Currently playing through Yakuza: Like a Dragon
About midway through the pandemic, I splurged on all the Yakuza franchise games (Yakuza 0, 1–6, Like a Dragon, and both of the Judgment games). I was always a big Shenmue fan and was looking for something similar.
Up until last fall, though, I had figured that Yakuza was a very different kind of game. A decent amount of research on my part proved that errant opinion wrong. The games share a decent amount of DNA with gameplay, especially Yakuza 0 (which should be your first experience with the franchise).
Both Yakuza 0 and Shenmue are set in 1980s Japan, with a combination of beat-em-up and Quick Time Event (QTE) gameplay, each revolving around a shadowy conspiracy. The specifics are unique, but the general ideas are pretty uncanny.
The whole concept, advanced in Shenmue in late 1999, of inserting traditional Japanese drama in a game was insanely innovative at the time. Rarely could you experience the random shifts in weather and NPCs who go about their own lives in a game. Your character even has a mundane day job during the narrative. Yes, playing it today, the controls are unconscionably clunky and the graphics haven’t aged well. Yet the story merits a play-through, as it’s a challenging, but ultimately rewarding experience.
With that said, I wanted to experience something like that anew.
I had finished Danganronpa in its entirety last fall, so my entire last winter for gaming revolved around blowing through the Yakuza series. Finally, I got through Yakuza 6 a couple months ago. All of these games up to Like a Dragon were beat-em-up games at their core. Sega (the publisher) and Ryu Ga Gotoku (the developer) decided to make the new Judgment spinoff the inheritor of the beat-em-up gameplay, and then shift Yakuza to an old-school JRPG formula.
JRPGs are my favorite gaming genre (fighters are second), but this has been a challenge to get into. Decent enough game so far, but it’s extremely different from the previous bazillion titles. The new protagonists are not as appealing as Kiryu (the previous hero), Akiyama (a secondary character), or Majima (the old rival). At the beginning of the game, I felt this gleam of hope that the protagonist’s humor would carry the game, but that quickly disappeared. The gameplay has ended up feeling really repetitive as of chapter 7, without many new elements. The battle system feels very cut-and-dry.
On a random side note, I’ve played every game up until this one on Playstation 5. I generally feel more comfortable with Sony and Nintendo controls. I’ve been wanting to give my X-Box Series X some more attention, though, so I’ve been playing Like a Dragon on XSX.
The explicit downside here? Those aforementioned QTEs require a good sense of which button is which for rapid presses, and Microsoft and Nintendo systems have flipped button codes. Disorienting, eh. Nintendo Life did a whole thing a while ago about non-universal button placements on gaming controllers.
Ah well, we’ll see how this goes. Maybe I’ll rank the games in the series once I finish this one.
