, and zero DRM.

When most series hit their second iteration, they get a minor graphical upgrade, a couple add-ons to the major mechanics, and a new story. Assassin’s Creed is a perfect example. Each new title adds some more weapons and strategic options and by the end the Ezio Auditore de Firenze is carrying so much crap on his person that he might as well be a Sherpa.

Witcher 2, instead, overhauled combat. Without the NWN engine holding them back, the developers were able to do something closer to the combat they wanted. The major elements are still there—silver and steel swords, alchemy, and signs—but they exist in a free-form system more reminiscent of the recent Batman games than of the semi-turn-based system it originated in. When I try to think of other series that changed the basic functions of their combat and pulled it off, nothing comes to mind, except for Witcher.

The game also released sans DRM. At least, on CD Projekt’s Good Old Games service. This was a risky move for the developer; it opened the door for massive piracy. And pirated it was, to the tune of 5 illegal downloads to one legal download. But CD Projekt stands by its decision. Not only is Witcher a great PC game series, it’s a great example of a developer and publisher walking “the walk” when it comes an Anti-DRM policy and continuing to treat their devoted fans (like myself) with respect.

My biggest fear is that that’ll come back to bite CD Projekt in the proverbial ass. Witcher is a rich series – five books and a collection of short stories give the dev plenty of backstory to work from, and I’d like them to get through all the good stuff. The world of the Witcher is a lush, memorable low-fantasy world. Characters like Geralt and Triss are some of my favorite to check in on. Just like the first Witcher did more than hint at a sequel, we already know Witcher 3 is on the way, and I can’t wait to see both what’s in store for Geralt and for the series itself.

*That’s what I call it, anyway

Deus Ex: Human Revolution was one of my favorite games this year. It was a great addition to one of my favorite game series. It was a much-needed dose of proper Cyberpunk. Just about everything was just right; the augmentations, the variety of missions, and the different city districts all felt like part of the same world.

But within Deus Ex is hidden another, very different game. Hidden inside this intricate, fascinating world is an incredibly boring shooter that comes up every time Adam Jensen fights a boss. And there’s a reason for it.

As it turns out, the boss fights were outsourced to another developer. A developer whose president “wasn’t familiar with Deus Ex.” Outsourcing aspects of a game isn’t unique to DXHR. In fact, with games getting bigger and bigger, it’s becoming a necessity in some cases. Most of the big shooters have one team working on multiplayer and another team working on single player. Assassin’s Creed Revelations involved a total of six studios across three continents. Outsourcing or spreading a game across multiple teams can be a good thing. Let each team concentrate on something specific to improve the strength of the end product.

In the case of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, there was a lack of communication, apparently, with regard to the philosophy of the story and design. The best we can hope is that this very-noticeable stumble – both in-game and out – is a lesson to other developers to make sure that when they outsource, everyone is working on the same game.