As someone who had the novel experience of operating a company during a global pandemic, occasionally I was made to interface with functionaries at varying levels of the government apparatus whose jobs were never under any kind of threat. It took me a really long time to figure out that the purpose of these organizations was to make getting what you're owed incredibly difficult. It's the only way to parse their incredibly clear actions. You would have to perform a profundity of mental labor to believe that their stated purpose is anything like the purpose they serve. If you did your part, and went through all this shit, and then had to pig-wrestle them for the money they say you're owed, from them, and they never gave it to you, and now you have been made to engage in a bunch of unpaid labor, it's no longer a tax return. Now it's a loan, with monthly interest - in any system that references reality.
Speaking of organized crime, I never played any Yakuza games before a couple days ago, when Infinite Wealth came out. I have stayed away from them for the most part because by the time I learned it was even a series, there were a handful of games already in it. Then - and this is an index of how little I knew about it - they changed the name of the game in English to what it already was in Japanese, which is Like A Dragon. I thought this was a spin-off of some kind, but no. The action combat, in a shocking turn of events, somehow became a turn-based tactics game as it went along. That was the first domino to fall.
I knew that would get me into it, after the last one. But I was still intimidated by the longevity of the series. Ultimately, what pulled me across the line was that it is clearly the inheritor of Shenmue, which was my favorite game for the longest time. I just wanted to live in there there. I felt confident that if I looked into it, the studio that made it would have some direct lineage there but I didn't expect it to be from Yu Suziki's literal protege - one who left production of Shemue out of frustration, and then was brought back as producer and director simultaneously because he's the only person Suzuki trusted.
It reminds me a little bit of when I learned about Power Metal, where as a young person who was denied "the rock" I somehow stumbled on something bizarre: that eighties metal never went anywhere, and continued to flourish and develop as a form somehow overseas. Infinite Wealth is like that. My favorite game somehow became a genre that only includes itself, and I missed basically all of it. I've been playing it on the Deck while I've been sick, and my mouth has just hung open for a significant percentage of it. Magical realism, soap opera, martial arts, life sim, QTEs (?!?), and surreal humor? I consider it my job to find things like this and I completely fucking missed it.
(CW)TB out.
