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.