Yakuza: Like a Dragon
Where to start with this one? I’ve never played a Yakuza game before, but when I saw they were coming out with a JRPG it piqued my interest. I played Like a Dragon on my Playstation 5 and it does just about everything right. This game has easily proven that you don’t need fantasy and a final boss that is a god to have a good JRPG.
You are Ichiban Kasuga, born in a whore house, raised in a whore house, current Yakuza, and lover of Dragon Quest. After taking the fall for a fellow Yakuza member of your “family” that murdered someone, you spend 19 years in prison. After you’re out you try to approach the patriarch, only to be turned away. This is where the story really begins. You guide Ichiban in an adventure to figure out the truth behind why you were in prison, and why your Yakuza family won’t take you back. It’s very refreshing to play a turn based game with a more modern story, and a cast of mature characters.
You spend most of the game in Isezaki Ijincho, which is heavily based off Isezakichō in Yokohama, Japan. It’s a community under the control of three opposing, yet balance, crime syndicates. A Yakuza Family, a Chinese Mafia, and a Korean Gang. Things are mostly peaceful, but that changes, and sets our party down a series of events that entangles itself in Ichigo’s goal of finding out why his patriarch won’t have anything to do with him.
The writing is top notch, and the voice acting is fantastic. The actors really nail the lines, mood, and humor of the writing. The music hit hard, and in the final credit roll I noticed even my girlfriend was bobbing back and forth. Like a Dragon feels like an interactive movie, with large cutscenes filled with emotion and drama that feel like something out of a A-list movie. Right down to the characters mouths properly mouthing the words.
There are a ton of mini games here. Tons of SEGA arcade games like Virtua Fighter. A crane/claw game. There’s shogi, which I was absolute trash at. A fun game where you rode bikes to collect cans. A game that was almost as good as Mario Kart, aptly named Dragon Kart. Slots, cards, darts, karoake, and more! My favorite mini game was this management mini game where you took a dying sweets store and turned into a huge conglomerate, allowing you to easily accrue funds to use in the main game. I spent 10 hours straight playing it because it was so addicting to reach the #1 position in the Ijincho market.
Battles consisted of taking down a whole bunch of different enemies all with their own weaknesses. There were multiple physical attack types, and multiple elemental attack types, that enemies could either resist or be weak to. After a couple chapters, Ichiban’s wild imagination begins to turn your allies and the enemies into elaborate visions of other things. It really is a sight to behold.
There is one thing I feel Like a Dragon really let me down on, and that’s the job system. A couple things fell short. First, their weren’t many jobs that were actually more useful than a characters base job. A lot of them felt like carbon copies of each other. The one (two if you manage to find the optional recruitable character) female in the party has a horrible selection of jobs, and only one is even useful, because it’s going to turn her into your main healer. Second, you could only change your job at one building in Ijincho, and you couldn’t do it on the fly. I feel they should have either made characters static classes, or made the classes more unique. That’s my only complaint.
Overall Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a masterpiece and really needs to be played by any JRPG fan. It’s definitely given me an itch to go play the rest of the series, just to get more of the writing, story telling, world building and music.
