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So my roommate Nick came in while I was busy writing some magazine article and talking to my friend, and he says, stinking of whiskey, "You want a review of that Yoshinoya: The Videogame?" And then he flashed me two middle fingers.
I was filled with anger, quickly and sharply. The anger had nothing to do with the middle fingers -- I can take as much as I dish out in that regard -- it was the raw realization that someone had played my game before I did. Back in 1993, I bought a copy of
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (an excellent choice that turned out to be), and had it in my house for all of five minutes before, while I was in the bathroom, my big brother opened it up, started a quest, named the hero, and entered the first town.
What audacity! A game I buy is mine. Though I didn't buy Yoshinoya: The Videogame, I'd like to think that writing enough inane articles about Gamecube games to attract enough attention to establish a working relationship with Sony Computer Entertainment Japan (wherein insertcredit.com is now corporate-sponsored, and may receive any PlayStation2 game on demand even if we don't plan to review them, or even review them favorably) was something like work. To the untrained eye, I am doing nothing outside listening to Japanese reggae-punk with Sony Eggo headphones (thanks to Sony); on deeper, more brilliant levels, I am working in close cooperation with our world's future. So when I secure a videogame and bring it into this house, don't fucking play it before I do.
I realize I am not a child anymore in terms of the law. I can be arrested, in this country, for screaming at my roommate for playing a videogame of mine before I get a chance to even open its package. I also realize that, lately, I sometimes have a stack of five (or sixteen) games standing beside my PlayStation2, and they're there, sometimes, for a week and a half or more before I even play a one of them. Whereas years ago bringing a new game home meant tearing it open and playing it right away, I am now an "adult" with "adult" "responsibilities," and I carry myself without ceremony.
Some ground rules, dear reader, if you ever find yourself in my house:
Don't play my games before I do.
If you want to play a game of mine, go ahead.
Just don't play one I haven't played yet.
If you're not sure which ones I haven't played
Don't hesitate to contact me.
If I am unreachable (cell phone battery dead, for example)
Assume I haven't played any of them.
Our other roommate, Drew Cosner, is allowed to cover his NEC PC-Engine Duo with a fucking blue tea-cozy and demand that no one touch it; I am allowed this much, at least.
I was sitting on the big magenta sofa, thinking about Yoshinoya: The Videogame. I was holding its poor ravished package in my hands. Its jacket is orange; the "Yoshinoya" logo is prominent and bold; the picture of gyuudon -- beef bowl -- is perfectly centered and almost appealing even to a vegetarian. It might be the box-art of the year.
. . . what the hell? Who am I kidding? I don't eat gyuudon. I never have. I am a vegetarian. This isn't my life. It isn't what I do. I can admit that the package art is simple and bold, and enticing in its bold simplicity. That's about it. That's all I'm allowed. I'm not allowed to lick my lips at the photograph and growl about how "I could go for some of that." Which leads me to our first devastating revelation regarding Success' Yoshinoya: The Videogame for PlayStation2, and that is that
THIS IS NOT MY GAME.
I mean, like I said, I worked for it, so to speak. I performed a series of minor negative social influences that ended with my obtaining an infinite stack of PlayStation2 games, yes. The game I hold in my hands will forever be my possession. Yet -- it is not mine. And not just because Nick played it before I did. Oh, no. I forgive you for that, Nick. Now stop pissing in your bedroom or whatever it is you're doing in there, and I'll re-friend you on this great livejournal we call life.
This game is not mine for reasons I don't, entirely, control. The chief of those reasons is that I don't like Yoshinoya. I don't like Yoshinoya, most simply, because I can't. I don't eat that grade-E beef they serve piping hot over there. Hell, no one eats that beef anymore, actually. Ever since the Beef Crisis began (I really wishNamco would get that GunCon2-compatible PlayStation2 port finished already) and everyone is afraid of both eating and turning into Mad Cows, Yoshinoya has served pork bowl (butadon) instead of beef bowl (gyuudon). Japanese office ladies, when they're not mumbling to co-workers about "It's hot, isn't it?" will bring up the Beef Crisis as a pseudo-conversation topic, wondering when sweaty shreds of cow-meat laid sauced atop rice will return to their hardworking weeknightly twenty-four-hour eating-binge lifestyle.
The Famitsu scores for Yoshinoya: The Videogame were kind. Two of the reviewers, who will remain nameless, remarked on the packaging, saying "It's like the Beef Bowl has returned." Sure enough, in the game, gyuudon is on the menu. This, alone, was cause for critical celebration. Gag me with a saibashi.
I tell you, many's the time I stood behind a friend or comrade while they ate at Yoshinoya. I've never been able to get the words out right. This is kind of cathartic: not a single item on the menu is meat-free. Not only this, when you walk into a Yoshinoya and don't order anything -- that is, if you're just accompanying a friend - the girl or guy behind the counter looks at you like you're a fucking psychopath. I once sat at a Yoshinoya in Saitama with my ex-girlfriend, late on Sunday night many years ago. We were the only two people in the joint. I, as always, don't look Japanese, yet am. She looked Japanese, yet was not. She wanted a beef bowl. I ordered it for her. The girl then asked me what I wanted. I said I'd just have a glass of water. The girl nodded. She came back with two beef bowls. I tried to send the one back. The girl wouldn't take it. She said I had to eat something, almost like she was my Korean mother. I told her no, as a matter of fact, I did not have to eat anything, in fact, I didn't have to do anything I didn't want to. The girl got all huffy about it. "Beef bowl is the most popular menu choice," she said, like it was supposed to comfort me. She spoke it slowly. "Everyone likes it. It is a simple choice. Most people order beef bowl. You'll like it."
I glanced at the shiny scraps of meat in the bowl. My stomach leapt.
I thumbed my chest. "I'm a vegetarian."
"You . . . who?"
I index-fingered my nose. "I am. I'm a vegetarian, me."
The girl threw both hands up in front of her face for a moment. When she lowered them, her gate of yellow Chiclets was opened in a chimpanzee grin.
"WHY?!"
I stuttered two or three things that sounded like screams.
The girl then picked up the beef bowl and the receipt; holding them both in two hands, she skipped into a small kabuki-like door. My girlfriend went on, oblivious, piling red peppers into her meaty meal. When the girl came back, a skinny man old enough to be my father and with three times as many chins came out with his hands on his hips. The girl still held the beef bowl. She was, by now, looking into its depths silently. The fluorescent lights in all 700-something Yoshinoya locations in the Kanto area are furious. She must have been able to see her reflection in that wet meat. The man spoke to me in un-dumbed Japanese, like a detective on an American TV show speaks English to the wrongly-accused Mexican youth.
"You don't like the beef bowl, she says?"
"I just -- I said I didn't want it."
"There's a problem with it?"
"No, there's not a problem with it--I just don't eat it. I don't eat that sort of stuff."
"Then why'd you order it?"
"I didn't order it."
"That's not what she says."
"She -- I told her I didn't want it."
"If you have a valid complaint, let's hear it. Does it look funny? Smell funny? What's your beef?"
"I -- no. I don't know. I don't know shit about beef bowl. It's not my specialty. Not my field. I'm a vegetarian, see."
"That's what she said you said."
"I only said it because it was true."
"That can be an interesting habit."
"Tell me about it."
"So you want to cancel the order?"
"I can't cancel an order I didn't order, can I?"
The man breathed, slowly, and put two hands out in front of his body, like he was pushing the matter away.
"Look, whether you ordered it or not doesn't matter by this point. It's here. You either eat it and pay or don't. Tell us to ditch it. Which is it going to be?"
"Ditch it," I said.
"Alright, we'll do that, son. Now, if you would please, stand up?"
"I -- what?"
"Stand up. We don't offer seating to window-shoppers."
"I'm here with my friend--"
"And your friend's a paying customer, so she's my friend, too."
My girlfriend looked up, and smiled at the guy. She knew he was talking about her. She just didn't know what he was saying.
In a minute, the guy was gone. I stood behind my girlfriend, hands on my hips, telling her to hurry up.
When she was finished, she asked me, "What was your argument about?"
"The beef bowl."
"You should have just eaten it," she said. "A little bit of meat isn't going to kill you."
That girl didn't really get it, did she? I mean, yes, to be sure, one little bit of meat isn't going to kill me. However, my vegetarianism s more than an act of mere self-preservation. It's something else.
So yeah, I've never really liked Yoshinoya.
And now, of all the games I could have picked to play at my new home on my new PlayStation2, I have picked Yoshinoya: The Videogame. Three hours is enough time to beat all its challenges, and I'm still playing. Let's begin, then, with the simple declaration that
THIS GAME HAS CHARACTER.
Lately, restaurant sims have been cropping up. This is not, exactly, one of them. Then again, none of them are really sims, per se, either. Taito's CoCo Curry Ichibanya, also based on a popular franchise, is more of a sim than Yoshinoya. Yakiniku Bugyou Bonfire is more of a cooking-puzzle-game. Yoshinoya is more of an action-puzzle game that happens to take place in Japan's proudest restaurant franchise (which has dozens of locations in Southern California, even; they have vegetable bowl there, and I really don't know what the point is, because vegetables simply don't taste good when they're sweaty and soft). What thrusts Yoshinoya head and shoulders above CoCo and Yakiniku Bugyou is its production value. The producers had more money than they knew what to do with. The environments and characters are slickly cel-shaded. Everything looks alive. The title screen might be the title screen of the year. Hell, let's go ahead and call it that, boldly -- Yoshinoya's title screen is the title screen of the year. In it, we see a vague globe, atop of which a cartoon Yoshinoya franchise sits. Within the windows, we can see the game's hero, Yoshino Gyuunosuke ("Beefboy Yoshino" -- ha!), buzzing around, serving customers. Cars and trains zoom by outside. In this game, the world is small enough to fit into the bottom three-quarters of a television screen, and Yoshinoya sits on top of everything.
That'd give me this really great sentimental feeling if I liked Yoshinoya.
The gameplay is simple enough. Customers constantly flood into your little franchise. You have anywhere from five to twenty-something seats where customers can sit. Press a button while in front of any one of those seats, and the customer will sit. The customers sometimes sit without your telling them to, which is all right, because telling them to sit down is a bit of a hassle. Sometimes, though, later in the game, you'll have a row of empty seats, and combos will be of the essence, so you'll need to start telling people to sit, and this makes the game feel like so much of a bother that I screamed, at one frustrated point, "I will never work at Yoshinoya!"
Though I think that was kind of already decided.
All the different customers always order the same things. So keeping an eye on the flow of customers into the restaurant is crucial -- watch the flow, and control who sits where, and you can get combos. Businessmen always order the triangle button. Office ladies love the circle button, as do schoolboys. There are square-button and X-button orders, too. If you have three schoolboys sitting next to eat other, all it takes is one press of the circle button to serve all three. That's a combo. A combo earns you a few seconds of extra time and more points. If you don't serve customers within roughly sixteen seconds, their heads explode and reform, and then they bolt out the door. I would say this is an exaggeration of reality if I hadn't seen that actually happen in a few Yoshinoyas myself.
These people love their beef to a point of anger.
Each stage consists of a morning, noon, and night segment. Finish the night segment, and move on to the next, logically harder franchise. Finish the station-front level, and it's on to the business-district location, for example. At the end of the night segment of each stage, there's a boss character. The boss is what we call a "tough customer."
My favorite boss is this one guy whose character description says he's twenty, yet still a high-school student. He has thick glasses and is chubby. He wears a little backpack. He explains to you that he goes to every Yoshinoya in the land, trying to find the best one. He challenges you to make him a gyuudon teishoku, which is industry slang for "tray with a bowl of meat-and-rice, a plate of vegetables, a bowl of soup, a cup of tea, and a slab of fish." Making the gyuudon is the hard part -- using the D-pad and the circle button, you have to coordinate the amount of beef and the amount of sauce in an appropriate balance that suits the customer's tastes. If it's too soggy, they'll tell you -- once they've partaken of it and complained. You then have to use your remaining time to fix them another dish. Selecting the other elements of the teishoku is done using a simple conveyor-belt slider. It's kind of fun. In the end, you have to apply "shine" to the meal by repeatedly pressing the circle button until it glows with a mysterious golden aura. Mad Cow Disease, probably. Finish up the tray and serve it up, and maybe the customer won't hate it. In the case of chubby -- he wants seconds, of the exact same thing. You have to carefully assure it's composed the same way, or he flips out. If time runs low, the customer will engage you in a complaint-apology duel; win the duel by jagging the circle button so your character spits out (albeit in text-balloon only) apologies like "MOSHIWAKE GOZAIMASEN" -- "THERE IS NO EXCUSE."
It's funny stuff.
What this demonstrates to me is both someone involved with the game either had working experience in food service (very likely) and that Yoshinoya, as an organization, is clued into their great status as an object of otaku-lore. In Japan, you'll find, anything that exists in more than ten locations has some form of otaku. There are lonely men who take lonely picture-stickers (a la that guy in Love Hina) in picture booths, and collect them. I knew a woman, once, who was obsessed with Ultraman bottle-cap covers. Obsessive hobbies come fast and furious in Japan, and Yoshinoya fuels more than a few of them.
Meiji's Poifull candy has a hell of a lot of otaku.
No one cares about Pocky, however. Get over it, people. It's just frosting on a stick.
I once used to subscribe to an Akihabara-based Japanese Dr. Pepper otaku club's email newsletter.
There are McDonalds-obsessive otaku, too. I, myself, used to be a borderline Tenya otaku. I still am, kind of. As I told a friend the other day, I used to go to every Tenya in the land, trying to find which one made the best sweet-potato tempura. "And you don't anymore?" No, I don't anymore. "Why not?" I don't know. I used to steal their teacups. I still do, kind of. Sometimes, when I'm in Tenya, if I have time or money for Tenya in the first place, I'll steal their cups. You can get a good thousand yen each for them on Yahoo! Auctions Japan, if the seals are in good enough shape.
Yoshinoya, as a game, however, goes above and beyond the call of fan-service duty. It is such a love-letter to this obsessive lunatics that it's chokingly, tear-jerkingly admirable at points. The quality of the voice-acting is genius, with your character hooting and hollering "IRASSHAIMASE!" as customers enter, and shouting the names of their food as he delivers it.
"NATTOU TEISHOKU!!"
The in-game text, too, is gorgeous. Your regional manager, looking like an American lawyer, gives you quirky little hints about channeling your energy into performing the most efficient possible day's work. He gets angry at you when you fail, and then with a flick of his expression, tells you he was only joking.
On the main character's "job application," as seen on the character-selection menu (there are four to choose from -- normal guy, big guy, little girl, normal girl), says, under "why I want to work at Yoshinoya" -- I kid you not -- "YOSHINOYA IS MY DESTINY."
This is either the most subtle, sneering nod to the late-1990s Pokemon videogame design trend I've ever seen, in or out of a videogame, or simply beautiful, latently malicious fan-service. Either way, I am in awe of the game's gall; a true Yoshinoya fan would snicker at this where I guffaw. I'm thinking, right now, however, that maybe his snicker is worth more, because he knows that he can only, in the end, know the game as well as the game knows him. It's like he's found a comforting lover in the game, or else a prostitute who makes him feel like hot shit.
The trivia challenge mode is almost entirely lost on me. The questions begin by bordering on ridiculous, and evolve to absolute madness. If I can't even tell you which cut of beef is used on the meat in Yoshinoya's famed beef bowl, how can I answer any of the other ninety-nine questions?
I keep thinking that if this game was about Tenya, I'd pick it up and love it. I'd even be tempted to eat at Tenya more often. Maybe twice a week. I'd be proud of myself, of the franchise, and of the game. I could see the gears of the marketing machine turning, and clicking, and working. It'd wind up into something precious.
It's not, however, as it stands. Playing Yoshinoya, for me, is a lot like looking at a cute Welsh Corgi puppy in a window. It has a hefty price tag -- either $4,000 or betraying my years-long regime (actually, I quit meat because I don't like it, you know) -- and will therefore never be mine.
They could just as easily have a hit in America with, say, a McDonald's-themed game of equal production values and addictive gameplay, I think. I'd like to see it happen. Sell it as part of a Happy Meal, or something. That'd really be something.
The game, as a game, leaves something to be desired. I've wondered, while writing this, if I'd be able to play it more than I already have if I liked Yoshinoya more than not at all. It's got a lot of button-pressing, and an intriguing combo system. As a puzzle game, it is borderline fascinating, because the "next piece" window is an actual part of an actual "world" -- that is, the endless line of customers snaking outside the Yoshinoya. As such, however, it is hard to see, sometimes. It is nonetheless fascinating.
Yet there is waste. Behind the counter, our hero is all alone -- I wonder who's cooking the food -- and he has free roam. You can move, using the analog stick, anywhere you want, though doing so is completely unnecessary. All that is necessary is to move from place-setting to place-setting. Why not have an automatic place-to-place move function? Maybe, click L2, and you're at the next place on the left? Did the designers think of this, and then feel mildly guilty about it? If so, where did the guilt come from? I can imagine the guilt, only I can't too easily imagine its shape. As the game is, you have to precisely position yourself in front of each place. Sometimes, because of a lack of precision, you'll serve a businessman an office lady's meal, and his head will explode. Eventually, even when you get good enough to stop complaining about the precision factor's being wasted, you can sit and write a review in which that click-move function still feels like a good idea.
Oh, well. It's a good game. If you like meat, check it out. You might be able to play it more intently than I was. If you like Yoshinoya, by all means, buy this game now. As fan-service it is indubitably worth it. To a non-fan it is merely intriguing, and so I give it a vegetarian's highest-possible recommendation.
--tim rogers knew a girl
named yoshino once
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