DEAD SOULS DEAD SOULS DEAD SOULS DEAD SOULS

LIKE A DRAGON OF THE END

What a name, right? Fuck, dude.

Usually I think of myself as someone who is on the other side of being a Like A Dragon enjoyer than, like, The Fans. Obviously on the whole I like these games a lot and I have written extensively about them on this website. I do find though that I’m a lot more critical of the writing in the series than almost anyone I’ve seen doing any written or video content about them, so a lot of the time when I talk about Like A Dragon, a series that I on the whole quite enjoy, I often sound like a huge grouch who doesn’t want anyone to have any fun.

Not this time though. This time I find myself in a bizarro upside down world where I have to look around and be like what the fuck are you guys all talking about. This game rocks. I feel like I’ve played a different game than everyone else who’s ever talked about it. I am getting the vibe that this is one of those times where a game that’s relatively annoying to access nowadays has developed a memetic reputation that’s just been repeated over and over and over online enough that everyone just accepts its shittiness as obvious fact even though only like nine people in the world ever actually played it. And those people simply have bad taste dude.

The story of Dead Souls is the simplest and shortest of any Like A Dragon game I’ve played; someone has engineered a zombie virus and unleashed it upon Kamurocho in a strategic manner that is clearly targeting offices of yakuza families associated with the eternally losing Tojo Clan, and eventually the guy behind it kidnaps Haruka because of course this entire thing was set up to fuck with specifically Kazuma Kiryu as revenge for the events of Yakuza 2 at the hands of some no name Omi Alliance guy who has gone rogue to do zombie stuff. The game is structured in the same way as Yakuza 4, split into four chapters where you control a different guy who each have a different perspective and access to different parts of the events going on and who each have some particular gameplay or story quirk that makes them unique, capping off with a climatic finale chapter to wrap everything up. Despite this sort of repeat in structure, everything you expect to be here is here. You have substories, you have all the minigames, you have hostess stuff, they even have made a third version of boxcelios just for this. It is, in every way that you would expect, a fully featured Like A Dragon.

Which does make the ways that it’s extremely not that feel more impactful. This is everyone’s big sticking point right: the game is not a brawler, but we have twisted the LAD3 engine into something that enables us to use all our existing assets to make a third person shooter that everyone hates. But like, it’s good! I Like It. It’s fine. The big thing that seems to really stick in everyone’s craw is the controls, and it’s true that Deal Souls doesn’t remotely resemble what had even in 2011 become basically standardized third person shooter controls. There’s no cover system and your guys are not particularly maneuverable. You have to unlock a lot of basic moves with level up points, stuff like melee attacks to clear rooms from often impressively large groups of zombies, dodge rolls, snap-aiming when you look down your sights. The flip side of this, to me, is that the RPG mechanics are impressively meaningful. There aren’t THAT many things to actually upgrade and unlocking two more inventory slots or the ability to pick up heavier shit or lock onto a head for a second just by pressing L2, these are huge, meaningful upgrades, and I’m happy to have them.

And the basic controls themselves, they cover basically every situation you need! Normally you’re walking around with the typical LAD range of movement, your guy just points in the direction you point the left stick, and you control the camera with the right stick. This doesn’t offer a great degree of precision to aim with but you rarely NEED precision – as long as you’re pointing roughly in the direction of a zombie, you’ll hit them. The range you need varies based on your weapon type of course but it holds true generally speaking. You can, however, hold the L1 button to lock your guy in a forward facing position which allows you to strafe horizontally or in a circle if you need to clear a crowd or slowly track a guy, or you want to shoot with some degree of measured care or in closer quarters but you need some maneuverability. Finally holding L2 locks you in place and you enter a first person aiming down your sights or scope, and yeah, you move that cursor with the left stick and that sucks, but y’know, in my 27 hours with this game, I did get used to it in the first, like, thirty minutes. Between these three degrees of movement vs precision, I never felt ill-equipped for any situation the game threw at me, and the game does give you a lot to work around.

There are a couple of strains of regular cannon-fodder zombies (some of them are Sort Of Large, you see, and knock you over instead of grabbing you, and some of them throw molotov cocktails), but much like in a musou game, which Dead Souls does resemble in a lot of ways, you know shit’s mostly worth your time when you see a guy with a health bar. There are ten-ish Mutant zombie types, and while the majority of them are stolen UNASHAMEDLY from other games like Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil, this kind of outright stealing is wise, imo. It ain’t broke, y’know? These guys are introduced at a steady clip throughout basically the entirety of the game, and for the most part they are all basically fun to deal with and add just enough complication to any given fight to be a good surprise to see rather than an annoyance. Particularly in Kiryu’s chapter where they start popping up in novel combinations and groups of two or three among hordes of normal zombies who are affected by some of the mutants’ behaviors, juggling the specific requirements for handling each of them all at once is some of the best stuff in this game from a play perspective. They also drop a good portion of the upgrade materials for your weapons and PERSONALLY I prefer fighting these guys to doing gambling minigames which is the other source of high level materials (thankfully money flows enough that you can buy your way out of engaging with any of that shit by the time you really need those upgrades).

Where Dead Souls does have drop the ball PRETTY HARD is in the way the game structures itself. Because there’s an ongoing zombie apocalypse, the map is separated between regular Kamurocho as we’re familiar with it and the quarantine zone, which is where you’ll be making your runs any time you have to do story stuff or for basically all side content. This makes sense, of course; the problem is that the process of accessing parts of the town is hugely restrictive now. Substories still have you running back and forth all over the neighborhood, the same way they ever have, but now all of their steps are formally broken up into three or for chapters of substory. So now rather than a substory called Brother And Sister that has multiple steps, you have four substories called Brother and Sister 1, 2, 3, and 4. Additionally, at any given time there are at most only two designated points where your character can be smuggled into the quarantine zone, but usually it’s only one. Which means you start in the same part of town every time and have to walk to wherever you need to be. ON TOP OF THIS, many of Kamurocho’s normal streets are clogged with debris or crashed cars within the quarantine zone, meaning travel is much more restricted and linear than usual in these games. So every time you want to advance the story you are talking to the quest giver, then walking to the quarantine zone entrance (walking around regular Kamurocho is also more difficult because you have to walk around the walls of the QZ), loading into the QZ, walking from the spawn point to the location of the substory, usually just doing One Fight that takes Thirty Seconds, then almost always you have to walk your way out of the QZ as well and back to the quest giver on the outside, rather than just warping you out when you’re done. Because hey, you might have other shit you wanna do in here!

So that is miserable. There’s some degree to which you can consolidate substories, but because you have to dip out to start the next phase of most of these quests, you’re always going in waves even if you’re operating at your absolute most efficient. Enemy layouts and aggression do change as you advance the story, and so do the points from which you enter the QZ and sometimes shortcuts open up within it, but not enough, and because the QZ grows to consume more and more of Kamurocho as the game advances, this problem actually gets worse over time. If there’s one noose around the game’s neck, that’s it. THAT’S where the feeling of unceasing repetition comes from, should one choose to engage with it, even after you realize there’s really no reason to be shooting like 90% of the enemies outside of the story missions.

I really do think the combat itself works perfectly well, though. You have a lot of weapon types that offer distinct use cases and the game makes a good argument for unlocking a lot of weapon slots and keeping a small variety on you as the difficulty ramps up in the late game. Each character carries a pistol with infinite ammo and their Signature Weapon (a shotgun for Majima, a gatling gun for Goda WE WILL TALK ABOUT HIM YES) but you get full freedom with the rest of their loadout and even though I always leaned into the main weapon of whoever I was playing as, a balanced kit gets you out of tight spots as the encounter design becomes more complex. This is probably best exemplified in the Subterraneas, a pseudo-roguelike mode that each character unlocks in a series of cartoonish tunnels underneath the city. The layouts and enemy configurations are randomized as you explore these depths and they can throw some really wacky and evil shit at you, rooms full of exploding guys or stacked with really fucked combinations of boss monsters. It’s good shit and an excellent showcase for the versatility that the systems in this game actually offer if you care to engage with them.

Meeting the game in good faith is kind of the theme of this experience for me. I am taking a pretty holier-than-thou tone here but I went into it expecting something a little more tongue-in-cheek than we get. And it’s not NOT that. The tone is lightER than you might see in a mainline LAD game. Majima gets a whole chapter to himself that doesn’t betray the fact that he’s actually a serious an competent leader within his organization who does his best to keep every situation in check from a supporting position, but it does ALSO indulge in the memey joke shit that Majima’s character is often reduced to when he doesn’t have a significant role in a given game’s story.

Ryuji Goda is perhaps the best example of what I’m talking about here because while he’s the third character you play as I think his chapter is the first time the game really digs its teeth into the possibility of what this kind of non-canon setting can do. Akiyama and Majima kind of just give you what you might expect those guys to do in this situation but Goda really breaks down the psychology of a guy whose psychology I’m distinctly uninterested in. I do like this character in the second game but a large part of why I like him is because he is uncomplicated to the point that his inability to Play The Game makes it clear that his path to power is enabled as much if not moreso by his prestigious name than his actual ability. Goda is interesting in Yakuza 2 because of the way the world warps around him, and when his personhood becomes the focus of the story is my least favorite shit in that plot.

Here, though, we don’t get very much of what we might expect to dig into about Goda. It’s not explained at all how he lived through the events of Yakuza 2, and an explanation for how he came to live the life he lives now, that of an apprentice to a takoyaki stand owner, happens in a completely offhand, undetailed way, after his own chapter even, to help explain why he knows how to get a big cool gun for Kiryu. The Goda we’re presented with in Dead Souls is an explicit, conscious mirror to Kiryu in almost every way. He’s a legendary guy with a huge reputation in his family, even years after he left the game, and he IS out, very firmly. He has a humble life that he earnestly loves and no one he associates with understands. He’s a gruff guy who isn’t portrayed as perfectly wise or anything but HAS realized that the violence and greed that dominated his life were childish and destructive drivers, and he tries to gently steer others away from paths he’s been down even if he still enjoys indulging himself under the right circumstances. And, also like Kiryu, The Life won’t let him be happy, and won’t let him be alone. The villain of the game is one of his former subordinates, hell-bent on getting revenge on the Tojo Clan, whom Goda doesn’t care about, and on Kiryu, whom Goda admires, partially on behalf of Goda himself, and refuses to hear Goda when he says this revenge is meaningless. The Tojo clan assumes Goda is in on this plot, even if they are decimated too quickly to really act on their suspicions. No one will just let him live his life. Even the man who saved his life and equipped him with his prosthetic arm made sure that arm can turn into a giant cartoonish gatling gun, one which he had never once used before the zombie shit started up. He makes takoyaki.

And this stuff is good but there’s more to him. Goda is much like Tanimura in Yakuza 4 where his character has depths to plumb but the game also realizes it forgot to put the plot in the first two chapters so most of his story is taken up by that stuff instead of shit that details the life of this new character, so all his most interesting shit is in his substories. In one of them he’s in the QZ and notices his master’s takoyaki pan with food being cooked badly in it, unattended. When he investigates a group of teenagers attempt to rob him. He doesn’t treat them compassionately but he doesn’t take them seriously as threats either, mostly just trying to get info about where his boss might be, but when zombies show up everyone scatters. When he runs into the group’s leader later the boy explains to him that they’d been stuck in the QZ since the beginning of the outbreak and he’d hidden himself in the ruins of the takoyaki stand. The food that was cooking wasn’t a trap, it was a poor attempt at making the first meal any of them would eat since the outbreak, and they only jumped him out of desperation. Goda offers to make them food because, after all, that’s his job, and you get a genuinely touching scene out of this where these teenaged boys start crying at being offered comfort and compassion and the space to not put up walls in an impossible situation, and Goda clearly takes enormous pleasure in being able to offer nourishment and comfort to people who need it. He’s a genuinely changed guy and this moment sells it better than anything else in the game, where he does still have to be a posturing badass a lot of the time, even if he’s a nice one now.

In another substory he meets a woman who looks startlingly like his sister Kaoru, a major character from Yakuza 2, one who is looking for her missing brother. Over the course of a long series of events in which they bond over their similar family situations growing up, Goda mostly unthinkingly shows this woman, and eventually also her brother, an enormous, life-changing amount of generosity and kindness. When everything is resolved and they part ways, the woman tells Goda that he acted like a brother to her in the brief time they knew each other. Goda actually doesn’t take this to heart - he barely knows his sister; they met briefly and in a horrible situation. He doesn’t think of himself in familial terms, and he thinks it’s strange and ridiculous for this woman to acknowledge compassion that he doesn’t realize he’s shown in remarkable quality. All he can do is hope his own sister is well. There’s a complex character to this guy that is honestly unnecessary and unexpected, but entirely welcome! I didn’t go into the funny zombie LAD game thinking I would come out a Ryuji Goda fan but they really went the extra mile to honor the fact that like, hey, we’re doing all the fanservice shit in this one, we might as well go balls out if this is the last we see of this guy. It’s an incredible send off for a fan favorite. And I mean like, he does also have a funny gatling gun arm. That’s here too.

And that’s what I mean too when I say that this is a full-featured Like A Dragon, they didn’t half-ass anything about it. There’s all time good LAD shit in this game. Like, when Kiryu arrives at Kamurocho things are fully dire, the neighborhood is almost completely overrun, and he breaks into the quarantine zone and he’s super mad and he’s being swarmed by zombies...and the game suddenly, for the first time in 20 hours, is making you do regular ass Yakuza hand to hand combat. It even puts little button prompts on the screen to remind you how to do it. Because of course Kiryu didn’t bring a fuckin gun, he doesn’t own a gun, why would he even think to do that. And the game does make you just punch and kick like twenty zombies, in a sequence that made me really appreciate how impressive it is that they got all this going using the Yakuza 3 tech. Fighting more than like five guys at a time in classic yakuza fashion feels really cool. So eventually Kiryu is rescued by the game’s main original supporting character, played by and modeled after Chiaki Kuriyama who is WAY too famous to be Kiryu’s sexy JSDF sidekick for two hours in a Yakuza SPINOFF game but sure, and she explains zombies to him and that you gotta shoot them. But he STILL refuses a gun, he’s like NO these are the people of Kamurocho there must be another way. It’s sick. It’s not until he meets a guy and the guy turns into a zombie right in front of him and you get into a fight AGAIN and the game makes you deplete this zombie’s health bar like eight times before Kiryu’s new friend is like come on man this is inhuman and finally Kiryu does it. But afterwards he respectfully closes his eyes and is very solemn about it. Despite everything this is not a SUPER solemn game but it’s Kiryu at his most dour in the series, partially because Haruka is in direct danger and partially because Kamurocho means to much to him and it kills him to see it and its people so thoroughly destroyed.

And that’s the ACTUAL best part of Dead Souls. The atmosphere it strikes is uniquely harrowing. When the outbreak starts nobody on the outside knows what’s happening. The government doesn’t let any information through, they only erect these gigantic walls between buildings and post soldiers up at them to hem the plague in with absolutely no plan for real containment or treatment. If people on the outside are sick it’s implied they’re quietly executed. There are groups of people gathered around a lot of these walls in the early chapters of the game, demanding answers, wondering if their coworkers or loved ones are trapped, are safe, wondering if work and life are supposed to continue normally if their jobs or homes are on the inside and they’re out here. But just as much there are people being normal. Yakuza series npcs are spawning and walking around like always. The stores are all open. The anxious ambient chatter is matched by the usual shit you hear in these games, people talking about fads and food and life in the district. And after every major story event the quarantine zone grows. First it’s just Tenkaichi Street and the nearby alleyway but very quickly Theater Square is just gone. These massive walls move, or new ones are in place. And still people have to live their lives. It’s clear some people are able to smuggle themselves in and out. Information is spreading among the people of Kamurocho. And the stores are all open, and the people are walking around, talking about what bar they’re going to go to tonight. And tomorrow Millennium Tower is gone. And Shichifuku Street. At one point you enter a building outside of the QZ in the Champion District, watch a cutscene, and when you leave you’re in the QZ now. It expanded while you were inside. Your character is, of course, empowered to leave but the people who live there aren’t, and getting out in this instance takes you across the paths of the employees at Shellac and a lot of people who live in Little Asia who have no choice but to try to figure it out now that they’re trapped with the zombies. And as the normal spaces shrink and the QZ continues to grow the anxious chatter does begin to outweigh the normal stuff, and cops and soldiers do begin to post up in bigger numbers, and the vibe becomes more and more stressed. But life is still going until the very second the plague envelopes an area.

I think we’re a little past that time where we’re all writing shit about Stuff That’s Quaint Now That We’ve All Done Covid so forgive me but I read the Eurogamer review for this game and one of the reviewer’s huge sticking points about the game, which he liked more than most critics did, was that he found this disconnect between the apocalyptic quarantine zone and the completely functioning everyday life right outside the walls completely unbelievable, that even in a series with as much tonal flexibility as Like A Dragon, that was too much for his suspension of disbelief. And all I can think in 2023 is how this is one of the truest feeling depictions of pandemic life I’ve seen in fiction now. Life goes on, no matter how ill advised or illogical or stupid it seems. Are the people ignorant, is the government incompetent, is everyone willing this danger upon themselves when they could be preventing large portions of it? Yeah man I don’t know! This thing that feels like almost certainly a combination of tech limitations and excuses to have all the Yakuza Minigame stuff still be available all the time was really affecting to me twelve years later. It’s a shame this game is trapped on the PS3.

Four thousand words later I feel like I could probably tighten it up, maybe especially considering that Dead Souls isn’t really ABOUT anything? Like I didn’t even mention that the OTHER main villain, the evil scientist who actually invents the zombie plague is just like “hoo hoo hoo being alive sucks so I made a virus that makes you cum so much that you turn into a zombie and want to spread your ecstasy to everyone else” and kiryu is just like “no, living is hard but being a cum zombie is a coward’s way out and persevering is the cool thing to do” but this is not like really a theme this is just a thing two people say at the end of a game that is otherwise not really doing anything with these ideas. I didn’t mention the boss fights at all? There are a lot of them and they’re all massive mutant monster guys like you see in Resident Evil or House of the Dead and almost all of them are really cool! I didn’t mention that this game has the hot goth doctor lady from Persona 5 with a tragic backstory who has you do tests for her in exchange for rewards but like many years before P5 did that and they even have very similar designs.

But almost nobody is going to actually play this game right so I wanted to really soak in this stuff. There are so many unfairly maligned games out there that are completely easily accessible that nobody ever wants to touch. Dead Souls has SO much going for it that even when it took a long time to show me its best writing, or the gameplay was frustrating me, or I was frustrating myself by doing all the substories which I don’t really recommend they’re mostly just okay in this one, I never considered stopping. And it did eventually reward me with some of my favorite stuff in the series. If I had to rank all the Like I Dragons I’ve played right this second it wouldn’t be at the bottom, I’ll say that. I’ve absolutely spent twenty bucks on worse games.

At the end of the day, when you finish a mission you get a results screen of Kazuma Kiryu holding a giant anti-personnel rifle while you get ranked on an S to D or E scale (idk how low it goes I’m too good at video games) for your mission performance based on factors such as accuracy and how many heat moves you used and how many zombies you headshotted and TO ME, that is the essence of video games. It does not get more Video Games than that.