If you’re single, Valentine’s Day is a great reminder that you’re alone. If you’re single and prone to bouts of self-hatred, Valentine’s Day is a great reminder that you’re alone and it’s because you’re weird.
Reader, we don’t think that about you, but probably, that doesn’t help. What might help is sparing a thought for the most alone, most weird and most horny guy in games, somebody so freakishly out-there that, in comparison, your own loneliness looks just glamorous.
If you’ve played Yakuza 0, you’re familiar with a man the game refers to as “Walking Erection” or “Mr. Libido.” He’s a guy in skin-tight tighty whities—and only that—whose one calling in life is to get his freak on anywhere and everywhere. He approaches you on the streets of Osaka and explains he’s jealous that you’re surrounded by pretty girls all the time in your capacity as club-owner. What’s up with this guy, you ask. He tells you: “Three rounds a day just isn’t enough for me, so I wind up just going from spot to spot most days,” he says, referring to Osaka’s clubs, video stores and massage parlors.
“Just shook hands with the ham cucumber?” he later asks you, after you’ve left one of the city’s video stores. God damned yuck. How can this game’s writers live with themselves!
Listen. It sure seems like this guy is loving life. And that’s his prerogative, I guess. But just think—the bar for the weirdest, most lonely guy has been set, and it is very, very high.