Kadarius Gen
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
Things change. People, civilizations, environments. Sometimes they change for the better, other times for the worse. Cynical as I am, I usually think things change for the worse; whether it’s one of my favorite bands experimenting with a new style of music that’s vastly inferior to the records I initially enjoyed or those frosted sugar cookies they serve in Publix becoming inedibly sweet (and it’s not cause I’m older, my sweet tooth has only sharpened with age.) But there are some cases where I feel change is good, especially when it comes to gaming. A thing a lot of gamers forget, and though it may not seem like that due to the current landscape of gaming, is that video games are the combination of art and technology meaning that experimentation is the very foundation of the medium. Many of my favorite games and series are those that push the technology they are on to their very limits such as early Dynasty Warriors titles or the Gran Turismo series. My parents would often confuse the replays in Gran Turismo 3 for real footage of racing events, and this was a video game that came out in 2001. Outside of the tech, there’s the styles of gameplay one can experiment with too and, most importantly for this review, the intention of the video game. As pieces of art, I feel that every video game has something they are intending to create/capture. Whether it’s a mind-bending philosophical cosmic horror story like in Marathon Infinity or simply about having fun and feeling cool while you drive a fast car like the early (PS1 era) Need for Speed games, every game from the most story driven RPGs to the most simplistic arcade shoot em up seeks to capture a certain essence with all of it’s components from the gameplay to the soundtrack to the artstyle and story being a part of this. Essence is not all of a game, in fact a major issue I have with some modern games is that they go more for vibes rather than substance, but rather it’s the glue that holds it all together.
This brings me to the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series, a long running series of Beat-’Em Up and RPG video games starting with the original video game known in the west as “Yakuza” which was released for the Playstation 2, receiving an HD remaster with it’s sequel for the PS3 and Wii U[1] in 2013. It followed the Beat-’Em Up formula for a while with small diversions such as the Hack and Slash focused spin offs Kenzan and Ishin set in Edo Period Japan, Dead Souls which was a Third-Person Survival Horror Shooter, and the Kurohyou duology which were more geared towards being 3D Fighting Games. 2019 is when the series shifted towards Dragon Quest style JRPG gameplay with Yakuza: Like a Dragon although some games have kept the traditional style like the Judgment spin-offs and Gaiden. This series is fairly popular now but for a long time, it was a cult series in the west with a large majority of titles never receiving official localization’s or translations. Hell, some spin offs like Kenzan have not been fully translated yet and the Kurohyou spin offs did not get translations until this decade! When these games were translated however, they were filled with errors and were often very mismarketed. A good example of this is this infamous American trailer for Yakuza 4 or this hilarious trailer for the Dead Souls spin-off which features a rock rendition of the Star Spangled banner and flash frames of Apple Pie to hypnotize American audiences in to playing a game about Japanese men slaying zombies. Of course, this attempt was feeble and the series would die in the west, only receiving a 3 years late localization of the fifth entry in 2015 after fans begged for it for years on end. Even after that, games were still late to be localized with Yakuza 0 and 6 both taking 2 years to come to the west (2015 to 2017 and 2016 to 2018 respectively) and Yakuza Kiwami taking a year and a half (from the start of 2016 to the summer of 2017) to be localized. It would take until the release of the spin-off Lost Judgment for these games to have simultaneous global releases which was 5 years after the unexpected international success of 0.
Before I continue any further, I will be referring to these games with the initials LaD from here on out to keep with the original Japanese names of the series and I will refer to entries by their number or spin off title. So when I say Like a Dragon 7, I am referring to the game that is titled Yakuza: Like a Dragon in the west, and when I say Like a Dragon 3, I am referring to the game known as Yakuza 3 in the west, so on and so forth.
Now, it’s important to understand why these games were such cult hits in the first place among us westerners, because that will be the biggest reason as to why I dislike the newest entry in this series, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, so much. I would say that the biggest reason for this is the sort of unfiltered but somewhat dramatized look at Japanese Urban life that these games provided. Of course it doesn’t cover everything, but nothing can. For a lot of westerners, these games had the same appeal a lot of Mafia movies have; they serve not only as power fantasies, but they let us see a darker side of society that most of us don’t want to think about or acknowledge exists but with things like Mafia codes of honor to bind the cast from descending in to animals and their challenges with maintaining said code. This, combined with aspects of Japanese culture that were for the most part positively presented or lightly parodied, a stark contrast to Grand Theft Auto’s more cynical and stinging ironic depictions of American culture, created something very appealing to western gamers like myself. Getting a bit more personal, my impetus to learn Japanese was thanks to this series and I know a fair amount of words thanks to hearing them in these games. Don’t just take it from me, many fans have made the pilgrimage to the real version of cities depicted in the series like Kabukichō (Kamurocho) and Dōtonbori (Sotenbori) with the former even including promotional vending machines related to the series. And it’s not just fans, an interview with current series director Masayoshi Yokohama stated that LaD 5 “captured the country of Japan, where you can get all the fun things in the world, beyond ideology and faith.” along with stating that Like a Dragon 6 was the best piece of entertainment capturing “what Japan is currently doing” at least in terms of 2016 that is. (Note: this interview is in Japanese)
Another appealing aspect of this series is that it’s the closest thing to a classic beat em up we had for a while from a mainstream developer/publisher for a while, at least on 7th gen consoles. Your other choices for beat em ups at the time, DMC/PlatinumGames clones not withstanding, were either the Batman: Arkham games or Akiba’s Trip and while I like the latter, I can definitely understand why one may be turned off from their sort of “trashy otaku” appeal and Arkham is well, Arkham. LaD’s roots, in terms of combat at least, go back to an older SEGA Arcade game known as Spikeout: Digital Battle Online, which is a fantastic 3D Beat Em Up developed by Toshiro Nagoshi who would go on to create the LaD series a few years after this. A quick playthrough of the game, or simply watching footage of it, you can see where a lot of the series would take its influences from, with the stages being the ground work for the “Long Battles” seen in a lot of LaD entries and some enemy movesets from Spikeout being reused in LaD games. Mechanic wise, you can see how early entries in the LaD series take almost 1:1 Spikeouts philosophy in regards to enemy spacing, attack timing and positioning yourself to ensure your attacks connect. This has lead to a lot of LaD fans having a low opinion on Spikeout and in some way I can understand as the newer entries in this series have strayed fairly far from Spikeout’s philosophy so if you’re used to one thing, it’ll be hard to adapt to another, but I will talk more in depth about that a little bit later.
Quick overview of the game for those unfamiliar. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is the 22nd (23rd if you count the Gacha Mobile game Ryu Ga Gotoku Online) entry in this series and returns to the traditional Beat-’Em Up gameplay the series is known for. It follows fan favorite Anti-Villain Goro Majima losing his memory and washing ashore on an island near the American state of Hawaii. He is saved by a young boy named Noah and his tiger Goro.[2] After befriending the boy, Majima learns that Noah is ill and unsure of how long he has to live, agrees to take him on a seafaring adventure to find a 200 year old treasure that may hold the secret to eternal life. This treasure is the target of other ex-Yakuza, a secret society, and an ancient cult that once controlled Hawaii’s underworld. For a series that started as a tragic tale of brothers turned rivals, this plot is definitely out there. Even with the series more absurd moments like a Golden Castle rising from the Earth and a fight against a giant mutant bear, this story is preposterous, and the inherent insanity feels like a selling point really.
But with all the introductory aspects out of the way, it’s time for the actual review of Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.
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VISUALS
Starting with visuals, this game doesn’t look too bad. It uses the same Dragon Engine 2.0 proprietary engine that the series introduced in Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased his name (do all these spin off games have to make their titles mouthfuls?) most of the same visuals you saw in that game and in Infinite Wealth return here, albeit with a few new areas that help show off the lighting effects. The star of the show is the “Madlantis” area that’s basically a Pirate themed Vegas area hidden in a cavernous island off the coast of Hawaii with a good mix of colored lights throughout it. But that leads to the biggest issue I have with this game, it’s just so BRIGHT. I usually turn down my brightness settings in video games due to my eyes being extra sensitive to light, but even after doing so, this game just felt so unnecessarily bright.
Here is a screenshot I captured of a street battle showcasing what I mean. The upper half of the street is obnoxiously bright and a lot of the character models end up being covered by the light which doesn’t make them hard to see, but it definitely ends up obscuring parts of their models. There are also a ton of light effects on the main character, Goro Majima, when he performs certain moves. These are fairly standard in Dragon Engine games at this point but they definitely feel much brighter here compared to say Judgment or Gaiden. It feels weirdly blown out in a way and I just don’t like it. This was a problem Infinite Wealth had as well, running on the same engine. While Dragon Engine 2.0 is definitely fantastic at lighting up night/darker scenes, their day scenes still need work.
The same problem as seen in Infinite Wealth. Poor Chitose taking the brunt of it here! Now lets look at IW and PY’s night lights respectively.
Now that’s much better. I suppose while the Dragon Engine ironed out a lot of it’s physics related kinks, it’s still in the dark when it comes to lighting. Graphically these games never took home any awards, although I feel Kenzan had some nice scenery, so all of this just feels like standard progress in terms of games increasing their fidelity.
But visuals are only one piece of the puzzle, it’s time to discuss the most important part of this game, how it plays. And I don’t just mean the combat, I am referring to exploration, progression, side activities, and so on. All of these are important but this game suffers from a big issue where it feels more like it’s “content” rather than gameplay. I will get in to that, but first I will discuss the actual combat of this game.
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GAMEPLAY
LaD games, for the longest time, could be seen as a 3D Evolution to the classic beat-’em up style of gameplay seen in games such as Kunio-Kun and Streets of Rage, and closely related to SEGA’s mid to late 90s Beat-’Em Ups like Dynamite Deka and the previously mentioned Spikeout. This series was not the most in depth when compared to other contemporaries like Urban Reign and its insane levels of parries and counters, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. LaD kept it simple with evenly paced combat that awarded players who understood the environments they were fighting in and their possible methods of combating the different types of enemies such as larger opponents with sumo style movesets, ranged enemies, or enemies carrying blades by allowing the player to combat them via special moves known as Heat Actions. In these games, anything and everything could be used as a weapon to reflect the sort of desperation one encounters when fighting for their life in a street battle. I feel as if the much denigrated Like a Dragon 3 perfectly captured this idea with its shear volume of brutal yet (somewhat) grounded heat actions that one can perform in this game, giving it some of the appeal of a crazy martial arts film or anime. Later games like 4, 5 and especially 0 I felt lost a lot of this appeal by focusing on creating increasingly absurd heat actions to help each playable character feel more and more distinct which just ended up making the attacks feel more like “Super Meter” moves in a 2D Fighting Game, albeit I must applaud the Judgment games for reeling it back in somewhat before the balance was thrown off once again.
But even then, the main thing unifying most of these games is that it awards knowledgeable players who can make the most out of their situation rather than simply button mashing in a horde of NPCs until their health bars are depleted. That is not what LaD Pirates does. In fact, it almost caters to mindlessly spamming attack buttons until the enemy falls over. You have two fighting styles in this game; the first is Mad Dog which is a combination of Majima’s Thug style from 0 and the titular Mad Dog style featured in every game he appears in (except for 6 since he was in jail for the entire story). In 0, the Thug style was a nimble all around style great for one on one confrontations that used Majima’s smaller frame and speed to his advantage along with a nice variety of Heat Actions that fit this purpose. The Mad Dog style was meant to be an all out style with extremely powerful and speedy dagger-based attacks that could easily dispatch crowds of enemies with little effort but required a lot of Heat to use and wasn’t meant for long term use against opponents or against bosses. Combining these two together sounds risky but could work if properly balanced, but sadly LaD Pirates fails on this front and what you get instead is a button mashy style without any weaknesses that does not feel engaging to use whatsoever. It’s great at crowd control, is lightning fast and easy to learn and it’s air combo potential lets you turn any encounter whether with a regular street gangster, a mini-boss or a full fledged boss battle in to an absolute joke. As for your secondary style, you have the brand new Sea Dog style. A style based on duel wielding swords a powerful pistol and a grappling hook that turns Majima in to a speedy weapons expert. I was not particularly a fan of this style, while some of it’s attacks were great in large scale battles, it suffers from a lot of its moves having a strange amount of end lag and a lot of its other attacks, i.e. the pistol and hook, being near useless unless you dumped a ton of upgrades in to them. The pistol needs to charge up to do any worthwhile damage, leaving you completely vulnerable to being attacked. I will give credit, it does let you perform a fairly strong heat action that targets 5 different enemies and I found myself using this one in pretty much every group battle after I unlocked it. I think a good solution would have been to include an upgrade that made you not flinch from enemy attacks but still take damage while charging up the pistol, similar to how Beast style in Kiwami has a guard that makes you take damage but you won’t get knocked over or stunned and can use it as a basis of some strong attacks. The Grappling Hook is genuinely more useful outside of combat than inside of it, because when you’re in a battle, you will often deal with enemies moving right after you grapple them, and you end up flying in their direction and not hitting anything. Why couldn’t they just make this function like the Wire from Gaiden? That let you grab and fling enemies around and made for some great combat options. Add on the ability to fling towards enemies, or perhaps chain multiple dives towards different enemies for a fast paced and unique way to engage opponents. Despite all of this, the game really wants you to use the Sea Dog style above the Mad Dog style, with almost every major story boss making you start the encounter in this style after you acquire it.
But why complain about the Mad Dog style being so good and the Sea Dog style being so bad? Why not just stick to the Mad Dog style, which I will admit is something I did throughout this game, when it’s so overpowered? There are two reasons I take issue with it, number one, it’s not engaging, and number two, the series has done this exact concept better. Have a look at Lost Judgment released in 2021. The game’s protagonist, Takayuki Yagami, had three (four if you had the Boxing style DLC) distinct and versatile styles you could use. Tiger for powerful and direct strikes, Crane for speedy crowd control, and Snake for swift slithering counter-play. All of these styles were fun to use, mostly balanced, and had situations where one was more useful than the other. A player could choose their favorite, but they were almost never punished for preferring to use one more than the other, and would often be driven to use multiple styles per battle. When I played through Lost Judgment, I would often find myself evading a boss with Crane style and getting in quick cheap shots, and once I learned their attack patterns, I would counter them with Snake before doing massive damage with Tiger style attacks. In LaD Pirates, I never had a reason to do this because both Sea Dog and Mad Dog styles never gave me any sort of ability to do this due to how limited their movesets are and also in part of how lame the enemy's themselves are to go up against.
Thanks to the stronger Dragon Engine they started using in LaD 6, these games are able to support larger enemy encounters than they previously could. LaD 6 took full advantage of this with almost every long battle making you fight groups of 15 or more enemies fairly frequently as compared to older games which would rarely break double digits for group battles and now this game takes it a step further with even bigger groups of up to 35 enemies at a time. When I first saw the trailers for this, I was fairly excited, I’m a big fan of musou style games with the first Drakengard being one of my favorite games of all time and the PS2 era of the Dynasty Warriors series being games I have high opinions on. And with how Yakuza 6 handled big group battles, I was fairly disappointed when I actually got my hands on it. One of the great things about Musou games is that while the enemies themselves are not too tough most of the time, a lot of the fun comes from the insanely high combo chains you can perform by juggling the enemies and knocking them in to eachother. With Yakuza 6 and Kiwami 2 setting the precedent for this sort of “Bowling Brawler” style of combat in the series, it is much to my chagrin that this kind of gameplay is neither practical nor exactly possible in this game for several reasons.
The first of which being the overabundance of ranged enemies in this game. LaD is no stranger to such a thing, and their degrees of annoyance varied per title. 0 and Kiwami 1 in particular they were annoying due to how a single gun enemy would basically stun you for an extended period of time if you were hit. Bad, but thankfully there were never too many at a time you would have to deal with and most of the time they had very little health. In this game, to fit with the pirate setting, many enemies carry blunderbusses and matchlock rifles in to combat (which are basically just reskinned pistols) and when you are hit by them you will often keel over. Not bad, but the sheer amount of these enemies makes it extremely cumbersome to actually engage in combat, just when you take care of one, two more will pop up and a lot of them have the amount of health regular enemies have too! This is further compounded by a new type of enemy in this game that uses a style similar to the Wild Dance style seen in LaD Ishin that uses both a sword and a pistol. They will run away and always shoot at you and will constantly block whenever you attempt to attack, and they often have more health than their single weapon wielding partners. If these enemies were a rarity I wouldn’t take issue but the game just loves to throw this kind of enemy with you along with other firearm wielders. Suppose it’s fitting for a game taking place in America, but when your own gun is nothing compared to these guys and requires a charge to be somewhat effective, you’re always the loser.
If that wasn’t bad enough, a lot of enemies in this game have hyperarmor, meaning they can just negate your attacks and perform a move for themselves that will often stun or knock you down. By no means is this a bad feature in a beat-’em up game, in fact I think it’s good because it counters button mashing and will cause a player to use a smarter game plan and it has featured in numerous Yakuza games before. But the way they went about this was much more efficent in prior titles, with the enemy often performing a hyperarmor attack rather than simply activating hyper armor and it was often triggered by the player performing a long uninterrupted combo. This let the player know when their hyperarmor would start and end letting you either back off and wait, or go for a riskier move while they were attacking. LaD Pirates doesn’t do this as enemy hyperarmor is activated pretty much whenever they feel like it. Pretty bad but when compounded with, as I said earlier, the lack of options a player has in combat compared to this series own predecessors. All you can do is just sit back and guess when it ends, and even then the enemy may decide to just do another hyperarmor attack. In a game where button mashing is the developer designated way to play, factors like this serve no purpose but to punish you for playing as intended. Musou games often have enemies like this too, but you have your own way to counter them; Dynasty Warriors has special moves you can perform and Drakengard lets you perform a wide range of magic attacks in response. Surely, LaD Pirates would let you do a heat action or two to counter these enemies, right?
This game has a rather small number of Heat Actions, clocking in at only 34, but this comes with an upside. The Like a Dragon series is often jokingly referred to as “ReUSE Ga Gotoku” by players, a play on the Japanese pronunciation of the series title Ryu Ga Gotoku, due to the amount of assets the series reuses ranging from movesets, music, heat actions and environments, which for the developers helped them save on budget and let these games come out on a yearly basis but is seen by some as lazy. While there are some reused heat actions in this game, many of which originating from Majima’s set of Heat Actions in 0, a large majority of them are new and are very well animated and unique. You can see them in this video here. They have an underlying issue though, a lot of them are VERY situation dependent to the point where you are very unlikely to encounter them in most real battles, especially boss battles. The Jetpack one is a great example. It does look amazing, but I never used it in game because throughout most of the games map, there are no Jetpacks! Yes, this series has had other Heat Actions like this; the Swingset one from Judgment comes to mind, and while it was fairly useless and only cool to use once or twice in the sparse scenarios where you could use it, it was not as much as a problem in that game compared to here due to the fact that you had a large number of other heat actions to use outside of that. In this game, you don’t even have ground heat actions! You would think they learned their lesson from LaD 6 lacking them, but no, in this game, if you are unarmed, you cannot perform a heat action on a grounded enemy. Why? They were definitely not lacking when it came to unarmed or sword HA’s on grounded enemies as those have been in many games throughout the series so I genuinely can’t think of a reason. If I had to choose between reused HA’s or only new ones, I would honestly go with the option of reused HA’s. The series has been going on for 20 years so there is no shortage of animations to pull from and this helps players like myself who like to experiment with the combat. If the series is afraid of being made fun of for reusing assets, why even bother setting a whole game in the map from your last mainline entry? Why have half the HA’s be reused and the other ones be new? It’s like they just put them there as an afterthought, much like the weapons of this game.
No, not the pistol and the hook, those were halfthoughts. With how few weapons you can pick up and use in this game and how vulnerably slow you become, you have almost no reason to use them. Again, why? This time I have a potential explanation being that Honolulu was designed as a map for an RPG rather than a beat-’em up like most other maps in this game. The weapon placement was sparse as Infinite Wealth was of course an RPG so you wouldn’t need to litter the map with weapons much the same way Kamurocho and Sotenbori from previous games would have their maps filled to the bring with random junk you can weaponize at a moments notice. Still, I must question the choice. With the large groups you can fight in this game, having weapons would be great for so many combat scenarios in this game.
So; hyperarmor, useless weapons, limited combat options, enemies that turn you in to swiss cheese. This games combat has a wide range of issues but it fails on one big level combat wise in my opinion. Providing an actual challenge to the player. All these complaints of mine may make it seem like I’m just bad at the game and I will admit I did die a few times and was playing on Hard Difficulty. However, this game, and many others in the series, have one big fatal flaw when it comes to actual beat-em’ up design. Let’s go back to Spikeout and the early games in this series. When you press a button to attack an enemy in those games, what happens?
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I’m sure the suspense is killing you, but yes, you do an attack. But it’s what your attack does in specific that matters here. It takes a few frames to fully come out, you remain in place when you do said attack, and each attack has a limited amount of range that you must keep in mind when you press the button. All of this sounds really basic and if you’re a fan of classic beat-’em ups you know this already. LaD Pirates ignores a lot of this and instead, when you press a button to attack, you instead warp to your enemy. This, in my opinion, removes any and all semblance of a challenge from the game. You don’t have to consider the space between you and your opponent, you don’t need to take in to account which attacks are appropriate for a situation, you can, quite literally, just button mash until the enemy has activates hyper armor. And dodge before pressing attack again, without even closing the gap between yourself and the enemy. It’s brainless “accessibility”[2] that removes any of the fun present in this genre of video game. What if First Person Shooters had aimbots built in to them that did all the shooting for you? What if racing games let you teleport to the finish line without ever pressing the gas peddle? To me, this is roughly the beat-’em up equivalent of that. And, as I said earlier, I was playing on Hard Mode. This is not a feature you can disable in the options. Regardless of your skill level, you will have to deal with this. Why not restrict this feature to the easy mode of the game for the players who just want to experience the story? This is one of the many countless “accessibility” features in video games that are great for people that don’t care about gameplay, but suck for people who do care about it. Another blunder in SEGA’s plan to help expand this game, and other franchises, for global appeal, though I doubt I can call it a blunder when it’s actually working as intended.
Now, time to wrap up this section about the combat with a brief word on the boss fights. One of this series strong suits is that even in the games I was not fond of, the boss fights were almost always fantastic. You can always find fans of this series debating which boss fight is their favorite, and while with most series this is usually reserved for final bosses, you will find plenty mentions of mid game bosses in these discussions. I will throw my hat in the ring and nominate the Itou Ittosai boss fight from Kenzan, Nozaki Ryou in Kurohyou 2 and Baba Shigeki’s final encounter in Like a Dragon 5. All of these battles are great for their own reasons; the simply badass nature of a Samurai duel between friends at sunset set to a fantastic Spanish Guitar track in Itou’s fight, the intense Japanese Rap Rock and insane fighting style of Ryou coupled with Tatsuya’s own growth in to a man, and the end of both Baba and Shinada’s emotional journey’s in Like a Dragon 5 with a melancholic yet hopeful guitar driven song in the background. Notice something in common? Outside of my bias towards the spin-offs, these boss battles have a common thread, emotional weight and a great soundtrack. I’ll get to my qualms with this games soundtrack a little later on, but none of these battles have any real emotional weight to them. even the battle against Saejima which should carry SOMETHING at least for the players but the game just treats it half as a joke and half as fan service. Even the final boss just feels like some guy, there’s really no reason to hate him or want to beat him beyond being a generic villain and being the last enemy in the game before you finish it. Worse still, none of the bosses are fun to go up against. The worst offender of this is a guy by the name of Keith who you encounter multiple times throughout the game. He has a boring, predictable moveset and each battle against him doesn’t do anything different except scale up the damage he can dish out and give him a few more cronies by his side. Another poor example is a character named Shigaki who does nothing new to the “Yakuza guy with sword and a bunch of faceless enemies by his side” that fans of this series have seen so many times before this but this time it’s even more egregious due to the reasons listed above.
That is all I have to say in regards to this games combat. Quite the wall of text but I am just getting started. Next, I will talk about the non-combat aspects of gameplay because, as many people have told me, this series is more than just the Tiger Drops and Heat Actions. Let’s start with the other reason people love to play these games, the mini-games. Most of them consist of your normal Like a Dragon affair of Darts, Golf, Pool, Mahjong, Karaoke, if it’s been a prior LaD game, it’s probably in this one too. All is well and good but so many of them just feel random. Why is Dragon Kart in this game? Is it just there cause Majima is the “wacky” character and we need him to partake in a “wacky” race? No, I have the actual answer. Padding. Packing Peanuts gameplay. To elaborate, these mini-games and pieces of side content are not put in to enhance the players experience but rather to give the facade that the game has more going for it than it actually does.
The best example of this is the Bounties list in this game. This is a list of mini-bosses the player can optionally encounter for extra money whenever they feel like it. There’s not much to these, you simply find them on the map, beat them up, and get your paycheck. With the large sums of money you need in this game to progress, you will find yourself doing these quite often. On the surface, this isn’t too bad. Nothing outstandingly good, but not that much of a pain. My issue with it springs from the fact that this series has done this exact concept before but better in a previous game. Like a Dragon 3 had a side quest known as the Hitman Missions where you had to hunt down a group of hitmen throughout Kamurocho and Ryukyu. It functioned similarly to the Bounties in this game, mini-bosses with a nice reward for beating them, but the main difference is that this was part of a larger story line that helped engage you with it more than just a list of baddies to rough up. In addition to the rewards, you would find out more about why the hitmen were choosing their targets (former Yakuza) and the final reveal that the leader was an antagonist from the first game trying to get his revenge on Kiryu made it a lot more satisfying as compared to this game where you just go after a bunch of enemies for no real purpose other than to grind. There was also far less of them, only 20 throughout the entirety of LaD 3 while in this game there are 86 to take out and your only reward is a ring that needs to be paired with 2 others to actually activate it’s effect which is just generating heat slightly faster in Sea Dog style only. With how little the game wants you to use heat actions its damn near useless if you ask me. They could have very easily tied this in to the Barracuda gang from Infinite Wealth stating that these bounties were remnants or a few of the more dangerous ones were officers in the gang trying to hold it together after Dwight became shark food. While it wouldn’t have been much, it would have been a bit more engaging for players coming from IW and it could have served as a nice way to tie up a loose end since that gang is pretty much never mentioned otherwise in this game outside of a single scene.
Beyond the Bounties, there’s also the coliseum mode which is normally something I look forward to but that ends up relying super heavily on the flawed Pirate Crew aspect of the game and group combat which I have already stated my issues with. The big issue here is that as the opponents scale in difficulty you will need to go back out in to the overworld, upgrade your ship (grind for materials and cash) improve your crew (grind battles with them) and potentially find new crew members for your ship as well (arbitrary tasks ranging from collectathons to playing mini-games to unlock them) to continue in the Coliseum mode. The mini-game to pad out the game’s length has padding within it to extend the mini-games length.
The real nadir of all of this though is the presence of the Vocational School. It served a purpose in LaD 7 and Infinite Wealth both for Ichiban’s character growth and as a fun little mini game to increase various stats in those two games. But here, it just feels like they left it over from IW to pad out the game length and give you a bunch of non-sensical quizzes vaguely about sea life to make it gameplay relevant. I understand the series love of reusing assets but a line really needs to be drawn somewhere where it can be understandable. Karaoke is a fan favorite and is obviously going nowhere, but lazily reintroducing mini-games like this just to pad out game length is cheap fan service and makes me not want to bother with playing these games when they’ll all just have the same minigames the mainline entries have. The Judgment duology was great with introducing a nice variety of unique mini-games like Drone Racing, a VR Board Game, and Robo-Battles, Skateboarding, Bike Races, Dancing…
Really it’s disappointing to me that these games are thought of both by the developers and the fans as being nothing more than small scale filler games to hold people over until the next mainline title comes out. That kneecaps the potential of an actually interesting spin-off game focusing on different aspects of this series world. That goes for everything about this game, but in particular it upsets me that it destroys any chance of these games having actually unique mini-games outside of just the Coliseum. When so many prior spin-offs in this series had dozens of activities you couldn’t find anywhere else and this game and Gaiden can barely muster up half the amount you see in mainline games, it says to me that the developers see these games as just content to throw at players and not anything actually meaningful which is a really depressing way to look at video games. The worst part is just how many fans are eating this up but I am going to save that for the end of this review.
But you’re not here for Mahjong, you are here for the SUBSTORIES. The beloved sidequests of these games that have shaped the image of this series. While comedy has no place in a Yakuza story, it seemed to have found it’s home in Yakuza Substory’s instead. Fans love these, they can’t get enough, every Yakuza fan has a laundry list of their favorite substories. Me personally, I never gave a crap about them but I can see the appeal. The contrast of super serious characters in strange situations is a classic comedy recipe, though whether or not it actually tastes good depends on the player, I’m just really picky. Picky or not, I really dislike the substories in this game for one big reason.
Recent games have had this issue that I like to describe as the “Twitter Screenshot Factory” effect. What I mean by that is that a lot of the games side content seems almost perfectly engineered to be posted on Twitter or other social media platforms for screenshots that get popular and help give free advertising for the series. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen a couple of out of context screencaps from Like a Dragon 0 such as the famous “Nugget” screencap.
It’s no secret that images like these going viral were a major part in 0 being successful in the west and the series becoming popular over here. It’s debatable as to whether or not that was intentional for this game, and an even bigger debate if these were conscious localization decisions or not, but it’s almost certainly a factor now and considering how the Japanese developers work directly with Sega of America now, this is definitely something they’re factoring in.
Let me give you an example. There’s a sidequest in this game where Majima needs to help a woman on a date with a dimwitted Japanophile. The name of “Mt. Fuji” escapes both the lady and her date so Majima steps in and whispers the answer to the woman. You can choose between the correct answer and an incorrect answer that just so happens to be...
Do I really have to say anything about this? The countless screenshots I saw of this exact scene when I logged on to Twitter after beating the game really say it all. Many of which had tens of thousands of likes and reshares. On one hand, I gotta respect SEGA for doing things like this. “Weird” scenes like this and the dating sim side quest with the Tiger are free advertising and will get people to play this game and the others in the series. All it takes is one screenshot for someone to spend close to 400 dollars[4] on this series of games. On the other hand, I am very obviously upset that this multifaceted series is now just being distilled in to funny pictures to share around.
It may just sound like I’m complaining about the humor in these games, but rest assured, I am not. My issue is that these substories really rob these characters from showing off interesting parts of themselves we’d normally never see, and in games with multiple characters like 5, helped out a lot when it came to character development. A great example of this is a subtory in 5 featuring Shinada Tatsuo encountering a young woman who ran away from home to enter the sex industry. Shinada, a journalist in the industry, protects the woman from some pimps and gives her genuinely useful advice about the world he works in. Shinada, from his introduction, is shown to have quite the libido, and he could have very easily scored a quickie with this woman but this substory shows that, even in an industry as crooked as his, there is some light. For the polar opposite, a few of the sidequests in Gaiden show off a different side of Kiryu where is more aggressive and embraces his roots as a YAKUZA, something you rarely see in the main story of the game. It doesn’t go too far, but it’s entertaining to see a meaner side to someone who is usually depicted as a gentle giant. This game has none of that and almost all the screencaps are just attempts at being weird. Who needs actually interesting character moments when you can just scrap with a bear for the umpteenth time?
But I think the worst part about all the side content in this game is how it’s presented to you, or rather how it’s shoved in your face. For some reason, SEGA is afraid that players might miss out on side content within this game. I can kind of understand it because in a game such as Like a Dragon 5 there’s so many optional activities that I completely missed on my first playthrough and was not aware of until my attempts at doing completionist runs. However this game is a fifth of that games length both in story and in terms of what the player can do outside of it, and most side activities are marked and have specific substories that introduce you to them. Despite this, the game still goes out of it’s way to block off story progress multiple times to introduce you to side content such as the Animal Rescue, Baseball, Aloha Links, Fortune Collecting, the Segways, Photo Rally, and Bounties. By the way, all those examples I just listed take place in Chapter 2! The second part of this 5 part game is the longest of them all and its just a guided tour of somewhere that most players have already. I think the worst part of all of this though is that, aside from the bounties, none of this side content is that big or that deserving of this amount of time outside of the Bounties which is just helpful for the padding this game makes you do.
Ultimately though, the mini-games are by no means bad, they’re just disappointing. If you enjoyed Dragon Kart in 7 or Infinite Wealth, you’ll like it here. If you couldn’t get enough of Crazy Delivery from IW, there’s some more of it here for you. Liked Sicko Snap? You get the idea. With almost nothing new to do, I am left greatly disappointed by the side content within this game. There is one big exception though…
Most Like a Dragon game’s have a major side quest or two that the game will sort of center around to go with the theme of the game. 0 had Real Estate and Cabaret Club management, Lost Judgment had the school clubs, and 5 had a unique side quest for each character (except Akiyama). This game’s major side quest is of course, pirate related. During the story, Majima becomes the captain of a rag tag group of pirates and inadvertently becomes involved in not only a search for treasure across the islands of Hawaii, but also comes up against a band of evil pirates known as the Devil Flags. You, of course, will take on these bastards and get all the booty you can while expanding your ship’s crew to become the most legendary set of pirates the seas have ever seen.
Out of everything this game does, I must say that this is probably one of the better aspects. The big new feature that comes with this consist of maritime ship combat and I must say that it is very engaging. I must admit that I haven’t played that many ship combat games (unless you count the Raft Wars flash game) but I never dreaded having to load in to a battle and often I looked forward to it. It’s rather simple; you can either shoot at your enemies with front facing machine guns, side facing cannons, ram them at high speeds or shoot them with a rocket launcher. You’ll also have to maintain not just the health of your ship but also the health of your crewmates who fire the armaments on your ship. Doing this means you will have to stop steering the ship and go help them out on the deck. You also have a limited number of repairs you can do to your ship, in which you will have to stop attacking and either use a smoke screen to avoid detection from the enemy’s ship or attempt to flee them. I am genuinely a really big fan of this, combat here feels like it requires a lot more thought and precision rather than just carelessly rushing in and spamming attacks like with the ground combat. There’s a bit more depth to it as you may require different types of canons or guns depending on the enemy. Some may be easier to defeat by freezing them while others needs to be set ablaze. The ships stern is also a weak point you can attack but is, of course, tricky to get to and some ships have counter measures to prevent you from camping out back there. There are very few flaws I actually have with this gamemode outside of the fact that upgrading or customizing your ship requires a lot of money and thus it means going out and partaking in the middling side content of this game to strengthen it.
But a ship is only as strong as her crew! And the crew you can assemble is… a mixed bag. Various crewmates can be found and recruited throughout the town, whether it’s from substories, prizes from mini-games, or just encountering them on the street and fulfilling various requirements for them such as beating them in fights or giving them money. Once a crewmate joins your merry band, they can assist you in raids on other ships or treasure hunts, with certain mates giving you bonuses depending on where they are assigned. It may be extra health, or another turbo boost while you’re in sailing mode.
A lot of the crew members you can recruit are reoccurring characters from other games which makes for some neat little fanservice. Kamiyama the weapons dealer from the PS3 games appears wielding a unique weapon and supporting characters from Judgment also show up like Sugiura, Higashi and Kaito. Andre Richardson from 3 and KSON (the streamer) can also be recruited. There are also some newer characters with unique models you can find throughout the town to add to your crew who often have very strong abilities. The main problem is that a lot of these crewmembers are kind of crap. Of course that’s to be expected with any game where you are managing a large group, but what makes it so egregious to me is the fact that the characters that are worthwhile are usually the fan service characters. A point can be made stating that obviously people would be upset if characters like Ichiban and Saejima weren’t good. Gaiden suffered from this issue where the playable clan members like Daigo and Majima were very disappointing to use, but immediately going to the polar opposite end and making it so that you would only want to use fan service characters is not a good solution either. Worse still, some characters are locked behind a 12 DOLLAR DLC PAY WALL. Kiryu, Nishitani 1, Daigo, Shimano, Yuki, Sagawa, Nugget the Chicken and Ono Michio. The worst part of all this is that you can’t even play as these guys. At least Gaiden let you play these characters even if they weren’t that fun to use, but 12 dollars for what’s basically a drone following me around? It feels like I’m the one having my precious gold taken from me. Still, the crew mates you get for free aren’t too bad and you don’t need to cough up 12 extra dollars, on top of the 60 dollars needed to purchase the game, to actually have fun with the game mode.
The actual ship raids are alright, they’re just big group battles that go by really fast. Due to the large amount of characters on screen, 30 on your side and often more than that on the enemies side, they just end up feeling like buttonmash fests where your crewmates end up doing most of the work. After enough time passes during the battle you can issue a special order that has a variety of effects like healing or increasing your parties defense. I think it would have been a lot more interesting if you could have ordered crew mates to target the enemies captains and first mates or to focus on the weaker enemies first. Earlier games had something like this in the coliseum mode during team battles where you could order your team mates to approach the enemy in certain ways, so I think it would have added another layer of intrigue to this gamemode.
As for the Treasure Hunts and the Devil Flags, they’re practically linked together so I’ll cover them both in a single paragraph. During the story, one of your crewmates reveals his father was a renown treasure hunter and passed his map on to him before he died. This treasure map has a list of various artifacts around Hawaii you can find for money and reputation and on this list are “cursed objects” that are held by the the Devil Flags. These cursed objects, when obtained, unlock super attacks that summon various sea creatures to attack your enemies. How do you obtain this treasure? For the most part, it consists of you taking part in long battles with your crewmates assisting you and receiving the treasure at the end of the battle. It’s basically the bouncer missions from Kiwami 2 all over again since you can’t heal and you need to complete it in one go. This time though, you have unreliable crewmates who are either complete beasts and destroy everything in the way or die to the second group of enemies you encounter. The Devil Kings themselves are just another set of four wacky side quest antagonists with uninteresting mini-boss fights to go along with them.
It’s really a shame that the most unique aspect of this game ends up encumbering itself with this series most trite and common flaw of having yet another group of four (its always four) guys to fight and then relying on its crappy combat to carry the rest of it.
And now, a quick word on the upgrade system. These games are always inconsistent with how they go about upgrades. 1, 2 and 3 would give you health and attack upgrades as you leveled up and each time you leveled up you would get a certain ammount of XP to put towards skills. 4 and 5 tried a system where you obtained orbs and each ability would appear on a list and require a certain amount of orbs for it. Ishin, 0 and Kiwami tried a more tradtional RPG Skill Tree/Grid, 6 and Kiwami 2 required you to get certain types of XP for certain upgrades. Gaiden and this game however have a similar problem in that the way you acquire skills is dependent on the money you earn and an exterior XP system too, which is known as your Pirate Rep in this game. So not only do you need to grind money if you want certain skills, you also need to get XP for it too which means, once again, forcing you to engage in a lot of the money making side content if you want to get any decent amount of upgrades. I didn’t like this in 0 but at least 0 had the excuse of literally everything you do giving you an insane amount of money. Combos, mini-games, the big side quest, and something I felt this game needed, battle rewards. If you did certain things in a battle like finish with low HP, take no damage, use a ton of heat actions or defeat enemies with your different styles, you would receive extra money from it. This game genuinely could have benefited from such a thing, or at the very least it could have given you Reputation for it. Things would have been a lot less tedious that way.
But not like that matters when there are so few upgrades in this game anyways and most of them are just for increasing your health bar and attack damage. But who needs that many upgrades to your health when you can carry so many healing items with you, and you already do insane amounts of damage to enemies without getting upgrades in the first place?
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STORY
The Japanese title of this game is 龍が如く８外伝 Pirates in Hawaii(パイレーツ イン ハワイ), which translates from Japanese to Like a Dragon 8 Side Story: Pirates in Hawaii. That means that this game is in fact, a Gaiden game much like The Man Who Erased His Name. I suppose that Sega of America saw a lot of westerners just called TMWEHN “Like a Dragon Gaiden” so they dropped the Gaiden from this games localized title. Ultimately though, that means that, as a side story, this game is shorter than a mainline entry. There’s not a lot to cover in the story as, for the most part, it’s not a bad storyline. These game have had some crap stories before, with 4’s messy convoluted conspiracy being a commonly pointed-at example. As stated earlier, Majima loses his memory, washes ashore in Hawaii, and becomes entangled in a swashbuckling adventure for an eternal life elixir. You find out later on that Majima was actually searching for the elixir prior to his memory loss and for a damn good reason, he wanted to find it and give it to former series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu who nearly died of lung cancer at the end of Infinite Wealth. That’s all well and good, and shows a sweeter side to Majima that players rarely saw and was rarely shown to Kiryu himself. But that is not known until almost the end of the game and for most of the game, you instead deal with a flanderized caricature of Majima. In a lot of fanbases, there is often a big debate between “fanon” and canon interpretations of characters, with the fanon interpretations being based on simplified traits or one specific appearance of a character. If you haven’t played the Yakuza games and only knew about it through memes, you probably know Majima as just this weird guy with a cool jacket who is obsessed with Kiryu. But after playing through 20 years worth of games, they gave this character a lot of nuance and depth that most people, even fans of these games, miss out on. The “Mad Dog” persona he puts on is an exaggeration of some of his character traits that he puts on to mask a lot of his trauma from being tortured, losing his wife, and not being there for his sworn brother, Saejima, on a hitman job that ended up getting Saejima sent to jail for 25 years. His obsession with Kiryu stems from both his respect for the man and using him to sort of fill the void Saejima left after he was arrested. While he could often be cruel to others, deep down he had a heart that would only open for those very close to him. All that being said, the Mad Dog persona was definitely a source of comic relief in the series, but in a Pagliacci/Sad Jester sort of fashion.
That, however, is not who you are dealing with when you play this game. You are dealing with the wacky, Majima Everywhere interpretation of the Mad Dog. With the loss of his memory, Majima doesn’t need to carry the baggage of his trauma, outside of vague notions of “I did bad things in my past life that I don’t remember” that don’t bear any consequences whatsoever cause everyone just ignores it, even Majima. Any depth to his character has been washed away for just pure fan service. This is especially upsetting to me, because Gaiden was faithful to Kiryu’s character but still showed off a side of him we rarely saw. His crueler, less caring side due to the absence of his children and the loss of his friends. It gave him new depth without straying from the characters roots.
Also, the amnesia thing is played so strangely. You’re telling me Majima can remember the specific tastes of Japanese candy he had as a kid, what life in Tokyo was like, and Japanese words… but he doesn’t remember anything about his sworn brother or 2 of the top guys in his Yakuza Clan? It’s really selective and eventually the devs just give up and he gets his memories back in Chapter 4 but it has no bearing on the plot outside of the post-credits scene. But in a way, the game is basically demanding you turn your brain off and not notice or care about things like this. The entire selling point of the game is it’s purposely stupid concept and they don’t want players to take it seriously.
Aside from the flanderization and inherent stupidity, the game’s story has a few bad scenes in it that I will discuss.
The first of which is the scene where Saejima makes his introductory appearance. He meets Majima in an attempt to bring him back to Japan, not knowing he has amnesia. Discussion breaks down and, in typical Like a Dragon fashion, they need to resolve things by throwing punches at eachother. As I said earlier on, I dislike this boss battle. His moveset is the same as his appearance in 5 but slightly faster and doesn’t make for that much of a challenge. During the battle, Saejima actually says to Majima “How do you remember your fighting style but you don’t remember me?” and Majima just brushes it off and says “Yeah I forgot you dude move on”. But worse than that is that the battle ends with Majima winning which is fine but then the game basically just disrespects Saejima for losing. It’s not so much that I want to be offended on behalf of a fictional character, it’s moreso that I’m upset that the game basically treats its own characters like a joke, especially a fan favorite character like Saejima. To rub more salt in the wound, the tiger literally pisses on him after the battle is over. I don’t think you could be any more overt with the symbolism if you tried.
The next scene comes much later on. Shigaki’s group of ex-Yakuza and Majima’s crew are working together and they just found the big treasure, this is when the main antagonist reveals that he has taken Noah’s older sister hostage. Majima wants to help by planning to turn the treasure in to the villain and obviously Shigaki is upset. He raises the point that the reason he’s doing this is so all of his ex-Yakuza buddies can have their second chance at life thanks to the 2 main Yakuza groups in the series (the Tojo Clan and the Omi Alliance) shutting down in Like a Dragon 7. A lot of these guys are homeless or are being forced back in to crime which is something Infinite Wealth and Gaiden explored. Shigaki also mentions that it’s extremely messed up that Majima, a legend in the Underworld, does not care about the well being of his fellow Yakuza, especially considering how at the end of 7 he was working with other former Tojo Clan members to start a security company for former Yakuza, albeit you find out that in Infinite Wealth it didn’t really work out.
Despite all of the frankly decent points Shigaki brought up, Majima, who had his memory back by this point, straight up says “Grow a pair” and tells Shigaki and his gang to get over it. I understand that Majima cared about Noah’s sister, and yeah Shigaki was being cruel by basically willing to throw her life away for the sake of him and his group, but for Majima to basically throw everyone under the bus like this is contradictory to literally everything the series has been trying to do for the past couple of games. The big reoccurring theme that this series has been touting is that you can always restart your life for the better regardless of age or status or what you have done wrong in the past. It’s a really beautiful theme in my opinion but they just ignored that so Majima could have a “cool moment” in front of everyone else. This scene could have very easily been fixed if Majima said something along the lines of “If you actually want a second chance in life you should do something good for someone else rather than act selfishly” but no none of that happens and he just beats them up and they begrudgingly help Majima’s crew with his plan.
Remember what I said about overt symbolism? I lied, there is something far more overt than a fan favorite character getting pissed on. Try having the main protagonist not reveal his tattoo during the final boss. Yes, that’s what this game does. A trademark of the series has basically been ignored for no reason whatsoever and I genuinely cannot think of a good reason for them to not have Majima reveal the Hanya during the final boss. You could say it’s because the final boss wasn’t a Yakuza but in Infinite Wealth, Ichiban still revealed his Dragonfish tattoo despite his final boss not being another member of the Yakuza. Maybe I’m over analyzing it, but to me, this is the series basically telling me that it’s not about the Yakuza anymore, but it’s just about the characters partaking in “Hype Moments” more than anything else. It’s basically just fanfiction for the sake of putting these characters in various scenarios rather than trying to tell a structured and intriguing story about them. Oh, and the main villain gets eaten by a whale for no reason right after you defeat him.
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SOUNDTRACK
Last but not least, I must address the soundtrack. Perhaps my biggest disappointment of them all. These games are almost always praised for their diverse, multi-genre soundtracks and reoccurring songs that are remixed in different entries. Even in the games I don’t particularly like, the soundtrack has some fantastic standout tracks that I often find myself revisiting for casual listens outside of the game. But this games soundtrack is so dull that I genuinely can’t remember a single song I liked. Let me walk through some of the worst offenders and give brief reasons as to why I dislike them.
First off is Crushing Blow, the theme for Shigaki and his group. The first half of this song isn’t too bad outside of the intro which is fairly lame. It reminds me of a PS2 or early PS3 era song that the series would use for a crime family like the Shimano or Tamashiro family and would definitely be improved if it had some faster paced and more distorted guitars like those themes have. But the big issue is that it just feels like it’s incomplete, the breakdown of the song just feels like the first half but slowed down and when it ends it just loops back to the start, doesn’t do anything interesting whatsoever. It’s basically half a song.
Next is Wild Fire, Taiga Saejima’s theme during his boss fight. This is a remix of his battle theme when you play as him in Like a Dragon 4 which is known as Massive Fire and man is it a let down. Usually, Saejima’s theme songs are loud, high intensity rock songs but this song ends up feeling like a Mr. Bungle track (not in a good way) in the sense that it keeps changing what genre it is mid song and nothing it tries really sticks. The guitars are fairly muted and electronics take more precedence here and then for some reason the middle of the song is a Trap beat that sounds NOTHING like Saejima’s theme. I’m not opposed to them using Hip-Hop style tracks, Pray Me from LaD 1 is one of my favorite tracks in the series and Nameless from Kurohyou 2 is a really catchy track. But here it just feels so random and out of place. After that it just uses the same guitar from the LaD 4 and with a chopped up Amen Break behind it. It sounded really amateurish so I decided to look up the composer for this game and it’s someone by the name of Saori Yoshida who has been composing songs since LaD Ishin in 2013. She’s composed some great tracks before like Theory of Beauty, Green Vibes and Destiny. Why is someone with so much experience creating tracks inferior to her prior work? Maybe it’s what SEGA asked for
Lastly, my least favorite track in the game, Polar Pulse, the theme of a giant security robot you fight in Chapter 3. Good lord what were they thinking on this one, it’s mixed in such a terrible way that every single instrument is so loud and pitched in a certain way that it ends up just hurting my head. Were they trying to make a song that felt “robotic” or “technological” by making all the electronic instruments painfully loud? Test Your Imagination is a song from LaD 3 that plays during the VR training sessions and manages to achieve this without being painful to listen to.
BUT there is one single song I feel like they got right. Receive You The Arousal. The "Receive You" songs are basically the main theme song for not just Majima but the series as a whole, and almost every game has an accompanying remix of it. This is by no means the best remix of the theme, but I genuinely think they pulled this one off fairly well, the mixing of traditional and electronic guitars here is very reminiscent of LaD Ishin’s Receive You The Archetype.
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EPILOGUE
After all is said and done, I cannot recommend this game whatsoever. Whether you are looking for a Beat-’Em Up experience, a solid story, a good pirate game, a decent mini-game collection (Infinite Wealth has all of these mini-games and more), or if you’re just a fan of the series. By no means is this the worst video game I have ever played, but this is, in all honesty, the worst game in the Like a Dragon series. Not because it’s unplayable or anything[5], but because there’s nothing that made me enjoy this series in the first place. All the classic arcade elements within the gameplay are gone and replaced with modern design philosophies that make these games so easy they’re boring. As a way to experience Japanese culture, there’s none of it to be experienced here whatsoever.
While Gaiden definitely previewed this idea, Pirate Yakuza has cemented my fear of where this series is going. This series is becoming a content farm. What I mean is that these games are no longer full experiences but rather they’re lazily and hastily made games with stories based on them throwing darts at a board with concepts on them. Kiryu is a Spy, Majima is a pirate, what’s next? Daigo is a Cowboy? Akiyama is a cyborg? Who knows! But I think, in the long term, this will be standard for the series. These short length, glorified expansion packs sold at full price will come out once or twice a year while the mainline games take longer to make. For the main, numbered entries this seems like a great thing since they will no longer be bound to a yearly schedule the way they were for the past 20 years. But what I worry about is how this will impact the series overall, because that means they’ll be making more and more games like this. Waves of low quality games inbetween the higher quality ones, it feels almost like SEGA is letting us know they’re giving us low quality games for the sake of binge playing when they go on sale. In a way it reminds me of what happened to Star Wars, any actual artistic direction and meaning traded in to just create a bunch of streaming series to binge watch and forget once you’re done with it.
This sucks, but what’s worse is that, in my experience, a lot of fans are almost “dangerously optimistic” over this game and the new direction for the series. What I mean is that any negativity directed at this game or this new model for the series is shut out and you are shamed for being critical of these games. When I check the r/yakuzagames subreddit and on Twitter, anyone who speaks negatively of these games are told canned statements about how you shouldn’t take this game seriously and that the game is almost “too silly” to be criticized or they’ll go as far to say “this series was always this silly” which is demonstrably false; The PS2 games were mostly straightfaced and even more recent games like Lost Judgment were fairly serious. Knowing for a fact that SEGA is watching social media for all the “funny” screencaps people post, they’re definitely seeing people silence any of the dissenters who may spring up which they will no doubt interpret as people encouraging more games such as this.
And my last issue with this game is the introduction of all the fantasy elements. People say that these games have had them to an extent like the golden castle in 2, the Giant Bear in 5 and the “Ghosts” in 6 but this game takes it to a new extreme. You fight giant squids, you can summon demonic sharks in combat, and one of the main bosses is a huge robot. These weirder supernatural aspects were usually kept to the side content but now it’s bleeding in to the main story. But why are they doing this? Aside from fan service and helping out with the series “Weird” appeal aspect, I have another theory. They’re going to turn the series in to an Urban Fantasy with crime elements as they slowly leave behind the actual Yakuza. Of course, mirroring reality, the actual Yakuza has declined greatly but by no means is that a reason for the series to abandon it’s crime melodrama roots and just focus on “hype” moments of having characters battle against conspiratorial groups with fantasy elements. But I think this shift, beyond the irl decline of Yakuza groups, is due to the lead director of this series, Masayoshi Yokoyama, having a big change of heart. Have a read of this interview he did around the time Infinite Wealth came out. This line in particular stands out above the rest:
“When you see mass shootings on TV, and you learn that the author was playing at home. It's a very complex problem, but I think we can't say that video games don't have an influence, because, unlike a novel or a film, they allow you to have an immersive experience," he says. "So I think that when creating video games that contain violence or yakuza stories, it is imperative to think about the effects that this can have on players."
No, that isn’t a quote lifted from Jack Thompson, that is Yokoyama himself saying this. He, genuinely believes that video games play a part in mass shootings. Putting aside the fact that there has been no proven scientific link between playing video games and violent behaviors, why is this Japanese director so concerned with a problem that is thankfully rare in his country but unfortunately common in western ones? Why does he want these games to be some sort of moral guide to potential players? Wouldn’t he be a total hypocrite anyways since, in these games, you CAN shoot people among other acts that would also be horrifically violent in real life? In these games you can stab your enemies, drown them, push them off ledges, burn them and beat them within inches of their lives. Watch the heat action compilations I linked earlier to see what I mean. If he’s so worried about someone playing these games and becoming violent in real life, why is he allowing players to assault these NPCs so brutally? It’s a really bad precedent that the lead director of one of the biggest Japanese game series is basically spouting the same debunked points from the 90s that censors were attempting to use to get rid of video games, hell anyone in gaming saying this is worrying. Why agree with the people who wanted to censor us?
I will bring this long winded review to an end here. Hate to end it on such a pessimistic note but what else can I say? This is a very disappointing entry in a long running series that I love, and it’s evident that this series is going to move in a direction I am not interested in whatsoever. How ironic that I, a westerner, fall out of love with a series as it shifts gears to appeal to people like me. If you, the reader, should take anything away from this, then I would highly recommend you check out Spikeout if you wanna properly scratch that itch for LaD style combat.
RATING: 2.5/10 Played on PC, Steam version
[1] Fun Fact; until the port of Yakuza Kiwami on the Nintendo Switch in 2024, this was the only game in the series to be ported to a Nintendo console. Likely due to the fact that former series director Toshihiro Nagoshi believed that the hardware was more focused on younger audiences rather than the mature audience the series aimed for. Of course he’s not working on these games now so…
[2] I’m gonna call Goro (the Tiger) “the tiger” going forward to avoid any confusion with Goro (the person), but it is up to you to not confuse the Tiger with Taiga.
[3] When I say “accessibility” I am not referring to features such as color blind settings or motion reduction. These features are great and one of the few things I love about modern video games. Instead, I am referring to "accessibility" that basically makes the game beatable without even trying.
[4] I am using the regular Steam prices of the Yakuza Complete Series bundle, the Judgment Collection, Like a Dragon Ishin, Like a Dragon Gaiden, and the (poorly named) Like a Dragon Series Starter Pack. For some reason, Gaiden and Ishin aren’t part of any pack and need to be bought independently. Granted, all of these games go on sale quite frequently, but even then you would still have to pay in the hundreds for each game.
[5] But for a little while, Nvidia GPU’s were facing frequent crashes while playing this game.
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