When Edge reviewed the English version of Yakuza in October 2006, it called it “the first truly Sega Sega game to appear on a home console since Outrun 2”, a game “with a powerful story to tell and vibrant and amusing ideas to back it up — a game with a heart”. Its hero, Kazuma Kiryu, is a gangster who slams thugs’ faces into walls in one scene and, in the next, lets a young girl, Haruka, tag along to cheer him on and pick his next game at the casino. The series built on that mix for twenty years: a melodramatic crime story, brutal street fights, and a city full of side stories and things to do. In Japan it is Ryu Ga Gotoku, “like a dragon”, and since 2022 that has been its name in the West too.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Sega; the team became Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio.
- Creator: Toshihiro Nagoshi.
- First game: Ryu Ga Gotoku, PlayStation 2, Japan, end of 2005; Yakuza in the West, 2006.
- Heroes: Kazuma Kiryu, the “Dragon of Dojima”; from Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2020), Ichiban Kasuga.
- Setting: Kamurocho, a fictional Tokyo entertainment district; Yakuza: Like a Dragon moved the main story to Yokohama.
- Combat: a street brawler, until Yakuza: Like a Dragon switched to turn-based battles.
Ryu Ga Gotoku
Nagoshi had made his name with arcade racing games and Super Monkey Ball. His crime drama came out in Japan for the PlayStation 2 at the end of 2005, and Edge reviewed an import copy in February 2006. Kiryu returns to “a world he knows only too well”, and the game follows him through the streets, clubs and back rooms of Kamurocho. Edge counted some 70 side events, “only around half of which” a player would blunder into without looking for them, and noted that the story had been “penned by a novelist, voiced by professional actors”. The reviewer also found the game full of its creator. Details such as “an impromptu drinking contest, Kazuma’s snakeskin shoes” made him wonder whether Nagoshi’s column in Edge “was really a design diary”; the Toshihiro Nagoshi entry tells that story.
Sega released it in English as Yakuza in 2006, with an English voice cast. Edge’s review set it beside Sega’s Shenmue: both had open city streets full of people, a plot told in long cut-scenes and fights against crowds, but Yakuza was what Shenmue might have been if it had “stopped aiming to become the eighth wonder of the world, and instead had to condense itself into a proper videogame”. Fights were “brutal and uncomplicated — it thuds, it crunches”: “Faces get slammed into walls and stomped, and prone bodies have furniture crashed into them.” Kiryu could be upgraded in special moves, new techniques and health. The reviewer liked the hunt for locker keys hidden around the city, each opening a numbered locker, because “there’s some true curiosity as to what exactly your next find will be”. The camera and the lock-on in boss fights were the main complaints.
The series
Sequels followed on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, with Nagoshi credited as general director of Yakuza 3, 4 and 5 and executive director of Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6. Kamurocho stayed at the centre of them, and later games let players watch it change. Yakuza 0 (2015), a prequel, is set in the bubble-economy Japan of the 1980s, with playable arcade machines “from Sega’s glory days”, as Wireframe put it, and its plot turns on a small, empty plot of land in Kamurocho which, by the time of the first game, has become the Millennium Tower. Kiryu spends part of the game running a property business.
In the West the series stayed a cult until Yakuza 0. It came out in English in January 2017, and Wikipedia’s account of the game credits it with the series’ rise in popularity outside Japan. By 2022 Wireframe was calling the franchise’s “sudden breakout popularity in the west” one of Sega’s biggest successes of recent years.
The studio also made spin-offs, among them Judgment (2019), a detective story set in Kamurocho with a disgraced lawyer as its hero. Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2020) went further: a new hero, Ichiban Kasuga, and turn-based battles of the kind found in Japanese role-playing games, with those games’ conventions played out in a modern Japanese city, Yokohama. Wireframe gave it 90%. In 2022 Sega dropped the Yakuza name in the West: starting with Like a Dragon: Ishin!, “everything Yakuza-related will be named Like a Dragon”, a closer translation of the Japanese title. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth followed in 2024.
Nagoshi left Sega in 2021, and Masayoshi Yokoyama became head of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio.
Sources
- Edge issue 159, February 2006, pp. 32–33: Ryu Ga Gotoku import review (PS2, Sega, out in Japan; Kamurocho; some 70 side events; the novelist and actors; Nagoshi’s column as a “design diary”).
- Edge issue 167, October 2006, pp. 84–85: Yakuza review (“the first truly Sega Sega game”; Haruka at the casino; Kazuma Kiryu, the “Dragon of Dojima”; Shenmue; the combat and upgrades; Kamurocho as “the fictional Tokyo district”; the locker keys; English voice work).
- Edge issue 171, January 2007, p. 65: review of the year (Yakuza and Nagoshi’s columns).
- Wireframe issue 11, April 2019: Judgment review (the Yakuza studio’s spin-off, set in Kamurocho).
- Wireframe issue 15, May 2019, p. 30: the plot of Yakuza 0 and the Millennium Tower.
- Wireframe issue 45, November 2020: Yakuza: Like a Dragon review (Ichiban Kasuga; turn-based battles; role-playing conventions in a contemporary setting; 90%).
- Wireframe issue 58, December 2021: the Yokohama setting of Yakuza: Like a Dragon.
- Wireframe issue 56, October 2021, p. 20: Nagoshi leaves Sega; Masayoshi Yokoyama head of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio.
- Wireframe issue 62, April 2022: Yakuza 0 and the 1980s, with Sega arcade machines to find.
- Wireframe issue 67, October 2022: “Yakuza no more” (breakout popularity in the West; the change to Like a Dragon from Ishin!).
- The Toshihiro Nagoshi entry and its sources: his credits on the series.
- Wikipedia, “Yakuza 0” (web, secondary): Japanese release in March 2015, English release on 24 January 2017; the property business; the game’s part in the series’ Western popularity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza_0
- Wikipedia, “Like a Dragon” (web, secondary): list of main games, including Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (2024). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_a_Dragon