Episode 12: Mad Dog at the Bat (uncut commentary)
I am once again joined by ChaosArgate, as we face off with Goro Majima for the first time in the Yakuza series. Here’s the Majima fight music without us talking over it, the track is called “Receive You the Prototype”.
No new video yet because I’ve kinda been a lazy bum this week, but I thought I’d give you a little behind-the-scenes update:
I’ve finished recording the main story along with the sidequests and most of the planned bonus content (the one thing I still need to record is the hostess club stuff, which I really don’t care about in the slightest but probably have to show off at some point), and I’ve also edited all of the episodes together so now it’s just a matter of recording commentary for them.
I was even able to fight the secret bonus boss despite the fact I screwed up two sidequests and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to fight him. Don’t know what went on there, but I’m not complaining.
I’ve also given the OP a bit of an overhaul and added some new character profiles to the second… err, fifth post, so go ahead and check those out if you feel like it.
Episode 13: Chapter 6 Substories, Part One
We help out a bunch of folks in Kamurocho, and beat up a few others. We even use a baseball bat for actually hitting baseballs instead of whacking people in the head with it.
Episode 14: Chapter 6 Substories, Part Two
Oh good, we’ve got a loyal minion, and we also manage to stumble across a rather nefarious plot. Speaking of plot, next time will be a story update again, and I figured I’d put Komaki’s training sessions from this chapter into a separate bonus video:
Komaki’s going to teach us some moves by throwing baseballs at our junk. There’s a couple more training sessions after this, but those will be in the main videos since we only get to do one at a time.
Bonus 03: Coliseum Battles, Part One
We participate in the first set of tournaments available at the Coliseum. In editing, I decided to speed things up a little, because I figured that hearing me go “and then we kick him in the face again” for 20 minutes would’ve been too boring even by my standards. So, instead of that, you get a sped-up version with some good music.
EDIT: ABORT ABORT I SCREWED UP
Oops. The game audio is missing and your commentary started around 10 seconds late.
Dammit, I put in the wrong voice track. Hold on.
I’m surprised it took me until episode 16 to fuck up in catastrophic fashion. Here’s the video again, and this time it even comes with the correct audio track!
Detective Date’s estranged daughter seems to be hanging out with the wrong crowd lately, and of course we’re going to do what we can to help out our friend. Lots of family drama here in Chapter 6, although to be fair it is called “Fatherhood”.
Ah yes, the silly part where he says “I’m a horrible father” immediately after slapping his daughter. I wonder if it was that way in the original version, because I don’t remember it being translated that way in Kiwami.
Some fairly major plot developments occur, the most significant of them clearly being the fact Nishiki’s carp tattoo has almost reached level 20.
We also visit the “Love in Heart” massage parlor and play a minigame that is in no way weird and creepy. 
I’d like to think that rather crude SFX after the minigame was added in the localization, but anything is possible with this series. While there is no PS2-era nudity or anything other than heavily implied sexual content here, I’ll tag this update as 
just to be on the safe side.
Okay, so it turns out I have fucked up pretty badly with one of the technical aspects of this LP. What I’ve been doing here is recording the output from my PS2 through the Micomsoft Framemeister, and that output has slight vertical pillarboxing on the sides like this (I’ve been messing around with the zoom function and cropping to make it less apparent and remove the horizontal letterboxing):
So, okay, I figured that was just how the PS2’s widescreen output looked. Then I finally did a proper side-by-side comparison with the PS3 release, which runs at a full 16:9. I assumed they had just extended the field of view horizontally for this release and removed the pillarboxing, but… well, see for yourself:
See how everything is ever so slightly shorter and wider? Yeah, basically how this works is that they stretched the image to fill the 16:9 aspect ratio on the PS3. The mistake I made was not realizing that you’re actually supposed to do that yourself with the PS2 output (I read a bunch of stuff about this but only got conflicting information from different sources), so everything in the videos so far has looked too skinny, and I never noticed because it didn’t look wrong enough. Go me.
I’ll fix the issue in future updates, but so much for me having the best-looking Yakuza 1 LP out there (unless I re-render all the previous videos, which I will not do because the discrepancy isn’t THAT huge).
Well, that’s enough of my incompetence for now. Time for an update:
Episode 18: Take Your Daughter to Work Day
You know, if I got shot an hour ago, going out on the town would be the least of my worries even if the bullet just grazed my arm like it did Haruka’s. Turns out she also loves illegal gambling. What on earth even goes on at the Sunflower Orphanage if all the kids from there turn out like hardcore yakuza?
On a technical note, the aspect is mostly fixed. There is a couple pixels’ worth of black border to the right of the image, which was hard to see in any preview so I didn’t notice until now. There’s also the fact that I used the Framemeister’s settings to crop out the horizontal borders and cut out a few pixels off the bottom in the process, so I’ll probably also need to stretch the sides out a bit more to get the perfect 16:9 ratio and lose a couple of pixels from there as well. Still, this is now at least close to how the game should look in widescreen mode, and I apologize for my stupid mistake (which probably would’ve gone unnoticed if I hadn’t brought it up myself, but hey).
…Heh, the forum is yelling at me for posting several times in a row. How rude. It’s not my fault I’m not getting much traffic, you know! Or maybe it is my fault because my content isn’t good enough, now that I think of it.
Was the part in the roulette gambling area optional or a side story? I don’t remember it being a part of Kiwami, but that could explain why I wouldn’t remember it (I completed the plot, but haven’t exhausted the side stories yet).
That was a substory, yeah. I don’t recall it being in Kiwami, but I didn’t do every single substory in that game so I might have just missed it.
Episode 19: Chapter 7 Substories, Part One
In which we float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, or something to that effect.
Episode 20: Haruka’s Trust (Chapter 7 Substories, Part Two)
We finish up the last of the substories in Chapter 7, and spend some quality time running around town with Haruka. This kid has an appetite like some sort of a world-devouring eldritch god.
Episode 21: Brothers of the Oath
BROTHERRR! Oh wait, wrong game. We finally meet up with Nishiki, but our old friend and oath brother is very obviously not the person he once was. Nishiki also brings up something interesting - Yumi’s ring was found at the crime scene when the ten billion yen were stolen. Why would she drop her ring so carelessly?
I thought Purgatory was supposed to be safe from this kind of thing? Geez, Kage, you had one job. Well then, looks like it’s time for Kazuma Kiryu to beat up all the street gangs in Kamurocho and find out who hired these idiots to attack West Park while we were out, because nobody kidnaps Haruka and gets away with it.
Just a heads up, by the way - this episode contains some rather unpleasant torture sequences in a flashback cutscene. Most of the violence in this game is cartoonish and kinda silly even though it’s rated M (or 18+ in Europe), but this particular scene is something you could feasibly see in a hardcore gangster film. Of course it still is the PS2 so the visuals aren’t as gnarly as they would be in something like GTA V and I doubt anyone out there would be traumatized by this or anything, but the whole thing is still pretty gross especially with those sound effects. 
