Game:

Yakuza 2 (2006)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 2:15:22

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Originally recorded: May 20, 2021
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Well, it finally happened. I finally managed to roll Yakuza 2 on my last roll, as my second-to-last "main" game of the year. It's funny, the same exact thing happened with Brave Fencer Musashi -- which was the game I wanted to play first last year. Is this to be my fate? The games I want to stream the most end up being saved to the very end, while I get saddled with something I'm dreading at the very start? ...sounds about right, actually.

Granted, while I simply wanted to do Musashi first for the sake of a very weird joke -- mainly that FF8's demo was included with the game -- my reason for wanting to do Yakuza 2 first is... substantially more selfish. The Remastered collection of the third through fifth games, as well as the sixth Yakuza all came to PC this year... and I wanted to play through more of the games in the staggered pace a friend of mine recommended to avoid burnout. I was kind of hoping to get through the entire Remastered collection this year, but as it stands, only playing 3 and 4 seem likely at this point, even in a best case scenario. Oh well, at least I got to start some other series in the meantime.

I did originally want to try to play through Kiwami 2 last year, but some other things got in the way. In the end, I'm kind of glad I didn't. The major criticism of my Yakuza 1 stream was that I pretty much saw everything coming (you know, because I played the remake), so Dari got really huffy about me "seeing everything coming". He felt like I was just going through the motions with the story... which, in his defense, I kind of was. I mainly just commented on the "early installment weirdness" regarding SEGA's translations for the game at the time. Going in blind for Y2, though... definitely the right decision.

I guess you could say I wasted a lot of time with this stream, what with sitting through the recaps of the first game. It was kind of interesting to see them in Japanese this time, as opposed to the English dub. That was probably one of the bits I found funny about this stream: Dari's sudden and stark revelation that using the original Japanese voices meant a lot more reading on his end. Honestly, since I cut my teeth on the series with 0, it's just nice to hear those recognizable voices again. Granted, I'll miss Joker Majima and Goofy Date. On that note, my last two streams spoiled me big-time. I didn't have to read the majority of those games' dialogue, since they were fully dubbed. Not this time.

I only ended up finishing the first two chapters this time, but while the aforementioned Y1 recap ate up a lot of my time, my policy regarding side missions didn't help. This time around, I decided to stick with the rule I set for the first game: I'll only do the side missions I find. I'm going to try to avoid the paid dating sequences though, just because they're massive time sinks. I've been considering going back and doing some offline post-game sessions in the first two Yakuza games, with the goal of facing off with the secret bosses in both games... but in terms of actual livestreams, those would just be a massive waste of time. KI is already sitting this one out, so I'm trying to stick to a standard run. The only real question is whether I'd want to do those sessions after I finish catching up with the rest of the series on my own... or sooner than that.