To say that I’m an enormous fan of the Yakuza franchise would be an understatement. I’ve been playing these games since 2017, starting with “Yakuza 0” which hooked me immediately. There are numerous reasons why I recommend these games to others. I try to emphasize the sheer effort and care put into their narratives, especially with how long they tend to be — mainline Yakuza stories can take anywhere from 20 to 50 hours to beat, and that’s excluding the gratuitous side stories and minigames they’re packed with. 

To anyone familiar with this series, it’s no surprise that most of the developers at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio are men. With the games’ consistent emphasis on taking pride in your masculinity and fighting every rando you encounter on the street, it’s clear that they’re primarily made and marketed towards an adult male audience. So, why am I choosing to focus on women in a series that’s primarily about men? Well, it’s precisely because these games focus so much on men that I want to shine the spotlight on women for a moment. For starters, the franchise has a huge fanbase of women — and who can blame them? What’s not to love about games where you play as a goofy middle-aged man doing goofy middle-aged man things? With that in mind, I wish the developers would put just as much effort into fleshing out their women like they do with their men. The Yakuza franchise has some of the most nuanced takes on masculinity I’ve ever seen, so it’s clear that their team can develop multifaceted characters. This means the lack of nuance when it comes to women is by choice, not by incompetence. I believe this is one of the major aspects of RGG Studio’s games that holds them back, and that their already positive reputation could ascend so much higher if only they’d clear the two-centimeter barrier that is treating their women with the same level of care and attention that they treat their men with.

So, what do I mean by that exactly? My first go-to example is the character Goro Majima. Even if his name doesn’t ring a bell, you’ve probably seen this eyepatched fella somewhere on the internet at some point. Majima is a character that practically bleeds traditional masculinity. He solves every conflict with a fight, he’s loud and quick to anger, and he’s used to getting his hands dirty in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Surprisingly however, he also exhibits many feminine traits, and this isn’t seen as a gag or weakness by any of the other characters. He’s sensitive to the needs of children, he’s empathetic towards other people, and he’s even got a drag persona by the name of Goromi who works as a hostess at a cabaret club. You’d think the other men in the series would ostracize him for some of these things, but nope! He’s seen as a bit eccentric, but he’s well respected. These are all just aspects of his character.

Alternatively, almost none of the women are allowed to be anything beyond young, beautiful, and traditionally feminine. One such example is the character Saeko Mukoda, who is one of the few playable women in the franchise. She fulfills a sort of girlboss archetype, where her femininity is still seen as tomboyish simply because she’s an outspoken person who knows how to fight and likes to drink. She’s quite a feminine person in terms of looks, never without a pair of heels and a miniskirt, and this is reflected by the job classes that are available to her. For context, job classes in “Yakuza 7” function the same as classes in any RPG and you can assign them to characters in your party to give them special abilities. I was excited to explore her character when I eventually got around to playing “Yakuza 7,” but I was a little disappointed in the limitations of her role in the group. To put things into perspective, the men share eight common job classes, including fortune teller, musician, chef, and so on. Women, however, are limited to only four shared job classes and they’re all traditionally gendered ones, which are hostess, casino dealer, idol, and dominatrix. Now I don’t think having these jobs available is sexist in and of itself, but I do think excluding women from taking on any of those other jobs is sexist. Is there a reason Saeko can’t be a chef or fortune teller? She’s just as competent as any other member of the party, so there isn’t really an excuse. It frustrates me how she’s not given the opportunity to grow as much as her male counterparts and become anything other than the token girl of the party.

The final nail in the coffin is how often the Yakuza series kills off its women simply to move the plot along. This makes many of the women we meet feel less impactful toward the story because you never know if or when the game will decide that they’re expendable. Not to mention how many of these women are only introduced because of their connection to the men in the series. There are slight spoilers ahead for the first Yakuza game, although at this point it’s been out for 19 years (making it old enough to attend UTD) so I doubt anyone will be sending us any strongly worded emails.

In the prequel of the series “Yakuza 0,” we’re introduced to a woman named Reina. She owns a bar called Serena and gradually befriends Kazuma Kiryu, the central protagonist, and his oath brother Akira Nishikiyama as they become regulars at her business. I expected Reina to have a huge role in the story. She’s an enormous help to Kiryu after he’s framed for murder, and she even returns in the first installment of the series as one of his few allies. You can imagine my surprise when she’s unceremoniously killed offscreen in “Yakuza 1,” and to add insult to injury Kiryu hardly even mourns her! She’s also never brought up again in future games as far as I’m aware, which baffles me to no end. A different woman eventually takes ownership of Reina’s bar after her death — as if she was never there to begin with. Reina was one of the few friendly faces to greet Kiryu after his release from prison, and both he and Nishiki shared pleasant memories of their time at Serena, which functioned as a haven for both of them. To top it all off, Reina only died because her apparent crush on Nishiki caused her to betray Kiryu, an action which she openly regrets. In the end, she’s disgraced and punished for the simple crime of caring about her friends and making a mistake after letting her feelings negatively influence her actions. What the hell, man. I don’t care what anyone has to say, I’m a Reina apologist till the end.

Well, that was depressing! As you can see, there’s a recurring pattern that these games follow when it comes to characterizing their women and that pattern often ends in either stereotyping, romance, or death. Sometimes all three, if the writers are feeling particularly misogynistic. It’s agitating to see this in a franchise that handles subjects like crime, humanity, and masculinity with a lot more tact. Don’t let this turn you off entirely from the series, though. Instead, I encourage you to think about how your favorite media chooses to portray its women. Hopefully if enough fans voice their dissatisfaction to RGG Studio (although I doubt that’ll happen anytime soon), they might lend an ear and hire more women to write or consult on these games. Or maybe they’ll just ignore us like they’ve been doing for the past two decades. Either way someone’s gotta be annoying about this, and for now that person is me.