Ichiban Kasuga takes the fall for a murder he didn’t commit, serves 18 years, and walks out to find nobody waiting. His clan is gone, destroyed by the man he respects most. That is the opening of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and it is the best thing Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has written in years. The eighth mainline Yakuza game swaps Kazuma Kiryu for Kasuga and swaps real-time brawling for turn-based party combat. Sega published it. The game launched on PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S on November 10, 2020. The PlayStation 5 version followed on March 2, 2021.
The gamble works.
Trailer, via SEGA.
Arakawa’s promise, and the 18 years that follow
In 2001, Masumi Arakawa persuades Kasuga to confess to a murder his captain, Jo Sawashiro, allegedly committed, to protect Sawashiro’s reputation. Kasuga, indebted to Arakawa, agrees to shoulder the blame. Arakawa promises to greet him on release.
Eighteen years later, Kasuga is released from jail. Arakawa is nowhere to be seen. A police officer picks him up, and the game becomes a hunt for the truth behind the betrayal.
What follows is a revenge story that keeps finding people on the margins. Kasuga draws a ragtag group of society’s outcasts to his side:
- Adachi, a rogue cop
- Nanba, a homeless ex-nurse
- Saeko, a hostess on a mission
The mandatory party fills out with Joongi Han, a Geomijul operative and the body double of the Jingweon Mafia leader from Yakuza 6, and Tianyou Zhao, leader of the Liumang. A fictionalized version of Japanese actress Eri Kamataki appears as a character of the same name, the chief executive of a company, voiced in Japanese by herself and in English by Eden Riegel.
Kasuga is voiced by Kazuhiro Nakaya in Japanese and Kaiji Tang in English. Kiryu, voiced by Takaya Kuroda and Darryl Kurylo, still appears in a supporting capacity. It is the first main series game where he does not lead.
Bicycles, jobs and a kart racer
The battle system is the departure everything else hangs on. Instead of real-time action, Yakuza: Like a Dragon runs a real-time turn-based role-playing system with up to four party members. Characters use nearby items — bicycles, for instance — to attack enemies, and can kick environmental objects toward a target if one sits on the way. Party assists strengthen the group or finish enemies, with more unlocked through story progress or sidequests.
Jobs function as character classes. Each has unique abilities, equipment and statistics, and every party member has at least one exclusive job. Two jobs sit behind paid downloadable content, which is the one place the structure pinches. A New Game Plus mode with exclusive difficulty settings shipped as paid DLC in Japan but is included at no extra cost in the Western release.
Sub-stories return for rewards, and the map still holds karaoke and other side activities. The new one is Dragon Kart, a kart racer bolted onto a crime drama. It is exactly as silly as that sounds, and it fits.
Isezaki Ijincho and the Ijin Three
For the first time, the series shifts its focus away from Tokyo’s Kamurocho. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is set in 2019, three years after Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, and most of it takes place in the Yokohama district of Isezaki Ijincho, based on the real Isezakicho. Kamurocho still appears in the game, as does Osaka’s Sotenbori.
Yokohama’s underworld runs on three interconnected factions known as the Ijin Three: the Chinese-Japanese Yokohama Liumang, the Korean-Japanese Geomijul mafia, an offshoot of the Jingweon Mafia, and the local Seiryu Clan. That three-way pressure gives the story a shape the older games had started to lose.
The shift matters more than the map size. Kiryu’s story was always about a man trying to get out. Kasuga’s is about a man trying to get in — to be a hero, to matter, to be greeted by someone. The party structure makes that literal. He is not a lone wolf. He is a guy assembling a crew of people nobody else wanted.
Where the game stumbles
Yakuza: Like a Dragon is not flawless. The turn-based system occasionally fights its own real-time positioning, and locking two jobs behind paid DLC in a game that already asks a lot of your time is a sour note. The English audio track returns here for the first time since the original game, which is a nice option and not a fix for anything.
The Western release also bundled in new costumes and some previously paid DLC, and that version reached Japan and Asia under the subtitle International on February 25, 2021 for Windows and Xbox platforms. A version for Amazon Luna launched on December 10, 2021.
But the narrative, the characters and the presentation carry it. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio took a long-running franchise and rebuilt the engine mid-flight. The result is a role-playing game that understands why people liked these games in the first place: not the punching, but the people standing next to you when the punching stops.
The series’ first worldwide use of its Japanese title, even as a subtitle, reads now like a statement of intent. The old protagonist’s story was finished. This one had somewhere to go.
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