I believed Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii would burn me out on the Like a Dragon collection, however now I do know that is by no means going to occur

After I have a look at the trajectory of the Yakuza collection over the past decade I really feel dizzy. Yakuza 0 launched 10 years in the past and is arguably the sport that catapulted the collection from cult consciousness to mainstream success within the west. The next 12 months, in 2016, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio launched Yakuza 6, which was meant to capstone the lengthy and elaborate Kazuma Kiryu saga, thus making room for a collection refresh. And boy did the collection get a refresh, even when RGG refuses to let go of Kiryu.

After a comparatively quiet 2017 (we acquired Yakuza Kiwami 2), the good Judgment made its debut in 2018, which was meant to maintain us firm till the massive seventh Yakuza instalment arrived in 2020. Yakuza: Like a Dragon famously deserted the collection’ crisp beat ’em up combating with JRPG-inspired turn-based fight, and changed the steely-but-gentle Kiryu with starry-eyed pet canine Ichiban Kasuga.

Much more has occurred since then. Like a Dragon has had a sequel within the type of Infinite Wealth. We have additionally had a Judgment sequel, and a Like a Dragon: Ishin! remake. For tragics who used to import these video games from Japan close to the start of the century, this embarrassment of riches is welcome and, to a level, enduringly inexplicable. What’s much more stunning is that Yakuza hasn’t sanded away its quirks for the sake of worldwide success. On the contrary: it is grow to be quirkier.

Yakuza 7’s turn-based fight was revealed as an April Fools joke. Everybody is aware of RGG are cheerful lunatics, however when this “joke” turned out to be true it was an actual assertion of intent from the studio, whereas additionally giving many diehards a sound cause to desert the collection. It was an enormous shift within the collection’ DNA, in any case, the likes of which few—or no—different studios would dare try. Even should you weren’t tremendous onboard with the zany melodrama of its meandering plots, you may not less than play Yakuza video games as combating video games.

Anyway, JRPG Yakuza (or these days, Like a Dragon) has confirmed an inexplicable success, and the combating Yakuza video games are actually offshoots: see Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Identify, and now, um, let me examine my notes: Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. It takes collection favorite Goro Majima—a zany, charismatic however totally deadly Yakuza—and turns him right into a pirate. As per the secret, you see.

I used to be fairly sceptical of Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Like most Yakuza fans, I really like Majima, and have lengthy wished him to have his personal sport. However Majima-as-pirate appeared to be a step too far within the zany route for RGG. In any case, as humorous and weird as Yakuza video games may be, these qualities often complement the straightfaced melodrama of their most important tales. Keep in mind, this collection was set nearly fully within the streets of a small pocket of Tokyo, and was just about fully involved with the infinite bickering and politicking of Yakuza households. These days they’re hardly in regards to the Japanese felony underworld in any respect.

Which is okay, however pirates? To make use of an analogy: When a child does one thing foolish that is humorous, and other people giggle at them, the child will do it once more, however extra intensely. This often retains going till the child utterly over-eggs the entire thing, the spectators get aggravated, and the child in some way hurts themself. That is near what I imagined occurring to RGG after Pirate Yakuza was introduced. That is too silly, gang. You are veering too zany. You are going to harm yourselves.

However Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is one other goddamned masterpiece, I am blissful to say. Throughout the first hour I had overwhelmed the shit out of a bunch of dumb pirate LARPers, sang in an elaborate musical-inspired jaunt aboard my ship, and made associates with each a rooster and a cat. In a while, I wander the streets of Honolulu shouting “aloha!” at individuals, which provides them to my associates record on an in-game social media app. I meet an embittered mascot who needs me to gather playing cards, for some cause. We’re again.

You recognize the drill by now: it takes Pirate Yakuza about 10 hours to get going. The story is drip fed amid numerous invites to partake in its aspect content material: need to play a batting sport with explosives? How a couple of spot of mahjong? Or karting? Why not recruit a pack of weirdos to assist in your pirate ship? And so on and many others. Sensible stuff, clearly.

Having performed each single mainline Yakuza sport, I can confidently say that Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is not doing a lot that is new. Positive, there’s crusing, however it’s arcade crusing, and anyway, I am talking broadly: each Yakuza sport brings some new characteristic to the desk, some new novelty, however the broader format has not modified a lot, save the change to turn-based fight in 7. Elsewhere, the Yakuza collection continues to get away with the flagrant re-use of maps, mini-games and places, which is often sufficient to get any studio drawn-and-quartered on Reddit.

However Yakuza is (largely) proof against this sort of criticism. It coasts alongside as a result of it is an inherently charming collection with a a lot stronger sense of what it’s than every other residing videogame collection. In 2025, in every single place you look, blockbuster video games are having existential crises attempting to adapt to the ephemeral tastes of an indeterminate “mass viewers”. Not RGG: they’ve simply launched a 30-hour joke sport a couple of Yakuza roaming the Pacific Ocean as an amnesiac pirate, with a child tiger as a companion, and a rhythm-based cooking mini-game, they usually’re charging $60 for it, and persons are shopping for it.

It is true that RGG advantages from working with a 20-year-old collection, and has carved out a manufacturing routine that works effectively for them. However that solely explains how the studio manages to dole these video games out at such a brisk tempo. It would not clarify why all of them are so reliably partaking. The Yakuza video games remind me of Twin Peaks greater than something: there is a deliberate meshing collectively of tones that will usually be at odds. This fixed tonal battle contributes to an identification and an environment that’s close to ineffable. In Yakuza’s case, the most important components appear derived from TV melodrama, motion film machismo and surrealist comedy, however there’s additionally gameshow components, Nineties motion cartoons, and now… musicals. All of this mixed makes Like a Dragon really feel like a really wild experiment.

I’ll have characterised Pirate Yakuza as an offshoot earlier, however in actuality it isn’t, and that is probably the most superb factor. Whereas earlier “offshoots”—the zombie-slaughtering Lifeless Souls, the nineteenth century-based Ishin—had been completely separate from the principle Yakuza video games, Pirate Yakuza is emphatically not. Its story very clearly intersects with the mainline video games, disallowing the chance that this bizarre ‘n’ experimental pirate sport—so past the scope of feasibility—isn’t canon. No, that is what you now have to just accept as Like a Dragon canon, people: it is whole bullshit, you by no means noticed it coming, and 10 years in the past we’d have written it off as a joke. And [psych!] that is why it is good.