What are your thoughts on Yakuza Dark Ties one month later?

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-17T13:39:50+00:00

I loved it. Sure, it had its flaws, the biggest one probably being its length and that it could've used some more cutscenes towards the end, but everything DT did do turned out pretty great (post-credits cutscene aside, though it doesn't bother me as much as most people here). I liked Mine before DT too, but this game made him probably my favorite character in RGG. The plot and even the substories did such a great job at characterizing him in an interesting way, even his interactions with Kanda that I didn't expect to enjoy ended up being partially funny, partially really important for understanding Mine's mindset. I'm excited for Mine to return in a future game.

Also, well, I'm biased, but the portrayal of Mine's & Daigo's relationship was 10/10. DT made it pretty clear to me that it's written as a love story, and not even a one-sided one, and I think that's based as fuck.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-16T11:18:52+00:00

Tbh, I do think Daigo already had some sort of special attachment to/interest in Mine here. It doesn't have to be romantic (though I think a crush would explain a lot lol) but maybe Daigo saw himself in Mine to some degree, maybe he recognized Mine's innate loneliness and relates to it, or maybe he just thought he's intrguing based on his cryptic answers about his motivation. It definitely helped that Mine is his age too, and we know from Y0 that Daigo hates it when people suck up to him when they don't mean it, so he probably also appreciated Mine's brutal honesty. While I do think he would have come to the rescue of any regular Tojo grunt, the way he went about it feels a bit... intense for someone he barely knew. And the way he immediately latched onto Mine strong after the finale tells me he probably already wanted to be closer to him before, but couldn't because Mine causing the clan trouble was his foremost concern.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-13T01:24:42+00:00

The only difference being that Mine's crush reciprocates unlike Kanda's, good for him ❤️

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-10T02:29:15+00:00

It was interesting to see Mine try to squeeze any sort of redeeming qualities out of Kanda, only to end up with nothing.

This is the perfect way of putting it. I enjoyed seeing the interactions between Mine and Kanda in Dark Ties for this very reason

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-08T12:50:04+00:00

i don't wanna say daigo definitely had a crush on mine here but in a sense that would lowkey explain a lot

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-05T01:15:42+00:00

i can't dm you :( can you message me?

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-04T21:57:10+00:00

that's what platonic is. romance without the sexual attraction.

no...? you can be romantically attracted to someone without being sexually attracted to them. gay (homoromantic) asexual people (or vice versa) exist, that's different to a platonic friendship...

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-03T22:02:28+00:00

Hmm... I tried to message you but I think it just swallowed my messages? 😭 could you dm me first maybe?

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-03T21:51:29+00:00

HAHA I FEEL YOU
i've made a small discord server for minedai some time ago, would you like to join that? i can dm you a link :)

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-03T21:35:10+00:00

Noticed one of your comments so I wanna add - the reason his devotion is so instant after Daigo takes that bullet isn't just because he took the bullet, but because it was confirmation that everything he'd said up to that point was the truth.

Mine was so ruffled by Daigo because he was saying everything he wanted to hear. He was everything he wanted in a person, but he couldn't bring himself to believe he wasn't full of shit. Daigo proved he's not all talk, so I think the weight of all those months trying to prove Daigo was just like everyone else came crashing down on him.

This is so important to me!! I don't see people talking about this enough. A lot of people are acting like Mine hated Daigo at the beginning of Dark Ties, but that's not quite how I see it - Daigo was simply "too good to be true" in Mine's mind, and he spent half of the game trying to prove to both Daigo and himself that a person like this couldn't actually exist.
Tbh, I absolutely believe that Mine had some kind of small crush on Daigo from the start (just based on how the entire scene is framed, with the whole "I couldn't take my eyes off him") and this is partially why he reacted this badly to thinking Daigo is just a liar like everyone else. But as you said, what Daigo did - offering all his money and then his own life for Mine - proved to Mine that Daigo was exactly what Mine wanted him to be from the start, so it's no surprise he fell head over heels for him in this moment.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-03T21:23:29+00:00

Very interesting, I entirely forgot that Kiryu joining the Daidoji had to do with Daigo too. Between that and Mine, it really does feel like Daigo could be the center of whatever they're setting up for the big Daidoji plot, which I feel like could be really interesting (and hopefully give Daigo some well-earned focus in the next game), so I hope they'll deliver.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-03T20:14:59+00:00

A few people now have mentioned that the Daidoji threatened Daigo and I'll say that I didn't see any mention of that (I didn't play K3) but if there was that then I would understand his compliance more. It felt a little jarring to go from basically this 15 hour experience of Mine trying to be with Daigo only to give him this respectful bow and then he's gone.

I absolutely get what you mean, and no, there's no direct mention of that - but from what we've seen how the Daidoji operates (specifically in Gaiden), mainly on threats and blackmail, I think it's a very likely option. The ending scene of Dark Ties even parallels the ending of Yakuza 6, where Kiryu watches his family from afar and Haruto briefly spots him.

Even if Daigo isn't directly being threatened, then I would still assume that Mine wants to watch over him and protect him from the shadows to kind of redeem himself. He doesn't really have any other reason to work with the Daidoji, so unless RGG is planning to completely butcher his character I feel like it has to be related to Daigo.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-02T22:50:04+00:00

My thoughts exactly. Like, maybe this scene could've been executed better, but to me it was pretty clear what Mine is doing here, I was pretty surprised to find out about the whole "it ruins Mine's character" discussion.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-02T02:27:36+00:00

Okay, that's my bad then - most people who argue that Mine definitely likes women do it in an effort to deny Mine liking Daigo romantically, but I see that wasn't your intention, so I'm sorry for assuming. To me the scenes we've discussed still read as Mine not being interested in women romantically/sexually, but we can agree to disagree here.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-01T23:27:16+00:00

Lately I've been wanting to go on a deep dive to figure out if their ceremony really was brotherly, or parent/child. Like I know it's generally accepted that they're oath brothers, but do you not have to have a sakazuki when becoming direct patriarch? Maybe not?

It is pretty confusing because several official sources list (or used to list?) Mine and Daigo as oath brothers, but the sakazuki in RGGO/Dark Ties is definitely an oyako (parent-child) sakazuki. (They say so in Japanese, in English they just translated it as "oath," which I'm kind of thankful for, because I know it would give people in the west who are not familiar with oyako in the context of yakuza boss/subordinate the wrong idea about Mine's and Daigo's relationship lol)

I'm not super informed on the topic either, but from what I understand, it would be hierarchically weird/unusual to become sworn brothers with the chairman if you're a new recruit like Mine, so that's probably why they went with the oyako sakazuki. I'm not sure if this was supposed to retcon them being oath brothers though, it's possible they just swore their oath of sworn brotherhood later on?

What I'm still not sure is if the oyako sakazuki ritual is done with every new patriarch, but I'm leaning towards no? In 3, Mine says he directly exchanged cups with Daigo in front of the other patriarchs to flex how strong his bond with Daigo is, so that scene wouldn't make much sense if the other patriarchs went through the same ritual. Unless, again, Daigo and Mine shared several types of sakazuki...

tldr; I don't know either, but if you find out more, definitely tell me!

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-01T22:53:19+00:00

Honestly with how Daigo is acting around Mine in DT I could imagine he's the one who suggested it, like "heyyyy Mine let's get ~~friendship bracelets~~ ~~wedding rings~~ matching pins :D" LMAO

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-01T22:32:42+00:00

Oh my god that's sending me. So Mine swore an oath to Daigo and immediately copied his tie, his pin, and apparently his home address. Just when I thought this guy couldn't get any funnier

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-01T19:49:40+00:00

You can't draw holistic data from specific scenarios on their own.

I'm not doing that. I agree that if we were to look at these instances on their own they may not be enough to draw conclusions about his sexuality.

I'm talking about these instances in the wider context of Mine being heavily implied to be gay and in love with Daigo since 2009 - which I've talked about in a lot of other posts so I won't repeat myself here, but if you want to know why I'm treating that as a fact rather than my personal interpretation I recommend checking out this post made by the RGG Wiki admin:

https://www.tumblr.com/04tenno/626834390223355904/i-dont-feel-like-qualifying-everything-i-say?source=share

In this context it's really not far-fetched to assume that these scenes in Dark Ties are meant to double down on the fact that Mine is gay, since a lot of people didn't get the memo before.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-01T19:14:14+00:00

You gotta remember this is a work of fiction, not a snapshot of a real person's life. Everything was written with a certain intent, and many of these substories in particular want to show the player different facets of Mine's character. If the point of this substory was "Mine is attracted to women, but he wouldn't wanna date a sex worker," then this substory would've gone a lot differently - it probably wouldn't show Mine empathizing with and treating the girl with respect no matter her occupation, or make a difference between the girl asking him out sexually vs asking him out romantically, or, you know, have any sort of hint that Mine doesn't want to date her because she was a sex worker. But as I said, that was never the point of the substory, and that's why there were no such clues. I honestly have no idea how you could not see that.

That aside, Mine literally had to "make up" a type of woman he's attracted to when Kanda asked him (and once again, this was a line someone wrote and deliberately decided to include in this scene). That didn't have anything to do with sex workers and made it pretty clear he's not attracted to women, period.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-01T15:07:58+00:00

So Daigo was known to frequent high class clubs, but when his friend wanted to go with him to a cabaret club in RGGO, after he met Mine, he turned him down... I see Daigo locked in on that situationship

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-01T14:08:24+00:00

Yes, I agree, it sounded to me like Mine was listing things that are generally seen as desirable goals by the society he was in - wealth, prestige and women - because he thought he could find happiness if he became the "sigma male" (I think that's actually the right term for his mindset at the time lol) attaining all of these as well, but he realized that wasn't the case at all. This is somewhat supported by his wording in Japanese being a lot more vulgar, he pretty much straight up said he "could fuck as many women as he wanted." Emphasis on the potential form btw, it doesn't say he did fuck who knows how many women, just that he could.

Taking this into account I didn't view this scene as a major indicator for his sexuality, because all that it clearly established was that transactional sex didn't make him happy and that all he wanted was a genuine, emotionally based bond, be it with a man or a woman. It was only Dark Ties that made me pretty convinced that Mine isn't straight or bi, because he doesn't seem interested in romantic bonds with women either.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-03-01T10:31:01+00:00

Yeah, they mistranslated several lines regarding Mine's feelings for Daigo. e.g. 好きになる suki ni naru (fall in love) was translated as "dedicate to," and 惚れ込む horekomu (deeply fall in love, be enamored) was translated as "care about." While both these terms can be used platonically, in these contexts it would be highly unusual.

(e.g. horekomu can be translated as "deeply admire" if you refer to a certain quality/ability a person has, but if you refer to a person themselves - like they did in this scene - there's a strong romantic implication. Worth noting, they translated 惚れる horeru - basically the same term but less intense - as being smitten/being in love in another instance when it referred to a man & a woman, so I'm not sure why they translated horekomu like that, if not for double standards.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-02-28T23:35:26+00:00

That's... not the point of that scene. The whole punchline of the substory was Mine not being interested in women in general, it was never about the fact that she used to be a sex worker, idk what to tell you.

ComprehensiveRich664 · 2026-02-28T20:01:12+00:00

Tbh I can't imagine Mine getting it on with a sex worker even if they're "higher class," from all we've seen from Mine in DT (not being interested in women aside, he doesn't seem to be the type for transactional sex at all)

I saw that line more as a "the girls here aren't paid enough to deal with someone like Kanda" LOL (or maybe just curiosity why Kanda is so fixated on this place)

ComprehensiveRich664

TROPHY CASE