Inspired by the Yakuza games, this martial arts-trained animator has spent 11 years exploding out of his own clothes because he thought "it looks fun"

The Yakuza games, now the Like a Dragon games, are about a lot of things. Drama, family, accountability, crime. Innovations in bicycle physical therapy. Manly men with manly men, entrepreneurship, and guns that simply do not work. One constant in the famously eclectic games is an aggressive enthusiasm for disrobing. It's a Yakuza staple: the explosive strip, the violent costume change, the dynamite undressing, the 'look at my cool-ass tattoo' unveiling.

Yakuza characters dramatically rip off their clothes with such bravado and regularity that, over 10 years ago, the series inspired animator Aung Zaw Oo (or Azo, online) to master the art of what he calls "clothing tricks" for himself, and I'll be damned if he isn't really, really good at it. 

Shorts on, shorts off  

It's as if the universe set Zaw Oo up to become a professional clothes shedder. He's been working as an animator since 2004; his first game was The Matrix: Path of Neo, which is a great place to start for unique action poses. He was most recently the one-man-army for animations on Outerloop's lovely turn-based RPG Thirsty Suitors, which is altogether great, as we said in our Thirsty Suitors review. Outside of work, he's spent years learning parkour, skating, gymnastics, Wushu kung fu, and more. He's been doing stripping tricks for over 10 years, and his hobbies and animations really blended together with Thirsty Suitors, which features quite a lot of explosive clothing indeed. And it can all be traced back to Yakuza 4.

"I always played brawlers," Zaw Oo tells me in a recent interview, which I couldn't arrange fast enough after seeing the above Twitter reel of his stunt-stripping. "I think Yakuza 4 was the second game they imported to the states, or at least for the PS3. So I started playing a few months after it came out so I played it in 2012. I did stunts, parkour, skateboarding, and gymnastics before that. I have an annual reel of videos that I film. But in 2012, that's the one where, like, you know what, it looks fun ripping off your clothes, so I had to figure out how to get that set of props. 

"I have these rip-away pants," he explains. "So I unbutton a few of those buttons and then it works the way it looks in a video game where it just kind of has this exploding effect. That's a cool visual thing combined with flips. Years later, I still have those. And at some point I switched to velcro tapes, the velcro stickers you can get, a positive and negative thing and then just have an old shirt and then you can do that. I think that's what actual male strippers strippers use."  

Most of the clothes Zaw Oo uses for his tricks are normal, oversized items that have been modified with simple touch-ups. A few buttons here, some velcro there, add in some extra-large and loose-fitting shoes and bam, you've got an easily manipulated outfit. Well, I say easily, but these stunts are serious business and the more elaborate ones can take hours to pull off perfectly. 

"I was just jumping into pants," he says of his earliest tricks. "Gym shorts, right? They're kind of loose and baggy, you can just slide them on really quickly. So at some point, I wondered if it might be possible to just do it in the jump instead of just either sitting down and doing it really fast or standing. And it turned out to be kind of easy. So that's where it kind of started. I've been making videos on YouTube since, like, the beginning of YouTube, but I didn't do it as a profession. The algorithm doesn't favor annual uploads.

"Shorts are definitely easier. Because you don't have the shin part of the pants to slow you down. It's just friction, right? So if I can find clothes that are smoother, usually these one-layer track pants, not cotton because cotton's very sticky. So one-layer track pants, or maybe even some type of single-layer snowboarding pants, those work better. And then for jackets, same thing. A really warm jacket with a wool liner inside, those don't slide very well. So the jacket that I have is either just one layer or the thick, two layers, but the inside doesn't have a lining so you can just slide faster. 

"I don't have that many specialized clothes, just things you can buy in any store or even just something you just go to Goodwill to look at. Difficulty is definitely when you're trying to do two of those together. Or if you're trying to flip into a single one. They have to be literally frictionless."

Lights, camera, pants 

I initially assumed that he was using these videos as references, but Zaw Oo says that at this point in his animation career, he doesn't need to reference videos in this way. He's really just making these clips for fun, especially during the pre-release downtime of game development when it's really just bug fixes while waiting for certification to go through. But while it doesn't really eat up his work time, clothing tricks can take quite some time to pull off. 

"The shorts I can do pretty much every time," he says. "Because it has to be every time, right? Because then you're piling on other factors. The jacket is another factor. But for something complicated like shirts, shorts, and maybe slippers, that could be like a three-hour filming session. Are you familiar with how skaters film? They would go out for an entire day and film like eight hours at a spot, getting kicked off, and kind of go back in and they get like one two-second clip? It's that kind of thing." 

He says his hardest trick yet is "probably the one at the beach where I'm ripping the shirt and the pants as I'm doing a front flip onto the beach from the boardwalk, only because each reset takes some time." Multi-piece outdoor tricks like this are especially difficult and may take three hours or more to record, but even the simple ones require some setup. Sadly, this means Zaw Oo can't pull these stunts out as party tricks: "It's not something I can pull out off the top of my head. It has to be like, 'hey guys, I'm filming this.' It's not like, surprise! But I have taught people to do the shorts thing. I think most people can do the shorts thing. If you can do a box jump at a gym, the short thing is very easy. Getting average athleticism is way more than enough."

"A lot of it is martial arts basics, right?" he says of the movements. "Like taekwondo. I do Chinese martial arts, Wushu very specifically. But a lot of it comes down to what I call movie kung fu. It's not a real practical thing. It's just aggressive dancing, punches and kicks that read well on camera and have a very wide arc instead of this type of boxing style. Those moves I've been doing for years, right? 

"Back then I did have to film myself because I wasn't familiar. But after a while, it becomes like, okay, I know what it looks like, and I know what I can sort of do, or I know the basics. So I don't need a video reference to do those animations. But it's fun to recreate them in the variation that's in the game. In the context of Thirsty Suitors, they're not really fighting. They're just doing a fighting move and then going to this taunting pose or something, what I would call the Phoenix Wright 'Objection!' pose." 

The goal for these clothing tricks is to combine more and more pieces of clothing or accessories, Zaw Oo says: "Now you're also taking off shoes, hats, and I think people do backpacks, so I think that's the next direction I would take it."

It's a worthy tribute to the Yakuza series, that's for sure. I ask about his favorite scenes and moments from the series, expecting something about Kiryu inexplicably ripping off a two-piece suit in an instant, but his response is even better. 

"One that's recent and most memorable is Yakuza 7. There's a scene where a character is eating a piece of bread. And then the bread pulls apart. And like, that looks so good. That's also one of the things that's even harder to do than clothes, actual foods that look like food. So it's in the beginning and this character is in prison. And when he comes out, he's never had this sweet bread for however many years he was in prison. So the first time he ate it, they showed it in this explicit detail, and then he pulls this bread apart so he can eat it. And that looks so good. That looks very appetizing. It's really hard to do. 

"That's the most memorable detail that you don't necessarily see in other games. So someone on their team, or multiple someones on the team, put in a lot of effort to make that bread look good. That's what I remember from the most recent Yakuza game I played. As far as the clothing thing, I don't think they do clothing simulation. I think they just do like a frame swap, a full frame wipe. I guess it's their narrative purpose, they want to reveal tattoos." 

Prepare for more clothes-ripping because Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is the longest Yakuza game yet.