The Kunio-kun Techno titles, a series with 42 forces spanning various genres, began in 1986 as a simple arena brawl. However, his most popular entries were those that included non-linear role-playing elements based on soap opera high school thugs. Anyone familiar with those titles, especially on the Famicom, Super Famicom and later Nintendo 3DS, will fully understand how Fading Afternoon works.
Developer Yeo (real name Vadim Gilyazetdinov), hailing from Moscow, has coded several similar titles, collectively known as his Existential Dilogy. Previous titles The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa (2018) and Arrest of a Stone Buddha (2020) also borrowed from the Kunio-kun format. While notable for their experimentation and ambition, it seems as if everything Yeo was looking to perfect has been realized in his latest title, Fading Afternoon. Backed by a thoughtful, reflective narrative, everything from concept to execution is executed with confidence and wit.
You play as Seiji Murayama, just released from prison, a Yakuza thug with a shady past and a bleak future. Set in Osaka, soon meet old acquaintances and reconnect, free to explore a map full of quirky, characteristic streets and unique interactive locations. First, your gang puts you up at a hotel, from which point you’re free to move around Osaka during the day, with the subway acting as a transit point to available venues. You quickly learn how to explore, walk the streets, enter shops, offices and other points of interest and meet friends and enemies occupying different positions and presenting different opportunities. One of the core indicators of the map is ‘War’, which basically means that a rival gang will be present in an area highlighted in red. If you choose to engage in combat by throwing the first punch, you will quickly be surrounded by thugs. When in your territory or acquired territory, Murayama often benefits from having a sidekick; but if he is on rival ground, he must fend off his assailants alone.
With combat an essential part of progression, it’s thankfully well executed, feeling both manageable and satisfying. What’s impressive is how wide your repertoire is and how cleverly it works with just two buttons. You can punch, kick, combo, roundhouse, slam them to the floor, grapple and essentially disarm opponents to use their weapons against them. It feels good to slap a punk and knock him to the floor, before knocking a gun out of a hood’s hand to return it to his spare.
It’s very grown up, tonally, not only in its themes of illness, loss, painful memories and the loneliness of gang culture, but also in its visual violence. The fight is bloody, with broken bones, bullets to the head and knives to the gut, prompting an appropriate splash of red. The animation is gorgeous and full of character, whether the sprites are smoking, sitting, or slung a bag over their shoulders.
What sets Fading Afternoon apart is its life simulator angle and attention to detail. In order to survive, you really have to take care of Murayama-san. If you do not extend your stay at the hotel by paying for extra days, you will suddenly wake up on a public bench, where at some point we realized that we had lost something important without ever realizing its purpose.
Without the convenience of a bathroom where you can shave, Murayama eventually grows a thick beard as he goes through the game’s impressive day/night cycles in real time. Wherever you are, from morning to afternoon, from sunset to evening, the color palette changes accordingly, changing the look of the locations.
Money is essential to progress, and there are a multitude of, mostly criminal, ways you can make it. If you fall in battle, you’ll wake up hospitalized and with a hefty bill to pay. You can choose to approach the game as a poor, homeless man, or rise through the ranks of wealth by sitting in the cafe and replenishing your HP with a coffee. Increasing the bag through fights opens up the game world. With money, you can buy new clothes, have fun at the host bars or take a swing at the baseball range. Murayama is a smoker, able to light and extinguish a cigarette with real skill, sitting where he likes to take life as it passes. Vending machines are available to top up your price of cigarettes as well as other accessories.
At the same time, Muruyama-san’s existence is sad, and the way his story is revealed, often in dream sequences, is fascinating. With its non-linear narrative, all your decisions, successes and failures change the path you take and your final outcome, meaning it can be experienced in many different ways.
Fading Afternoon is best described as a 2D Yakuza game in a Kunio-kun form. Yeo has made his Osaka pixel live and breathe so convincingly that it’s a truly soothing experience to immerse yourself in. The backgrounds are gorgeous – easily matching some of the Super Nintendo’s best – and everything looks very authentic to what Japan is really like – like taking a vacation, of sorts. It’s done with a finesse, a realism and a richness that makes every door or entryway compelling, your exploration unlocks mini-games, various plot lines and random character encounters.
Our only real criticism is that, initially, you’re thrown in at the deep end, plot-wise. The speech is never overwrought or overwritten, but there are a lot of name drops that you can’t remember at first, and it takes a movie-type approach to dot-feeding her backstories and complex web of relationships. This can make it confusing, at first, if you’re trying to create a mental directory of who’s who. Thankfully, as you get to know the streets of Osaka better and revisit key NPCs, the plot elements come into focus and you become more comfortable with where everything is going.
CONCLUSION
Fading Afternoon is a very ambitious game that improves on Techno’s decades-old Kunio-kun formula in almost every way. It’s arguably Yeo’s most accomplished work to date, and impressive in its polish. What really shines, however, is how it expands on its life-simulating elements and those all-important details. It keeps things fresh, interesting and compelling. Although it is regularly marked by satisfying gang violence, it is not a fast game by any means. With its pleasant plot and melancholic motifs, it’s more of an experience to dive into, explore and exploit for all its little surprises and different paths into later games. For everything it tries to achieve, beyond anything else, Fading Afternoon is incredibly charming.