Vicarious Drunkenness: “Feud of the Ages” and the Role of Alcohol in ‘Like a Dragon: Ishin!’
When I was an undergraduate at University, I took a literature course titled “Be Drunk: The Literature of Intoxication.” In this course, I studied everything between Charles Baudelaire’s dark poetry to Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-fueled observations. This course gave me the language and theoretical framework to better understand the utterly human desire to alter one’s own consciousness, to escape into something at the extremes of the sacred and profane. I also learned a lot about why I have turned to alcohol in moments of celebration and sorrow. The result is that I now see that kaleidoscope of academic abstraction and personal experience in the depictions of alcohol (and other mind-altering substances) found in the fiction I consume.
I have recently been chipping away at the gorgeously remastered Like A Dragon: Ishin! which, like all games in the Yakuza series, provides plenty of occasions to drink – often to excess. Within the gameplay loop of combat, at least, being drunk in the Yakuza games serves a purpose. Consuming alcohol results in an increased encounter rate as you wander through the alleyways of Japan, and increases the rate at which your character accumulates heat, a gauge that enables special attacks that do extra damage. Completionists of the series will undoubtedly be familiar with frequenting the Yakuza world’s bars, but Ishin features perhaps the single most elaborate episode involving alcohol across the Yakuza-related games, and it serves as one of the highlights in the entire story.
The Ishin scene in question is called “Feud of the Ages,” which starts as an immiserated tragedy but somehow devolves into a comedic display of what I can only describe as competitive masculinity and, ultimately, wholesome reconciliation. Sakamoto Ryoma, who players will recognize as Kazuma Kiryu reimagined, loses a dear brother while on his revenge quest to discover the killer of his adoptive father. Masking the indescribable pain, Ryoma drowns himself in endless bottles of liquor, alone in his room, casting his final empty bottle aside. Out of alcohol, he decides to pursue his need for drink elsewhere, out on the town. This excursion is, perhaps predictably, where things get out of hand.
Early in his drinking escapade, Ryoma is approached by a mysterious woman who invites him back to a secret location. Unsure of this woman’s motive, but curious at the prospect, Ryoma follows her back to an empty bar where he will be able to drink alone, enabling himself to dive deeper into his misery. But when Ryoma arrives, he is met by Katsura Kogoro, who longtime Yakuza fans will recognize as Akiyama from Yakuza 4 and Yakuza 5; it turns out that this mysterious woman is named Ikumatsu, better known as Hana-chan from those same Yakuza installments. Together, they corner Ryoma into drinking and opening up further about the feelings that he so desperately wants to diminish.
Watching Ryoma, an otherwise stoic man whose emotions can best be described as stern, open up to the point of tears harkens to mind that college course I took years ago. Ryoma is drowning in pain, in loss – but not just the mere fact of his brother dying, rather, the layers of complicated guilt that his sober mind can’t bear to begin processing. Takechi, Ryoma’s brother, was the closest thing to family left in Ryoma’s life. Due to circumstance, the two brothers did not share the goodbye they would have wanted in the wake of their father’s assassination. Framed for this murder, Ryoma fled to Kyo, and so the unspoken grief that both men were experiencing was walled off, causing both brothers to cope in manifestly different directions.
Ryoma’s loss is doubly compounded when word reaches Kyo that Takechi has died by suicide. It’s one thing to lose a family member, another to lose one unexpectedly, but to lose an estranged brother to suicide is a different degree of loss entirely. At the risk of saying the obvious, when someone close to you takes their own life, the feeling is almost impossible to capture. In a split second, the knowledge of this loss slams open the file drawer in your head that profiles this person; you rattle through every possible emotion – shock, guilt, confusion, pain – and start recontextualizing every recent experience of this person. In “Feud of the Ages,” Ryoma cannot bear to begin this agonizing and never ending process, and so he refuses to let that file cabinet even open. Hence the binge drinking episode that, frankly, ought to have killed him from alcohol poisoning.
While commiserating over this indescribable pain, Katsura proposes that Ryoma become a sort of spy on the Shinsengumi, an elite law enforcement squad, and continue the work that Ryoma’s brother died enacting. Not content with this offer, Ryoma – somehow still conscious, despite the bottomless alcohol up until this point – storms out into the street, ready to find another watering hole to isolate himself within. While storming off, however, Katsura isn’t ready to hear ‘no,’ and the two encounter a group of men cruelly pelting rocks at a stray dog. As this dog cowers, a third figure wanders into the scene, that of General Saigo, better known as Ryuji Goda from the first few Yakuza games. Saigo puts a stop to the animal cruelty, instantly bonds with the abused shiba inu, and adopts it as his own.
Despite the fact that Saigo saves the day and displays a great degree of wholesome affection towards the rescued pup, the tone of this scene immediately shifts when Saigo notices Ryoma and Katsura staring at him from nearby. It turns out that Katsura and Saigo are bitter rivals – or, at least, their respective clans and provinces dictate a feud – and conflict ensues. Ryoma, irritated at this exchange and still quick tempered from the mixture of excessive alcohol consumption and immense loss, tosses the men’s weapons to the ground and a three-way fist fight ensues. Ryoma emerges as the winner, demanding as punishment that the two losing men go out with him as drinking buddies for the remainder of the evening.
The subsequent scenes of “Feud of the Ages” involve Saigo and Katsura practically begging for Ryoma to stop drinking, but he keeps bullishly insisting otherwise. Drinking the two other men practically under the table, it’s remarkable that any of them speak coherently whatsoever and don’t find themselves either passed out or kicked out of the bars they are patroning. What started as a hostile bond earlier in the chapter quickly reveals itself to be superficial; these men have far more in common than their allegiances would lead them to believe. As unlikely and uphill a partnership as it first seems, you can start to see cracks in their bravado-laden facade by the time they relocate to another bar.
Eventually, discussion turns towards political beliefs, and Ryoma, absolutely plastered, confesses to the double identity he has been using while infiltrating the Shinsengumi. While Katsura surely knew the nature of Ryoma’s true identity, Saigo did not, and the reaction to this revelation is not as grandiose as it could be because, well, when the conversation gets handed back to Ryoma, he has passed out while sitting up, unconscious at last.
Saigo’s reaction to the news of two Ryomas reveals that, prior to this exchange, he had already met someone using the name ‘Sakamoto Ryoma,’ which casts doubt on the real Ryoma’s situation when learning that this person claiming to be Ryoma had proposed an alliance for the purposes of war. This false Ryoma planned on arming this allied group with purchased arms from British sources. Uncertain as it may be, “Feud of the Ages” throws an additional wrench of uncertainty into the plot, symbolizing the identity crisis now faced by the true Ryoma. In the same way that Saito Hajime (i.e. the protagonist going by Ryoma) has adopted this identity in order to avoid suspicion, so too might this other Ryoma – or so the characters speculate.
United by an evening of alcohol and a common feeling of responsibility for Ryoma’s safety, Saigo and Katsura team up to bring Ryoma back home to the inn where he began the night drinking alone. The player doesn’t get all of the details here, but upon waking, Ryoma learns that these men, his “drinking buddies” the innkeep Oryo relays, had left a parting message for him, “We’ll go ahead and let bygones be bygones.”
What began as a night of sorrow and tragedy, personal suffering and regret, became something entirely different – a night of emotional catharsis, of the healing between wounded men, and the resolution to leave spilt blood to dry in the soil rather than continue to moisten it afresh with deontic retribution. “Feud of the Ages” thus captures in microcosm one of the Yakuza series’ greatest strengths: the ability to rock wildly back and forth between disparate tones and emotions without ever feeling dissonant, out of place, or inappropriate to the scene’s context. This small chapter could have easily been cut from the overall narrative, as it feels like a short story or side quest from a DLC addition, but I am so incredibly glad that it exists here because it greatly humanizes characters with some of the toughest, hard-as-nails facades in the entire game.
The presence of “Feud of the Ages” makes me step back from Ishin itself and think about the role that alcohol plays within video games more broadly. While far from essential to any gaming experience, I think fondly of a few other games where alcohol serves as a valuable plot device both for character development and easing of tension. The primary example that comes to mind is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, specifically the quest “No Place Like Home,” in which we see sides of the protagonist Geralt emerge that otherwise never surface within the rest of the game. The “No Place Like Home” scene serves to add silliness and mirth to an otherwise dark storyline; especially considering how Geralt is portrayed in Andrzej Sapkowski’s book series, this otherwise inconsequential chapter shows the player how truly human this Witcher is. So too with Ryoma’s depiction, as well as his comrades, in “Feud of the Ages.”
“Feud of the Ages” also led to one of my new favorite lines of video game dialogue when, later in the story, a character observes, “Man, who woulda thought all it took to bury a generational grudge was a night out with the lads?” Chef’s kiss.
Alcohol certainly does not have an appropriate role to play in most games. But for the type of experience that leans directly into mature themes like the Yakuza series, while still focusing itself on emotional bonds, relationships, and dramatic tension, the introduction of alcohol as a spin on the formula is a clever way to show these aspects of storytelling in an unfamiliar new light. While I’ll never know the joys of seeing some of my favorite characters under the influence, I relish in the altered states that games like Like a Dragon: Ishin! bring to the table with their honest and unflinching portrayals of these illicit activities.
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