This video is sponsored by Skillshare. The first 1000 people who click the link in the description
will get a free trial of Skillshare Premium. As the story of Yakuza: Like a Dragon kicked
into full swing and the open world of Yokohama presented its relatively grey expanse to me,
I did what I would have done in any other Yakuza game. Matching new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga’s
headstrong personality, I charged through the city’s numerous backstreets with reckless abandon
looking for the action… and in a series of events that felt completely alien to me given how Team
Dragon games have always exemplified the pneumatic drill-like strength of your character’s fists,
one of my earliest battles in the game saw me fighting some lowly drones that
proceeded to pummel me into the ground. Waking up with half of what little money
I had now gone, I realised that the numbers above their heads should have said it all—they
were higher level than me; this was an area the game had decided I wasn’t meant to be
in. Like a Dragon was gating off vast swathes of its open world based on character level,
on numbers—this is a system I usually hate in other open world RPGs and it’s one of many ways
in which the rather seismic shift in the Yakuza framework from brawler to full on turn-based JRPG
makes itself apparent. I usually bounce off this kind of game pretty quickly for exactly these
kinds of design decisions—alongside combat that relies on dice rolls as much as your own skill,
the need to take time away from the main narrative and interesting side quests to grind the numbers
governing it all. But here… I couldn’t help but feel like this situation made total sense.
See, the streets of Kamurocho are sleazy and alive with the possibility that trouble might
be waiting around the next corner, but it’s complemented by the fact that you’ve almost
always been Kiryu Kazuma—the Dragon of Dojima. These are your streets, I as a player have seen
this district evolve over the decades spanning the Yakuza and Judgment timeline—I am intimately
familiar with the way this works. Kiryu comes across punks, Kiryu smashes punks
with bicycle. All is right with the world. On the other hand, Kasuga might be similar to
Kiryu in some ways (namely his unwavering and eminently loveable sense of loyalty to those
around him as well as his similarly chiselled physique) but the context of it his situation
and the way he’s forced to confront it is fairly different from the series’ mainstay. It’s not
just Yokohama that’s new to Kasuga, he’s not just out of place, he’s out of time. He’s emerged from
spending half his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, ready to prostrate himself
anew at the feet of the man who put him there as if nothing happened, only to find that the city
that raised him, the people who took him in as an child have all moved on and what’s more, he’s
about to fall foul of seemingly further betrayal at the hands of his most cherished father figure.
Kasuga has just endured the most severe case of cultural and physical whiplash it’s possible to
experience—his world has been completely flipped upside down. He’s in an area he’s unfamiliar with,
robbed of everything in a city whose vastness absolutely dwarfs Kamurocho,
whose criminal hierarchies and customs are completely different, and he’s kicking about
town with a homeless drunk guy he doesn’t know particularly well at this stage. Of
course he’s gonna get his arse handed to him. And with that, for the first time in a Yakuza
game outside of a Mr Shakedown-style gimmick, the very streets of Yokohama feel legitimately,
mechanically dangerous in a way that other Yakuza settings simply don’t. You have to actually watch
yourself and strategically avoid brawls you’re not ready for because in this unfamiliar world,
those goons you’re used to making short work of, suddenly have the potential to do some
serious damage, at least initially. Those numbers above your enemy’s heads aren’t arbitrary—they
represent the very real gulf between their knowledge of these streets vs your own.
And it’s this reason why I’ve found it way harder to write about this game than I thought
it would be. By all accounts I shouldn’t love this game as much as I do and yet, building
upon the developer’s penchant for mechanical storytelling as seen so prominently in Judgment,
here we have just one component of Like a Dragon’s densely layered JRPG framework already telling us
so much about this character and the world he finds himself in—a kind of narrative and
thematic reinforcement consistent with every change Like a Dragon brings to the Yakuza table.
Contrary to what you might think given the game’s origins as a literal April Fools joke,
far from being slapped on for a laugh, the JRPG systems here are intrinsic to what this game is
about—not just mechanical but baked into the very story unfolding before you. To a certain
extent, Like a Dragon is a JRPG about JRPGs. Indeed, the question of “what would happen if
you tried to apply the principles of the genre to the grim and complicated realities of real
life” is the thematic kernel here. I mean, it’s certainly the main source of the game’s perfectly
executed comedy, as our main character—quick to remind us at every turn of how big a fan he is
of the Dragon Quest series—relates every part of his crew’s journey through the lens of the
genre’s tropes like grinding and levelling up. Our team of gallant warriors ready to take down
a vile evil… consists of the aforementioned homeless drunk dude, an over-the-hill former
police officer and a bar manager. Kasuga’s… hallucinations of the world (?) and grand,
hilarious summon animations provide the payoff that you’re not exactly raining down elemental
hell upon ghoulish monsters; rather, you’re realising that the weakness of some guy on the
street amounts to drinking too much and getting smacked in the face with a bat—whodathunkit.
But even beyond this comedic application, the affection Kasuga holds for these JRPGs of old,
with their representations of heroism and stepping up against mighty foes,
good triumphing over evil and all that… it all forms the critical component of
his character—contextualising his sense of duty and headstrong demeanour as that
of the archetypical Hero standing up for what’s right, whatever the cost. It’s what drives him,
what allows him to rile up his friends to join him on his quest to find out the reasons behind
his apparent and sudden betrayal in a labyrinthine plot that goes all the way to the top—said winding
plot being one of the few aspects of Like a Dragon you could argue hasn’t changed all that much.
See, the games of Team Dragon often revolve around a single mystery or antagonist but
the common thread between them is that the issues facing these characters are
often far more complicated than bringing down a single villain—in many cases, they’re rooted
in certain aspects of society that you get the feeling the writers aren’t particularly fond of.
You see this in 3 as Kiryu tries his best to bring up the kids in his care to be as close
to objectively good as possible, to care for others and avoid making the mistakes Kiryu made
in his past… all to enter a society that has already deemed them criminals and thugs purely
based on the fact they don’t have parents. You even find it in Judgment, with Yagami’s
struggle between a lawyer’s job to win a case and a detective’s job to find the truth serving
as a pointed critique of the Japanese legal system. This series might be over-the-top and
wacky on its surface, but it always has something to say about the functions of the larger society.
But where Like a Dragon sets itself apart from its predecessors, where its shift in genre allows
the game to drill down more deeply on this kind of commentary, is that this isn’t a game about taking
on everyone with your lone fists. As the need to fight as a party exemplifies, this is a game
about coming to terms with and embracing your own imperfections—that realisation that you might not
be able to solve all of these problems yourself. More broadly it’s about truly understanding
who a person really is rather than defining them simply by their current circumstances;
how those who hypocritically proclaim moral superiority over society’s underclasses
often contribute themselves to the corrupt systems that force people into those circumstances to
begin with, as smug self-importance trumps any desire for actual change.
It’s what makes Kasuga’s proclamations of the importance of heroism so interesting because
his ideas of that concept aren’t actually rooted in the kind of good vs evil black and
white morality the antagonists of this game so sanctimoniously preach. Instead, Kasuga’s
self-awareness of his own shortcomings speaks to the complextities lying within every human being.
By allowing himself to really connect with those around him, over time he unravels
the rich stories of these individuals; and as a consequence you as a player discover their skills
and attributes that complement Kasuga’s strengths and fill in the blanks of his
weaknesses in a very direct way—through battle. And look, I personally am never going to be able
to see the need to grind out levels as anything other than a frustating pace-killer narratively,
but this is about as close as I’ve come to viewing its potential as a kind of
relationship building exercise—the process of discovering how these disparate personalities
and skillsets can click with one another is so central to the game’s themes and combat,
that the rare occasion you’re forced to battle with even one less party member feels like being
told to juggle with both hands behind your back. And instead of becoming some divisive asshole
hellbent on actually helping no one, he comes to the conclusion that no matter who a person
is or where they are in life, there is no exception in which they shouldn’t be treated
with extreme compassion and forgiveness. It’s Kasuga’s dedication to this view that remains so
charmingly straightforward—it places him and his crew as the underdogs you truly root for.
But all of this also frames Kasuga and crew’s biggest enemy as one of alarming enormity. There’s
a clear enough path towards defeating the one big bad guy or solving the one mystery—how the hell
do you combat the intricate web of societal systems—comprising the delicate interplay
of parliament, criminal factions and public perception—designed to keep people in their place?
Kasuga’s positivity is abundant, but will it secure him and his homeless pal a job
when to do so requires a fixed address? Will it convince the pearl-clutching weirdos that
sometimes the grey area of the law is where people need to exist when society has thrown
them to the wayside? Will it put food in kids’ mouths when they end up the true victims of such
short-sighted and self-important moralising? You know, it’s funny and heartwarming to see these
characters embrace Kasuga’s view of the world but perhaps the reason they tag along with him
is because, well, what have they got left to lose? You could argue that, in true JRPG fashion,
all of this is the god that must be killed here. It’s this struggle, this dissonance between the
plainness of how Kasuga believes the world should work and the unfathomable bureaucracy of reality
that leads to moments of such gutwrenching tension as the enemies Kasuga goes up against seem too
amorphous, too entrenched in a corrupt system to combat and change… but subsequently it leads to
moments of true triumph when his foolhardiness refuses to let him back down in the face of all
that—that even if he falls against these foes, he’ll have done so with the unwavering belief in
the idea that in a world so dominated by cruel, selfish indifference masquerading as concern,
just being good, forgiving and sticking by those close to him—refusing to boil a person’s entire
being down to just one fleeting aspect of their life—can be enough to overcome the completely wild
hurdles in his way. And in an age where people are so depressingly quick and delighted to see
the absolute worst in each another, truly Kasuga is the hero we all need right now.
You know, I don’t think that Like a Dragon is somehow a perfect video game—it certainly falls
prey to some of the more plodding frustrations I find so… anticlimactic in more traditional JRPGs,
where massive action set-pieces devolve into absurd scenarios with characters standing around
aimlessly waiting to be hit, especially when the combat in prior titles was so immediate and
ferocious. But I ask—what series is more equipped to lean into that kind of absurdity than Yakuza?
Its systems, however frustrating they may be at times, represent the closest marriage between
mechanics and themes the Yakuza series has seen up to this point. This approach, this complete
vision realised by the developers yields such such pulse-pounding, hilarious, tense and heartwarming
character moments across its many, many hours of playtime that makes me think, despite my
negative biases towards this genre, that there was really no other way to tell this incredible story.
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