Re: where realism and unrealism cross the lines
@Assault freak, oddly enough, remembering the mk games from the nineties, it was the very exaggerated overthetop nature of the gore which made the games less than possible to take seriously.
For example in MK2, when jacks did his fatality where he'd pull off the opponent's arms, the opponent would just stand their, blood gouting from their sockets as the "jacks winss fatility" sign appeared.
And don't forget Quon chi's fatality from deadly alliance where he would jump on his opponents' shoulders, and literally stretch their kneck until it was about six feet long, leaving them to stagger about like a chicken with their kneck bobbing, before collapsing to the floor.
I'm not sure how things are now in MK (before Covid last year, I was going to get together with my brother and watch through all the mk11 story mode sequences, but you can see why that didn't happen), , but certainly in the past the games very much were like the Yakusa game you describe, which was one of the reasons the hysteria about mortal Kombat's violence always seemed rather silly to me.
I'd also argue that there are occasions some degree of realism, or at least making people care and interact with other aspects of the world actually helps a lot.
To take one example, Zelda 64 had a time cycle on the world map. During the day nothing so bad could happen, shops would be open and you could wander the land. During the night, the music would change the atmosphere alter, and out would come the monsters.
Some locations you had to wait until a set time to enter, some places it was safer to cross at a given time of day. The cycles were only ten minutes or so, so no need to wait too long, but I remember watching my brother play the game, and just how cool it was to see the sun set, night come and then suddenly get a few low level monsters stalking the landscape, it added a great deal to the games' atmosphere by simply making the world just that bit more interactable.
This is the sort of thing I mean, stuff that doesn't necessarily try to emulate the real world, but just gives a bit more nuance to what is there.
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