The biggest compliment I can give Yakuza: Like a Dragon is just how much it reminds me of Yakuza 0. More than any other Yakuza title I always felt 0 had this perfect balance between emotional drama and hilarious bizarre situations. I remember an interview with one of the developer team who described Yakuza something along the lines of "doing silly things extremely seriously". This is the perfect description of the series as a whole but I feel Yakuza 0 and Like a Dragon perfected the balance of these that no other game managed, as great as I think they all are. Even Like a Dragon's conception originated from an April Fool's video in 2019 where they showed the game as a turn based RPG (which it wasn't actually at the time). The prank was so popular that they decided to change the entire gameplay mechanics for the Japanese launch 9 months later. Silly things, extremely seriously.

Honestly as both a JRPG fan and a Yakuza fan everything about this game was an absolute smash. The new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga is just wonderful. I wasn't sure at first, even for a Yakuza game I felt the start of this game was a slow burn and retread some ideas from the very original Yakuza game but once it gets started I fell in love with not only him but all the characters he meets. Not every story beat quite works but the cast and the fantastic voice acting (I played in Japanese) absolutely carry it in those rare moments. Interestingly I'm probably more attached to the cast in this game than other Yakuza games just because you spend so much more time with them all due to it being a party based RPG rather than a solo beat 'em up. I especially liked Adachi and Saeko but they are all fantastic. Also having a JRPG with a purely adult cast was such a refreshing change of pace.

The combat system is so full of imagination being both hilarious and paying homage to classic JRPG's in a lot of ways. Ichiban is a huge Dragon Quest fan and even being part of the Yakuza always wanted to be a hero. I'm not sure if he took too many hits to the head but in battle he sees some of the enemies as RPG type enemies. Drunks turn into beer knights, Fire Jugglers, and other weird enemies. The game has a job system such as Final Fantasy implemented but to change jobs you actually have to go to the job center to do it. I love the way they incorporated that into a real life scenario. Also the fact that apparently the job center in Yokohama advertises for Dominatixs, Break Dancers, Bodyguards, you know.....standard vacancies. My only complaint about this system (and game generally) is that for most of the game there is little need to change jobs. You become hugely weaker going from a level 30 Homeless Man to a level 1 musician involving a lot of grinding to catch up just isn't worth it stat wise, only to learn a few skills. I would like to see better balance and encouragement to change jobs and experiment as I only found that worth doing grinding for the end game dungeons.

Combat aside this is a standard Yakuza game, this isn't an insult. If you've never played one before it's essentially mini open world's set in cities. They aren't massive but tend to be dense and memorable which is how open worlds should be. Size isn't everything (snarf snarf). During these explorations there are substories or side quests and mini games many of which are hilarious. Some examples involving Japanese men in business suits and power ranger helmets, a whole kart racing game, running a business with a chicken, collecting cans in a rickshaw among others.

I spent 120 hours playing this and getting the platinum trophy. Watching a woman smack a yakuza in the face with her leaden handbag +2 simply never got old and with Ishin and two further Like a Dragon titles announced coming it's never been a better time to be a series fan.

+ Characters are great with fantastic voice acting.
+ Combat system is full of imagination.
+ Tons to do. Great mini games and substories.

- Job system needs slightly refining to encourage using other jobs.

Absolutely mesmerizing. I don't think any character in the last couple years has resonated with the same way Ichiban Kasuga does. As much as I love Kiryu and Majima as characters, Ichiban is a character whose growth throughout this game alone sets him up to be the character that means the most to me in this series.

There's a couple narrative issues I have with the game, and some gripes about some of the politics of the game (woodaba's review highlights a couple of them, although I can't 100% agree with them), but a lot of it is overshadowed by how much I love and character for the primary crew in this game.

Game had me crying a bunch near the end. I may just be a sucker for found family shit, though.

“Once you’re at rock bottom, the only way forward is up. But the bottom doesn’t have to be all dark and gloomy. If you can stand and look up, you’ll see the light of hope there.”

I can't write a proper review to this since the moment that i'm writing this, i have finished the game so yeah. Taking a proper break from Yakuza for 8 months, it just geniuely feels worth it. A new battle system and a new protagonist, everything really goes fresh from start to end and finishing the chapter over and over and having a ton of fun by doing the sidestories just really had me with the fun of my life and on the end of my seat with endings of each one, the cast is just perfect everything goes to well to me and none of the interactions feels forced and geniuely had my laughs with the active voice.

RGG really did it for me and i can't wait to start the Judgment Duology and experience the final 2 Nagoshi games.

I enjoyed this game a lot. I finished it before I made an account here but now that I'm playing Gaiden, I realise I still have a lot of things I want to say about it.

Let's start off with the elephant in the room. Maybe it came from playing the 7 previous titles back to back within two years, but I'm quite surprised to now find myself being much more engaged with the new turn based combat in yakuza than the old action combat. For RGGs first attempt, it's a little rough around the edges, but for everything new and crazy that it does for the genre (that I have seen), it's nothing short of outstanding. It's not the most balanced, but for a casual playthrough it'll do, since in my experience, the previous entries were never balanced anyway (It was either just right or a complete cake walk based on how much side content you did). I didn't appreciate the random level spike that forces you to grind, and most "dungeons" were not interesting scenery wise. They have room to improve these things as the series goes forward.
The most commendable part of this is I don't think the combat could be nearly as enjoyable if RGG didn't decide to take a risk and fully embrace the thing that has given this series it's identity: the silly.

Yakuza has always hit that perfect blend of "serious crime game" and "wtf?". Or has it? Yes I think it always has, but we've had so many of those at this point now. What's the harm in trying something different and just going balls out on the wtf? If it doesn't work then you have a formula to fall back on, but here it does work, so so well. Classes and special moves, enemy designs, items, everything you see in the core gameplay is absolutely even more over the top ridiculous and feels like such a breath of fresh air from the same "smashing a head against the wall" heat move or the same x-x-x-y combo that we've seen previously. And the key thing that holds all these things together so well is... a complete dumbass of a protagonist.

Seeing this universe through the eyes of a Dragon Quest nerd has to be one of the most genius ways to turn this franchise on it's head. Ichiban is just a lovable dude who somehow makes his way through the modern yakuza world despite barely having the pre-requisites to do so, and you can't help but cheer him on every step of the way thanks to his charisma, no matter how weird things get.

I will admit that despite my praise for the new direction and protagonist, my biggest disappointment in this game comes from what this does for the game's main story. I don't think it's bad but just a bit... uninteresting? I won't go into detail but my favourite things about it were the bonds that Ichi makes, the journey he goes through, and the lessons he learns (all of this is great). Other than that, everything I enjoyed in other Yakuza plots felt undercooked here, and I think part of it is due to the new tone. I think most of the villains aren't memorable at all since they show up very irregularly; the pacing is really off and some chapters are very focused on new characters, feeling fairly separate from the main plot. Sometimes the party members feel like they were stuck into parts of the story for the sake of tagging along into the gameplay, in classic JRPG fashion it all comes down to the power of friendship in the end. However I understand that this is a give and take with respect to making the new direction work at all, and it is my hope that with the characters now introduced, and a wildly new setting in infinite wealth, it will feel more like the gameplay is built around the story rather than the other way around.

On to side content, this is by far the best I've seen from the series and one of this game's biggest strengths in my opinion. The substory writing is top tier and there's plenty of new minigames that don't actually feel like a waste of time thanks to the links with RPG mechanics. And the main business minigame doesn't completely suck (huge win)! It could partly be due to me taking my biggest break from the series between 6 and this, but this was the most I've enjoyed, felt rewarded and felt compelled to do as much side content as possible in the series. Not to mention that the new setting of Yokohama is insane compared to anything seen prior in terms of sheer size.

I'm not a huge fan of the music direction the series is taking with all the dubstep, EDM, etc. But I can't deny that it fits the tone of the game pretty well and I do like some of the tracks.

So yeah, the TL;DR is I think this was an incredible step forward for the franchise just by virtue of being different. It's rough in some areas (Story didn't hit me as hard as others in the series but had it's moments and overall enjoyable) but it's an impressive first try and I'm very very excited for Infinite Wealth.

"Once you’re at rock bottom, the only way forward is up. But the bottom doesn’t have to be all dark and gloomy. If you can stand and look up, you’ll see the light of hope there"

Yakuza: Like A Dragon não é apenas um Yakuza de turno, ele é um JRPG em cada característica de sua essência. Se você é fã desse gênero, aproveite essa experiencia mágica.

Uma das maiores homenagens a um gênero de videogame que já vi, a maneira que o Ichiban é e referencia um herói de RPG, a construção das dungeons, os Drinks Links (tal qual os Social Links de Persona), sistema de classes como Final Fantasy antigos, a Sujidex, e outros. Ele é tão inteligente como homenagem que ele referencia não apenas no humor, mas na própria progressão, o Ichiban vive uma jornada do herói, seus maiores inimigos controlam o poder de maneira metafórica ao gênero, e muitas outras simbologias, da qual esse jogo é rico.
Sua narrativa é TÃO RICA, apesar de sua primeira metade não ser tão engajante quanto a do 0, eu admiro a progressão e escala dos acontecimentos, tudo tem seu devido tempo de desenvolvimento, com um ótimo pacing. A politica geral de Yokohama com a "guerra fria" dos grupos que a lideram, e toda a discussão de membro na sociedade são muito boas, e PRINCIPALMENTE seu climax, a simbologia dos armários e das duas metades, eu chorei... E o que carrega muito dessa experiencia são seus personagens, incríveis tanto individualmente, com um crescimento tanto no plot principal quanto nos DL, quanto em grupo, a interação geral é tão divertida, humana, que te faz sentir falta ao terminar.
E claro, uma das gameplays mais divertidas de seu meio, visualmente maluco e único vindo das loucuras do Ichiban, e na jogabilidade misturando tantas mecânicas diferentes, a movimentação tal qual um tático, interativo tal qual um action, e características gerais antigas e atuais, como classes, golpes em conjunto, e tudo isso ainda mantendo a personalidade da franquia em cada característica. Tem um excelente balanceamento, desafiador e renovador sempre que necessário.

No fim, uma das experiencias mais valiosas que já tive com o gênero e videogame no geral, Like a Dragon está no meu coração.

This is a pretty harsh review, maybe one that is not reflective of how I felt about the game for a significant portion of its runtime, but I'm angry at how many things about this game legitimately infuriated me, and how only a few people are willing to talk about them.

There's definitely good stuff here. The cast is charismatic and likeable, the "Essence Of" animations are very funny, and the game has a lot of charm in how it interprets the conventions of classic JRPGs into the modern Yakuza universe. The soundtrack bangs harder than it has any right to, almost certainly the best of the Yakuza games I've played. Yakuza: Like a Dragon wears a shit-eating grin and an attitude you can't help be swept up by, but as the hours drag on and on, the charm wears thin, and the flaws stick out more and more, until I had grown to resent and even, to a certain extent, hate a game I once loved.

The plot is a complete mess that changes gears completely every three chapters or so, leaving me with a near-constant state of narrative and thematic whiplash, which would maybe be forgivable if this was a 30 hour game, but it's far closer to 60, 70, even up to 100 hours long. At least it's fun for that length, right? Well...

I'm a big fan of JRPGs. They're probably my favourite genre. And I love turn-based combat...when done well. When I heard that Like A Dragon would be a turn-based RPG, my excitement couldn't be contained. It felt like they were making a game I had dreamed about for years. So trust me when I say that the battle system of Like A Dragon is the worst I've experienced in a big JRPG in years. Progression is thoughtless and on-rails, with the only choice being which one of the game's jobs you want to be grinding at a specific moment. Moment to moment, the combat offers no interesting choices, almost every encounter playing out the exact same way: big AOE attacks if enemies are clustered together, or big single-target attacks if they aren't. Boss design is routinely awful, with the game almost always simply resorting to having the boss be a big tough guy with loads of health and resistances that does a fuck-ton of damage, without any other mechanics to make them feel distinct or memorable or fun. Artificial difficulty abounds in the final third, with both the Chapter 12 and Chapter 15 bosses literally having the game tell you to grind out about 10 levels before facing them, OHKO attacks that can hit your main character with little warning and give you an instant game over, wiping out all your progress through these overlong boss encounters, and dungeons as a whole containing almost no save points. Do you have a life you'd like to get back to anytime soon? Tough luck, buddy! Stick it out or do that shitty final dungeon where you run into the same room and fight the same enemies about a dozen times all over again.

And all of this would be bad enough, if not for the fact that the battle system is the vehicle by which the game delivers the truly unpleasant politics it has beneath it's surface-level charm and empathy. Through the cutscenes, the game affects a facade of being caring and empathetic towards sex workers (though that in and of itself is fairly lacking in nuance) but the former sex worker in your party, Saeko, is reduced to a caricature of feminine stereotypes when she's in battle, having a set of "female exclusive" jobs with abilities like "Sexy Pose" and weapons that are handbags. The game earnestly tries to convince you that it really cares about the plight of Japan's homeless, up until the point the game's "metal slime" equivalents are revealed: largely defenceless homeless men who you are encouraged to seek out and kill as fast as possible for an enormous EXP bonus. The initially charming and funny way battles are framed, as the overactive imagination of a central character raised on a diet of Dragon Quest, eventually left a bad taste in my mouth as Ichiban kept imagining deeply offensive caricatures of black men and trans people for him to beat up with his baseball bat.

As with the year's other big disappointment, Doom Eternal, the awful attitudes this game has beneath the surface have gone almost completely undiscussed by the wider gaming press, with only Dia Lacina's piece (which I initially thought was harsh but now reads as almost startlingly on-the-point) and a few people on discord and twitter acknowleging it. When the game asked me to grind out levels in a boring-as-fuck sewer dungeon right before the final boss, where it had me beat up trans caricatures that made me a bit sick to look at, I found myself getting really angry that I wasn't warned that this was waiting for me.

If you watched "YAKUZA: LIKE A DRAGON: FULL MOVIE 1080p 60fps" on youtube, or played the first four or five chapters exclusively, you might be forgiven for thinking that this game really is an empathetic portrayal of people on society's bottom rung rising up to reclaim their lives. But the actual game doesn't bear up to that scrutiny. It pretends to care about subaltern, and does a good job of pretending, but it doesn't. Not really. Not when it comes time to make shitty jokes at their expense.

When I loved Like A Dragon, I really loved it. There's truly moving scenes and moments, all the way up to the end. But when I hated it, I really hated it. And over time, the latter emotion won out over the former. In many ways, it is the true sequel to Persona 5. A game I was incredibly excited for, played obsessively through it's obscenely overlong length, and felt my enthusiasm sap out of me in real time over the course of it, until I watched it chicken out of landing it's themes home time and time again, until it's conservative attitudes bubbled to the surface, until my memories of the game, once positive and warm, turned cold and resentful in my hands.

The most I've been disappointed in a game in a long time.

I'm disappointed with this game. I was open to new characters in the franchise since Kiryu's journey (seemingly)
came to an end. However, aside from Ichiban who's great and actually a pretty loveable dork and a great contrast to Kiryu, the other characters are not really memorable. Like many other people, 0 was my first Yakuza game and my favorite in the franchise. I played all the other games and fell in love with the series as a result. So when they announced Yakuza 7 I was really excited but also concerned, because of the decision to change the combat to a turn-based system. The previous games were all amazing to play in its beat em up format, so I thought changing to turn-based will make the game play just like every other JRPG out there. And well..I was right.

The combat itself is your totally standard JRPG turn-based combat. Tactics and strategies are all well and good, but most JRPGs as well as LAD don't require them. Both turn-based combat and real time combat can be executed well or badly and both have advantages and disadvantages designers must consider when making their game. It really depends on how good the turn-based system is. Well designed turn based combat gives players direct access to the strategic elements of combat. For example, I love me some good SRPGs like Fire Emblem, but LAD and other JRPGs just happen to have a very bland and generic system implemented that require no strategy/tactics whatsoever.

The turn-based fighting system can be a change for the first few hours in the game, then it gets insanely slow and monotonous. What REALLY frustrated me was the grinding.
Previous Yakuza games didn't need this cheap way to make the game "last longer" while you need to go through hundreds of fights to farm exp points and level up the characters. What I usually most immerse in is the story. Unfortunately, to get through the story, you have to grind through thousands of boring encounters and repetitive fights. The turn-based combat is just not very engaging and most fights are without any challenge. The game is also very unbalanced. I just don't have the time and patience for a game that purposely wastes my time.

LAD seems slightly more campy and overacted, which is not a bad thing considering it's a completely new saga featuring new characters. It's also pretty fitting for a main character like Ichiban. For the Kiryu games, however, I prefer the balance of keeping overacted and cartoonish aspects in the substories and general side content of the game (which I always adore), while the main story remains serious and tense. So I'm curious how LAD 8 will handle this.

Overall, I'm not a huge fan of the JRPG mechanics. The story starts strong but goes off the rails very early on and gets really slow and boring. I don't think LAD is necessarily a bad game, but its not a good Yakuza game neither. I really wish this had been a spin-off instead.

It’s not peak fiction, but you can see it from here.

Yakuza: Like A Dragon — referred to as Yakuza 7 from here on — was pitched to me by a couple of friends as one of the greatest games ever made. That’s a tough sell, largely because I’m a miserable dickhead who seriously (don’t laugh!) writes about video games. Putting forth anything as being one of the best is a fucking gamble, because you’re not playing with good odds. There are a lot of works out there, and only a couple get to be the best. It tends to make it hurt worse when, almost inevitably, it’s not actually one of the best; you get your hopes up, and then the work doesn’t live up to the inflated goals you set for it, and then you’re left feeling disappointed.

Luckily, though, that’s not the case here. I don’t think Yakuza 7 is as good as I was told it was, but it’s certainly still pretty good. Great, even! There are some pacing and writing issues that drag it down, but what’s here is legitimately impressive. I don’t really care for RPGs as a genre, and I especially don’t care for games that ask for thirty to forty hours of my time, so the fact that this is still scoring as high as it is may as well be a sign of the end times. The four horsemen are a yakuza, an ex-nurse, an office worker, and a triad boss.

It’s immensely funny that, in an era where the largest development studios are playing it as safe as they possibly can, RGG Studios decided that Yakuza is no longer an action game. It’s such a ridiculous fucking idea. Some positive reception to an April Fool’s joke was all they needed to go all-in on this? What the fuck? You aren’t supposed to make games like this. And yet, they did; and yet, it works. It works really well, actually. There’s a bit of a problem that AoE skills are absurdly good compared to their single-target little brothers; obviously the single-target skills are king in boss fights, but those are pretty far and few between. Autobattling still takes a while and uses up precious items, and low-level mooks don't run away even when you've got a massive numbers advantage over them; most of the street fights are little more than time wasters, ultimately. Expect to spend the majority of the endgame running away from random encounters simply because they don't pay out in resources more than they take.

Ichiban is a wonderful character, and it's frankly no surprise that many people have latched onto him as hard as they have. Most of the cast is strong, really. I certainly wasn't expecting this to handle social issues as well as it did. It's more than a little hamfisted at times — discussions about "gray zones" and "bleaching white" tend to lean on wordplay a bit too heavily — but it's a pretty solid takedown of blind idealism. Bleach Japan's goals sound, from the outset, to be pretty reasonable. It's only once you dig in and find out what they're actually working towards that it becomes apparent that they're interested solely in enforcing laws, not in ensuring that people benefit from the law. Sure, women being forced to turn to sex work is bad. Homeless people not being able to find a safe spot to sleep is bad. Yakuza gangsters shouldn't be running the streets. The solution, though, is not to deport them, arrest them, and incite a gang war in the hopes they all kill themselves off, respectively. The gray zones are astronomically far from perfect, but blindly adhering to already-oppressive laws serves only to worsen the problem. It's rare to find a work with a positive view on criminal activity that isn't individualistic "fuck-you-I-do-what-I-want" id slop, but rather calls into question the legitimacy of the laws being broken.

I do have a problem with the writing in that it feels mean, sometimes. It happens often enough to be noticeable, and it clashes hard with a lot of what's written elsewhere. Nanba, for example, never really stops being a "homeless guy", even after he manages to get two(!!!) different houses that he stays in. The game just keeps reminding you how bad he smells, because he's homeless: he can debuff enemies because he stinks; he can breathe fire because his breath is just that potent; he can revive allies because none of them want him to give them CPR. It's weird. I don't really feel a sense of malice here, because the game is otherwise pretty fair to homeless people — certainly more than most, as low of a bar as that is. It's more like the game needs a smack upside the head and for someone to tell it that it's not being funny. I feel like it'd smarten up pretty quick.

Yakuza 7 has a bit of a habit. It’s definitely not a good habit, but I’m a little hesitant to call it a bad habit. Yakuza 7 just really loves killing off characters. Whenever a character’s arc comes to a close, they just get merked. The Geomijul goon who shakes down the bar owners? Shot to death. Arakawa? Shot to death. Hoshino? Shot to death. Ogasawara? Probably shot to death. Characters just start dropping like flies the second that they’ve served their narrative purpose. I guess I can understand it, considering that this is ultimately a game about organized crime — nobody walks away from Goodfellas wondering what was up with all of the indiscriminate murder — but it makes it a little difficult to stomach the feel-good ending that follows in the wake of such a bloodbath. Yakuza as a franchise is kind of renowned for being over the top, so this might just be a case of me going to a steakhouse and complaining that they don’t have enough vegetarian options, but I think there’s a bit too much melo in this melodrama.

Where it really came to a head for me was in the final stretch of cutscenes — as good a place as any for it to come to a head, I suppose. After going through a lengthy boss sequence, and then a second boss sequence, and then a third boss sequence, Ichiban finally manages to corner his young master. Masato pulls a gun, points it at Ichiban, and then points it at himself; his life as he knows it is over, and all of his hard work has been pulled out from under him, and he sees no reason to go on. Ichiban, who’s spent the entire game desperately trying to make this fucking stupid asshole see the light, breaks down in tears. He tells Masato that he would have done anything for him, that Masato needs to start over, that he believes Masato can turn a new leaf and be a better person. He caps it off with the line “please don’t make me watch my brother die”, which is so insanely good that I’m getting choked up again writing it out. It’s a phenomenal sequence. It’s written really well, it’s paced really well, and it works. It works better than any single moment in the preceding thirty hours.

Masato then gets stabbed by a lackey and bleeds out. Ichiban punctuates the moment with a slow-motion “NOOOOOOOOOOO!”. I roll my eyes because the game is now being stupid. Take it down a notch. You had something really good going, with the whole “choosing to be a better person after spending twenty years fucking up” angle. You don’t need to spoil it by going full soap opera, pretending like you’re gonna kill off the character after all of that. Just roll these obviously fake credits, and show us the scene where Masato is out of the hospital, and — oh, no, you actually killed him off. Jesus. Really? What a waste. I can’t really articulate why this complete bloodbath bothers me so much if not for the fact that it all feels at odds with the fact that this is supposed to be a happy ending. I guess when you’ve got a franchise that’s been running for this long without the universe being reset, it does you well to just kill off as many named characters as you can; people who play the next game won’t be asking where the old characters are if they know that they’re all turning into compost.

A severe difficulty spike right near the end also necessitates a good dose of grinding to get to a point where you can (un)comfortably clear it, which doesn't help the pacing much. You're more-or-less forced to complete the battle arena at least once, and then subsequently forced into the Kamurocho sewers to farm Invested Vagabonds. It's certainly not as egregious as some other RPGs when it comes to how much grinding you're expected to do, but it's still a hefty ask for a game that's already about thirty hours when you're going straight down the critical path. Add in the obscene amount of substories and minigames — some of which are great, some of which very much aren't — and this is a long game. I was definitely starting to lose patience with it by the end.

It's not perfect, but it's not far from it. There's a lot here to love. I think if this had ended somewhere around the halfway point, I wouldn't have a single bad thing to say. The first ten or so hours of Yakuza 7 are masterful, and the remaining minimum twenty are only pretty solid. It's easy to be a lot worse than this.

Don't piss me off. I'm close to leveling up and you look like just enough XP.

𝗔 𝗬𝗔𝗞𝗨𝗭𝗔 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗡𝗘𝗪 𝗔𝗚𝗘!

If you think about it, there really was no better choice than Ichiban Kasuga to replace Kiryu Kazuma, was there? Sure you could point to previous protagonists such as Akiyama or Saejima to take over the lead, and that’s not a bad idea by any means it’s just…the fact that it is someone like Ichiban that makes a lot of sense. The very prospect of filling in the boots of the DRAGON OF DOJIMA himself with a new protagonist is daunting from a development perspective, and downright scary from the player perspective. Which is why I’m so happy that Yakuza: Like a Dragon is as good as it is, that for every hole I can poke into this game’s mechanics or narrative, there’s a moment that makes me fall in love with it all over again.

So much of the praise I see lobbied towards this game’s narrative stems from a view that it’s scathing in its critique of the establishment, where in place of the typical JRPG “fight god” final boss, the god is the arm of the government itself. It’s certainly not a wrong view, but I think it’s misleading. Personally, I don’t find the critiques it delivers super meaningful, I think it buckles under it’s own weight in that regard and struggles in it’s representation of them but that’s really never been the focus for me. I’m not ignorant of the flaws of this game, I think the last two party members are embarrassingly underdeveloped, the turn-based combat also leaves a lot to be desired (although this replay was done with the Like a Brawler mod) and there’s also some of the traditional Yakuza plot devices which I don’t like…but despite all that I rarely find myself thinking of the negatives because the positives far outweigh them.

To me, Yakuza 7 is an innately human story, surprisingly intimate with it’s world in a way few other games in the series are. Like I said, it’s the original Yakuza, repackaged and rewritten for the new age and it’s that guiding philosophy of looking to the past while embracing the future works. It’s Kiryu and Nishiki all over again but not with the somber badass attitude of the original, Y7 is much more interested in exploring how meaningful even a single relationship can be. Even to people who have betrayed you, even to people who have hurt you, if you can find the strength within yourself to forgive them then why not, right? Nobody wants to lose people whom we hold dear, even if they do wrong there’s a strong capacity for good in everybody and Ichiban Kasuga is a man who will take those chances, who will take those odds. The Koi has become one with Dragon, and it will keep moving forward, holding the ones it loves close. It’s a rejection of Kiryu and Nishiki’s solitude, and a celebration of the bonds we hold dear.

𝗞𝗘𝗘𝗣 𝗟𝗜𝗩𝗜𝗡𝗚, 𝗜𝗖𝗛𝗜.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a flawed game. I was often frustrated with its combat and story pacing. It all too often confirmed my fears about the new direction RGG Studios wanted to take this series in. I can't exactly blame them for trying something so drastically different, as this was at the time the 8th main line Yakuza game. After all the trials and struggles of Kazuma Kiryu, it was definitly time to move on. And despite all the issues I had with Like a Dragon, they actually did the impossible once again and rose up to the challenge to deliver one of the best games I have ever played.

And it's all build on the shoulders of its new main character: Ichiban Kasuga. He is in many ways similar to the series main boy Kiryu. An orphan raised on the rough streets of Tokyo, getting taken in by an enigmatic father figure with deep ties to the Japanese underworld. And while they are so similar in upbringing and the morals they stand for, along with the color of their suits literary being inverted, RGG immediately shows you the difference between them all in their introduction. In the PS2 original and Kiwami, Kyrui's intro is quiet. We follow him as he makes understated treats for a money collection job, confident, professional. Ichiban is also introduced during a job collection Money for the Yakuza. Unlike Kyrui, he is not threatening, nor is he a professional as we see him desperately chase some low life through the streets of Kamurocho before throwing himself off a balcony screaming and flattening his target with a body slam. This is Ichiban Kasuga. He's loud, he's easily excitable and above all else: Fully dedicated to whatever job he's doing for the people he considers family. Ichiban won me over hard. Throughout all the stories funniest and also the darkest moments, and this story gets fucking dark, Ichiban is here to push you along with his borderline retarded optimism. The story came together incredibly satisfying, gave me chills on multiple occasions, and the ending almost broke me. Is the pacing all over the place ? Yes, sometimes I was tearing my hair out when it decided to move along at the pace of a melting Iceberg, but just like many games in this very series, the payoff is 100% worth it. Ichibans speech at the end especially was incredible and Kazuhiro Nakaya, his Japanese voice actor, deserves all the awards in the world for what I think is one of the best performances I have seen in basically anything. I absolutely don't want to spoil anything in case you haven't played it yet, so I'm just going to move on to the gameplay and fully recommend Yakuza Like a Dragon on the strengths of the story alone.

The gameplay was a mixed bag. I don't think they flawlessly managed to transition from action combat into a turn-based rpg. I would best describe it as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle because despite the many options you have with the new job system, it mostly comes down to choosing between three basics options. Either targeting single enemies, doing large AOI attacks or keeping on top of your parties health. Enemies only ever become a problem whenever they heavily out level you, and even that was only an issue during one particular boss fight where the game basically kicks your ass and tells you to fuck off. Go grind, you scrub. It was certainly appropriate considering who I was fighting, but it didn't make it any less annoying that the story basically was put on pause in order for me to grind in the game's boring as fuck dungeons. And that might be my biggest personal issue with Like a Dragon. The side content seems to have been a major priority during the development. Admittedly, it's the best and most fun side content, Yakuza has ever had. Every side story and mini-game you could think of his here. From an entire management sim, a full on Mario Kart clone and even the entire arcade version of Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown. It's all great and all, but be aware that you will basically be forced to do some of those side quests at some point in the story. As one of the many people who like to play Yakuza by mainlining the story and then slowly enjoying the side content in Premium Adventure, that certainly was a roadblock I had to overcome in order to have a fun.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon still was an incredible game for me, and I'm now fully onboard with whatever insanity Infinity Wealth looks to be. RGG Studios continues to be the GOAT in an industrie that decided to increasingly suck ass, and I can not recommend enough that you get into this incredible series. RGG I love you all but also fuck you for teaching me what a coin locker baby is. That scene will probably not leave me for a while, as well as the eyeball scene. That was just fucking gross, man.

"Gee, Ichi. What are we going to do this fight?"

"The same thing we do every fight, Adachi. Use our strongest AoE ad nauseam."

The transition to turn based JRPG battles is refreshing at first but becomes a drag as the game progresses. Unlike the other Yakuza games where you always adapt to a situation and feel like you've grown as a player through new combos, here you will almost always use the same couple attacks. I almost never used a status ailment outside of poison and rarely buffed my party or debuffed enemies outside of boss fights. That so many bosses resist all but one type of damage makes them exceptionally tedious, even moreso when they can one shot you. The cycle of Orbital Laser, Orbital Laser, restore MP/HP, repeat during the second last boss fight is the most egregious example of this. I feel this could largely be remedied by giving bosses more health and removing their resistances altogether so you can at least feel like you're doing something even with your party members who cannot exploit a weakness.

On the plus side the story is good but not great, though that's understandable given these are new characters without several games of backstory to fully flesh them out. Everything else is more Yakuza which is all it ever needed to be.

Once you're at rock bottom, the only place to go is up.

A few days after I lost access to the game on PS+, it went on a sale, it's like fate wanted me to finish it. This was my first venture into the Like a Dragon series, after a long time of being relatively interested on it, a result of its exponentially increasing online presence as a franchise.

Like a Dragon is a very strong story about honor, respect, and most importantly, finding your own worth in the world, with Ichiban Kasuga being at the center of it. He values those features on a person so much that it leads him to take the guilt for a crime he didnt commit, which is as much as I can say about the story without getting into implied spoilers.
This serves to kickstart an amazing RPG that balances both serious, thought provoking and very emotional moments with silly laid back side content, one moment you find yourself being wrapped into a big conspiracy and the next one you are singing on a Karaoke or participating in Go kart races.

The game plays as you would expect any turn based game to play like, if you have played one, you have played them all. However in this game part of the fun of the turn based experience comes from setting up job combos in your party that allow you to minmax the shit out of everything. On top of that, you cant just brute force your way through everything by spamming attacks, you have to rely on as many tools (buffs, debuffs, ailments) as you can use to get through the toughest encounters, which is something I appreciate a lot when its done in this genre because it helps to prevent it from getting stale.

The worst thing I could nitpick about the game overall is that from chapter 12 onwards it starts relying on increasing the level gap between you and the enemies too often, which could have used some more thought to spike the difficulty if they really wanted to, but in the end, it was for a very good reason

As an afterthought, I would like to talk about how I decided to get into it, which was actually quite funny. It all started when I saw the trailer for Infinite Wealth that reveals that Kiryu has cancer and, for some reason, hearing that this character I knew nothing about (except how popular and beloved he is) was gonna have to deal with that in the next mainline game, made me feel like it was about time I caught up before the game released so I could see his story through. While theres no way I can play an entire franchise of long ass games in one month, at least I wanted to play those who precede IW first, that being Yakuza Like a Dragon, and Gaiden (which I hope to get to play sooner than later).

And so, with you as a witness, random user in Backloggd reading this, I make it one of my 2024 goals to play through these series, because I absolutely understand what the fuss is all about now, and I wish I had sooner.

Why couldn't this have been a spinoff instead...Just to talk about the good things first, I really enjoyed exploring another new city with Yokohama. Dragon Karts, Can Quest, vocational school, and the movie theater, all being new activities, were great. Nearly every new character was good, and even Ichiban was a decent guy when he and the entire game weren't reminding you he was a gamer.

But my god, the combat is awful. Every fight just gets inflated to be at least twice as long as before. The positional combat just drags it out even more if you really want to take advantage of it. The bosses and "setpieces" are at their worst. The first dungeon plays out like every other dungeon, with hallways full of enemies that never prove a threat to you. Constant healing stations and random items litter pointless, samey-looking sewers. Then you get to the first boss, where you walk into the restaurant to find your patriarch so he can explain himself. You meet your captain, whom you took the fall for in prison for 18 years. You expect this amazing buildup to end in a satisfying fight, like every other game. Instead, you slowly select your skill and use them while hitting your little qtes just to make sure you do an extra 10 dmg! You get a little break from this occasionally to remind you of what could have been. Do you change anything up from gameplay in the lead-up to this boss? Of course not; you just keep selecting the same skill to use and watch a meter mindlessly go down. Oh, now you're out of mana, and the boss still has 15% of his health bar. Well, I guess it's time to just hit your auto attack and make sure you perfect guard their attacks even if you're in no danger. Well, that sure was a fight, but you really toughed it out and understood the extent of the boss's mechanics.

Except for 1 or being generous 2, this is how every boss fight plays out. I want to especially highlight a terrible one because it was done almost perfectly in Yakuza 6! The lead-up to Joon-gi Han and then his actual fight were such a disappointment. Y6 players will obviously know him, so seeing him pop up here already was a red flag. First off, you can tell his personality is very different and worse for it. He isn't such a charismatic, ruthless leader anymore, having been reduced to just a calm guy following orders from his leader. Moving on to the actual boss fight isn't up to par at all. I feel like new fans would be just as disappointed as I am, as the fight was so basic when we're halfway through the game at this point. Going away from these boss complaints, the random battles out in the world have worse spawn rates than Y5 and Judgment! Everyone is also forced to start the game on normal when every other entry could start on hard.

Yeah, I understand later he's not the same, but being a body double twist is awful, even by Yakuza twist standards. It really felt like they just wanted to use a great design again no matter what while also ruining what made Joon-gi Han so great in the previous game. Even the other twists in this game were a new low. Mirrorface is probably the worst twist I've seen in a series full of increasingly weird twists. Other than Ichiban pouring his heart out, everything after the Kiryu fight I wish I could forget and erase from the game. If I could, I would remove Kiryu too, but with RGG's recent summit introducing even more Kiryu games, it seems like they do not want to give him an ending.

The story otherwise was decent, with some pretty good moments in Chapter 12. That entire chapter was a huge highlight, especially when they decided to include the first boss of the game near the end. I really was not feeling the combat for most of the game until this chapter. Some jobs needed to be done better because many skills are simply useless or not transferable while stuck in a useless job. Not to mention, even if you just wanted to experiment, it is a huge hassle to always go back to one spot to change a job. There were many times when I wanted to swap things around to learn a specific skill but quickly decided to just stay with what I had.

Aside from the strange inclusion of a fake Joon-gi Han, I thought the rest of the party was a good addition. Nanba and Adachi were the best ones, with Saeko losing a lot of relevance after a few chapters. Zhao and JGH were kind of interesting since you recruit them from a different faction, but they didn't seem to have as much screentime. Of course, there is another optional character too, but the game just forgets about Eri almost entirely. Eri is never shown in any cutscene in the story and really only exists for the business minigame. Even in the story cutscenes, there is so much inconsistency with who is shown. Sometimes you just see the main trio of Adachi, Nanba, and Saeko, while other times they sprinkle in JGH and/or Zhao. Sometimes it's a combination of these five, with no rhyme or reason for any of the changes. Even in substories, you will only see Ichiban, which makes it just feel so awkward. Each of the characters also has their own bond links, where you can usually learn more about them. Each one of these stories ends the same way, with their problem being solved after an easy fight, leaving them all feeling pointless. Also, tossing in Kashiwagi and Lau Ka Long when they are both clearly dead is insane.

Very spellbound by Yakuza 7's early game. Broad shifts for the series that nicely complement the themes of the story - about the difficulty of starting over in a new place, and it never being too late to look to the future. Further complemented by the fact that you are ripped out of not only the familiar Kamurocho, but also the genre. The fact that it unflinchingly (albeit clumsily) touches on topics like homelessness in Japan, the sex work industry, and immigration mindfully... It's really fucking incredible. I won't gush, but I love the cast and their themes. I cried a lot.

The shift to turn-based was the stim injection I needed after growing weary of the mashy brawler combat of 0, K1+2. It's incredible that a combat system that has been iterated on for over a decade has been immediately blown out of the water by something that almost feels like a science experiment. A genuinely informed genre shift that means items and equipment finally matter, as well as meaning you can now operate an entire party of characters while completely maintaining the old original pacing. My vote for personal GOTY.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV1lOo-T15I

my thoughts on yakuza 7 are incredibly complicated, so as always these are just my raw thoughts. sorry if they don't make any damn sense!

yakuza 7 is a jrpg take on the yakuza/like a dragon series that wears its main inspiration on its sleeve and points out that same sleeve the whole way through. it starts out decently strong and keeps a lighthearted tone, relative to previous games at least. there's a few great moments here and there but it doesn't beat you over the head with them like yakuza 0 did. there's hints that the game is going to hit pretty hard interspersed throughout, but for the most part it plays out like early yakuza games with a found family twist to it.

however, at the end of chapter 12, at one of the most indulgent and silly and fanservicey chapters at that point, the game punches you in the gut and it catches you off guard completely, and i love it to death. chapters 12-15 are easily the most enjoyable moments in the entire franchise thus far for me. i cried as much at those 4 chapters as i did at the entirety of 0. the final cutscenes of this game are easily the most emotionally raw the series has ever been and completely sold me on ichiban as a protagonist and i couldn't be happier that kazuhiro nakaya gets a chance to shine in this series again because he blows it out of the fucking park.

a spectacular performance aside, ichiban is the perfect protagonist for this story. the found family angle and how he relies and loves his friends as opposed to kiryu who, while having allies, would constantly self sacrifice and rush in alone is done so well. this is my favorite main cast of characters in a yakuza game with great antagonists (even if they take a while to shine) and one of my favorite parties in any jrpg i've ever played

in terms of what i didn't like, the music in this game is probably the most lacking an ost in the series has felt for me. i might be alone on that but barely any music stood out to me. it's not that big of a deal to me and i can look past it for sure, but it still is a bit of a let down. the way the game handles the lower rungs of society is also a bit frustrating. homeless people are lauded as hard workers and underdogs, but enemies like the hungry hungry homeless rub me a bit wrong. the main cast being staunch defenders of sex workers is also cool, but they seem to only care if it's survival sex work. nothing too major, but things that just rubbed me the wrong way enough for me to mention.

forgot to mention when i first wrote this review (adding this 2 days after) but yokohama is probably the first new city added in the series since sotenbori that has actually been just as enjoyable to experience and explore as kamurocho. definitely not as boring as some of the yakuza 3/5 locations

all in all, yakuza: like a dragon is a promising reboot to a series i love to death, and with all of the announcements for the series lately, i couldn't have picked a better time to finally finish this entry, and i'm really excited to see what ichiban and his pals get up to next.