malvasia bianca

I’ve been going through one Yakuza game a year for most of the last decade, and last year I reached the end of the numbered Kiryu games. Which made it not entirely obvious which game I should play in 2026, but after consulting Wikipedia’s list of games in the series, I decided to queue up the next mainline game in the series, Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

Like a Dragon introduces a new main character, Ichiban Kasuga; but it also switches up the beat ’em up gameplay for RPG gameplay. Coming into the game, my attitude about the former was cautious optimism: you can only have so many games whose plot is “Kiryu’s been trying to set up a life outside of the Yakuza but he gets pulled in one last time to solve a critical problem”. I was a little less sure about the latter, but honestly I spend a lot more time playing RPGs than I do beat ’em ups, and the studio has earned quite a bit of trust from me, so hopefully it will turn out well?

 

After not too long, I was completely sold on the RPG transition. The developers foreground the transition by having Kasuga be a fan of the Dragon Quest series and by having him explicitly want to be like a hero in an RPG; kind of goofy but this is the Yakuza series, we actually don’t want them to play things completely straight, and I support not sweeping the change under the rug. And the mechanics seemed fine; nothing groundbreaking from an RPG point of view (though the way you have to pay attention to physical positioning of your opponents as they move around while you’re preparing your attack was new to me; and, as I played more, the job system felt more unusual than I first thought, though I suspect that there actually is a decent amount of prior art there, just in games I haven’t played), but it was well enough done to keep me happy. (Especially since, as noted above, I’m in general more familiar with / a fan of the new genre than with the old genre.)

So the introduction to the game was fine; but then you start accumulating party members, and this is where the new genre turned out to be actively better. Ever since Yakuza 4, the series has had you playing multiple characters during a given game, but they were handled serially. So each player was given a section of the game setting up their own story, and then they’d all come together in the final section of the game. And, while the characters were working together in the final section, you were only controlling one of them, and usually the ones you weren’t controlling weren’t even with you physically as you were wandering around town. So those games didn’t feel like an ensemble cast, they were more a collection of related stories.

In Like a Dragon, however, when you meet a new main character, they soon get added right into your party. So the story feels completely different: on a macro level, it’s telling one story instead of four interveaving stories, and on a micro level, the characters are interacting constantly.

 

Having a party affects the gameplay too, of course, because instead of having Kiryu constantly fighting groups of maybe five people, you have your group of four people fighting against groups of maybe six people. And the game has a class system where characters can level up in a specific job (that they can change, with each character having access to one job specific to them as well as a pool of jobs shared among characters of the same gender), as well as having a level for the character as a whole that is independent of whatever levels they have for the different jobs they’ve tried.

Honestly, the jobs felt much less distinct than classes do in normal RPGs, though; it’s probably more important on harder difficulty levels, but on normal difficulty, all that really mattered (outside of a few battles) was making sure I had one party member whose job enabled healing skills. (And even that character was quite competent at fighting; in non-boss fights they spent most of their time fighting rather than healing.) In particular, there weren’t any distance fighters (or at least not in any of the classes that I tried out), everybody is going right up to enemies and pounding away on them.

The game has a HP / MP system; and, at the very beginning, I spent a bit of time wondering how that would play out. (Especially because, while you can replenish both by eating at restaurants, you’re not initially making enough money to be able to do that regularly; though you do get both of them replenished every time you level up either a character or a character’s job, and that was happening quite frequently during that period.) But the very first character who joins your party is a healer who also can replenish MP by attacking, so at that point, as long as you do all your attacking via your standard attack (which doesn’t cost MP), then you don’t have to worry about MP or HP: your healer can heal you as necessary, and they spend enough time attacking instead of healing that their MP is always topped up. (You get access to a better healer later, but that healer also has the same mechanism of replenishing MP during standard attacks.)

So, in practice, Like a Dragon was the third game in a row that I’d played where I basically didn’t have to worry about MP. Or at least not during regular battles: you do have to worry about MP during boss battles, both because you’ll want the non-healers to do stronger attacks that require MP and because your healer might have to heal every turn and hence won’t be able to replenish their MP via normal attacks. But that’s fine, that’s what replenishing items are for. Honestly, the weirdest thing here was that I ended up basically never going into restaurants: I like going through the whole menu of most restaurants in Yakuza games, I kind of missed needing to do that!

Or at least it’s mostly fine: the encouragement to do the same attack over and over gives a sameness to your battles, making them a little flatter than most RPGs. Not the end of the world, though; you do have to do at least a bit of thinking about which enemy to attack next, because you’re thinking about enemy positioning (since that affects what attacks will get blocked), enemy vulnerability to weapon types, how many enemies you’ll be able to defeat before the next round of battle, and whether any enemies have special moves that you’re particularly scared of. So you’re still making decisions during battles; and, honestly, it’s not like most RPGs have you thinking deeply about every individual move in the vast majority of battles either. (And also it is sadly well within the Yakuza tradition to have you deal with too many overworld battles that are just boring, with a massive difficulty / skills-required gap between those and boss fights.)

 

So that’s what’s new about Like a Dragon; but the game otherwise fits squarely within the traditions of the series, in an entirely pleasant way. I liked the plot; I liked bouncing back and forth between the plot and the many side stories that were available. As always, there are a ton of minigames; these days I mostly skip the small ones, and I give the medium-sized ones (a kart racer and a business management sim, in this instance) a try. The medium-sized ones in this game ended up not grabbing me, so I dropped them after not very long; but that’s fine, there were lots of other things to keep me busy, I don’t expect every aspect of a game as sprawling as this to be to to my taste.

And there was a pleasant enough mechanism to level up your bond with your party members, so you’d learn more about their invidual story. While also increasing the rate at which they’d gain experience while not in your active party; by the time I got more characters than could all fit in my active party at once, I’d maxed out the bond of enough characters that I didn’t have to worry about making sure to level everybody up evenly, I could just move older characters out of the active party.

 

And then I hit chapter 12, and all of a sudden I needed 3 million yen to advance to the next plot checkpoint. At first, I wasn’t particularly worried: I had 1.5 million yen, and side stories had been bumping up that number regularly. But I’d actually done all the side stories that were available by that point at the time; and yes, battles give me money, but a typical amount of money for a single battle was around 5 thousand yen, probably a little less. So I’d have to fight more than 300 battles to make it to the next plot point; that felt both out of line and boring.

At first I was simply annoyed by this: I’d actually just finished up two side stories that had each required me to spend a million yen, so if I hadn’t done those two side stories, I would have been fine. But the flip side is that side stories were one of my main sorces of money; if I hadn’t been the sort of person who did basically every side story, then I also wouldn’t have had money, just for a different reason. (So I guess I was still annoyed, thinking that through, just more complexly annoyed: the game was putting up a barrier no matter what kind of player you are.)

Then I tried out a dungeon that I’d noted but hadn’t explored; if that gave me a steady drip of appropriately leveled enemies then maybe I’d make money while leveling myself up a bit and it would work out well? But nope, that dungeon had fixed enemies who were lower level than the enemies wandering around the streets, so while the battles were dense, I was only making like 2 thousand yen from them, which would take even longer. (It turns out that that dungeon is useful for gathering crafting materials, a mechanism that I hadn’t deeply explored.)

Reading online, it turns out that the game is basically saying “you actually need to spend time on the business management sim here”. Which I did; it’s fine (and was probably made easier because I’d gotten lots of potential hires for that minigame via the side stories I’d finished), and you even get another party member that way. (Not very well incorporated into the story, she doesn’t even show up on screen in the plot cut scenes, but she does give another option for the female jobs.) I ended up spending two (maybe three) nights going to the end of that sim, because it was pleasant enough, that got that one new character’s bond leveled up properly, and doing that earned me maybe ten million yen (with an easy path to earning more if I needed it), so even after setting aside three million for the plot, I could buy multiple million-yen high quality weapons, all the consumables I wanted, etc.

I don’t think this was great design on the game’s part. If you want to have the business minigame be essential, then just make it essential: instead of having a plot excuse to for why Kazuma needs three million yen, have a plot excuse for why Kazuma needs to be more integrated with the business community. And, as a side effect, the money will be there for buying stuff in game, the game will know that you’ve unlocked that extra character, and the player will know how to get more money if they want to make large purchases.

But, honestly, just change the progress curves? If it’s reasonable for the player to want to spend a million yen on a weapon at this point in the game, then tweak the fight rewards so, by this point in the game, the player can get a million yen in 20 fights instead of in 200 fights! Or lower the price of weapons so they cost 100 thousand yen instead of a million yen. All of these numbers are just figures on a spreadsheet somewhere, there’s nothing magic about them.

 

That was frustrating, but also it seemed like a one-time thing (surely the game wasn’t next going to say that I had to max out the kart racing game!), and indeed the plot progression picked back up after then. So that was good.

Or it was good until it wasn’t. Chapter 12 had actually had a pretty tough boss fight, but not too far out of line; I used slightly more consumable items than I would have liked, but I made it through it, and that’s what consumable items are there for.

Chapter 14, though, was a different story: I hit another boss fight, and that boss wiped the floor with me. It wouldn’t have mattered how many consumables I used: once I got to the later stages of that fight, my characters would go from full health to knocked out before I had a chance to do any healing.

Clearly I was missing something: I didn’t know if I was way underleveled somehow, or bad at tactics (which wouldn’t have been surprising, because as mentioned above the regular combat encouraged me to not really get to know my characters’ full range of abilities) or what. But something was wrong.

So I looked it up in a guide, and the answer was very unsatisfying. I was probably a little underleveled, but that wasn’t the main issue. Instead, there were three things that guides suggested: 1) this boss is vulnerable to ice attacks, so use those more; 2) if you can poison them, then that will do damage even if you’re guarding and healing a lot (and poison lasts a lot longer than other afflictions in the game); and 3) that boss will never attack female characters.

And, to be blunt, that’s ridiculous. The first of those seems reasonable; but this isn’t a Persona game, you aren’t trained to pay close attention to elemental attacks and you don’t have easy access to any elemental attacks. Reading the guides, there are apparently two jobs (one male and one female) that give you any cold attack at all; I looked at what be required to unlock the hostess job cold attack, and I’d need to level up a character to job level 20. And the obvious character to do that was only job level 21 on the only job they’d had; admittedly that was the character I’d gotten recently, my other female character’s job level was slightly higher, but that’s a massive amount of grinding for one specific battle!

Poison was similarly limited; there, though, I fortunately had once character who could apply it. As to not attacking female characters, we’ve got another reason why, in practice, yes you have to finish the management sim, because at least I had two female characters.

 

After reading that, I went to sleep assuming that I was done with the game; maybe I’d find videos of cut scenes, but the balancing of this last quarter of the game was clearly way off. (And no, there wasn’t an Easy difficulty that I could switch down to.) Sleeping on it, though, I decided to give it a try: I did a bit of leveling up, and then retried the battle.

And yes, it worked that time: the main character blocked all the time, the poison guy blocked all the time other than when he had to reapply poison, my healer healed all the time, and my other female character sometimes attacked (doing token amounts of damage, less than the poison) and sometimes used items, depending on what was necessary. With that, it wasn’t too hard to make it through the battle.

But also, that was in no way a good outcome? The tactics required weren’t ones that the game had encouraged me to learn; and making it through a battle by turtling is just not a fun experience. Maybe the battle comes off better on new game plus when you’ve got more experience and more options; if you just want to have fun going through the game once, though, it sucks.

 

Fortunately, that was the low point in the game; I only had one and a half chapters left after that, and the boss fights were much more manageable than the ones from chapters 12 and 14. And I liked the story enough that I was glad to have seen it through to the end. (Not sure they should have put quite as many cut scenes as they did after the credits, though!)

And ultimately, I think Like a Dragon is a good game but a much more flawed one than I thought three quarters of the way through. I still think that switching the game over to the RPG genre had some good effects: it enables an ensemble cast much more directly than being a beat ’em up did. (Not that the previous genre was bad: it was a natural fit to the story, in particular.) Hopefully future games in the series will avoid some of the same pitfalls; we’ll see how I feel like Infinite Wealth when I get around to it in a couple of years…