am i a real person or a character in another person's RPG
if there's even one person out there who gave a shit about you, then wouldn't that make them family?
human connection is difficult and terrifying!
come back next week for more ground-breaking revelations.
unfortunately, being aware of the obvious nature of this statement doesn’t make it any less true. being connected to others is simultaneously the most important, wonderful feeling we can experience and yet also often the most harrowing. i’ve struggled a fair bit with connecting and relating to others for my entire conscious life, feeling closer to an alien pretending to be a human being than a naturally adept social butterfly. all of this inevitably folds into my eternal failure to believe that i am, in fact, a real person in myself.
despite this internal struggle, i somehow manage it externally. i have friends who i experience mutual love and care with, coworkers i can feel comfortable around in a stressful environment, industry connections i can interact with professionally, and at times, people i love who I open my bare and bleeding heart to. It may take vast amounts of concentrated effort and concentration on exactly how I’m acting and presenting myself to maintain these connections, but i maintain them all the same.
role-playing games are inherently designed to imitate human connection through similarly deliberate means. what defines their genre is the depth of interpersonal relationships that can be reached between the protagonist you inhabit and the characters they interact with throughout its narrative, to a much greater degree than other genres. you’re not just here to complete a linear objective; you’re here to build bonds.
yet, due to being trapped within the medium of video games, these characters are inherently limited. there will be an end point in which you have ‘completed’ a bond with someone. there is only a finite amount of conversations that can be had - only as many as their writers had time to create and programmers had time to implement. despite this existential limitation, these characters can, with the right writers behind them, genuinely feel like real people.
it is at this point in this piece that i am going to bring up the like a dragon series (act surprised!) it goes without saying that this series contains some of the most fleshed out characters within the medium of video games — kazuma kiryu alone has gone through several lifetime’s worth of character arcs and development, over literal decades of his life on screen. but where the verisimilitude of these complex, broken people shines its brightest is in the most recent mainline titles: yakuza: like a dragon and like a dragon: infinite Wealth. no spoilers ahead, in case you’re worried.
with yakuza: like a dragon, and the change of protagonist from kiryu to ichiban, came the introduction of the bonds system. this mechanic appears as a literal in-game bond meter that fills up as ichiban becomes closer to the people he holds dear, through a variety of interactions. fighting as a party in ichiban’s JRPG-like street battles; going out to eat together and chatting about their meals; singing their hearts out on survive’s karaoke stage and even just striking up random conversations while walking around yokohama — all of these otherwise trivial activities contribute to the bonds between ichiban and his friends.
the core of these connections lies in drink links, an entirely optional bit of side content that is nevertheless incredibly important to ichiban’s character and his games’ overarcing theme of friendship. as the name implies, these scenes take ichiban (and kiryu, in infinite wealth’s case) and a party member out to their local haunt for a heart to heart over whiskey.
the narratives and tones of these conversations vary drastically for each character featured: joongi opens up to ichiban about his harrowing trauma of having his birth-given identity of yeonsu kim ripped away and replaced against his will to become a perfect imitation of the late jingweon mafia leader joongi han; constrastingly, zhao later turns to kiryu for advice in his attempt to run a respectable restaurant while also being the feared face of the yokohama liumang syndicate. my personal favourite involves adachi secretly acting as a financial benefactor to a child whose father he falsely arrested while still an acting detective, atoning for his past sins in a roundabout way while admitting his fear to ever look this child in the eyes after what he did.
the varying tones of these drink links is far from a negative, instead representing the sheer variety of challenges and difficulties that people can face, and their willingness to open up to those they care about. Each character’s drink link story delivers a clear arc in steadily trusting ichiban and kiryu more and more over time to divulge more personal information and struggles, as their hearts slowly open up to the dragons. this is especially vital for kiryu, as a major part of his arc in infinite wealth is learning to trust others and allowing himself to be helped, rather than only ever being the one to help others at his own detriment.
through drink links (and later life links with other valued and beloved people in his life) alongside the bonds system as a whole, kiryu finally accepts that he is allowed to be a person loved by the people around him, rather than a pillar standing alone. he can see himself not just as the stoic dragon he’s been told he has to be, but simply as a member of a community of care and understanding.
now, I promise that I am going to loop back to my original point here. drink links, chats over dinner, walk-and-talk party chats and the bonds system in general are presented as a fairly binary way to increase an objective ‘human connection meter’ in a video game. actual human connection is obviously far more subjective and horrifyingly complex than a system within a JRPG. but while playing through infinite wealth in january and seeing kiryu slowly spend time with and open up to the various party members, i felt like i had a slight revelation:
“wait, isn’t this just how I create and maintain friendships in reality?”
again, not ground-breaking by any means. but for someone who has forever struggled with considering themselves as a real person who is capable of meaningful connection with others, it was an oddly comforting thought. bond meters may not exist, but one objectively builds bonds with other people by spending time with them; it’s very unlikely that this metaphorical bond meter will ever go anywhere but up. through sharing my joys, woes, worries and hopes with others, over coffee, drinks or a 2am bedside conversation, i gradually become more of a person in their lives, and more of a person in myself.
i may have a limited amount of dialogue options to share with other people. i may have difficulty remembering that i do not exist only in other people’s perceptions. i may struggle to consider myself as a real person, and that feeling is unlikely go away any time soon, but i can at the very least happily see myself as a valued character to be bonded with as part of someone else’s story.
and that’s … actually okay?