I get asked a lot what it is I like about Yakuza, and I usually start with how much I enjoy kicking bicycles into people's faces, move on to its love for Japanese urban spaces and their sense of place, then wind up with some appreciation for its soap opera storytelling. Sometimes that will prompt a follow-up along the lines of "those are some very different things", to which I can reply "yes, that's the point".
Yakuza is a series built on its contradictions. Yes, it's a hilarious adventure through a heavily-fictionalised Japanese underworld, as a cast of losers and misfits find themselves in the most ridiculous scenarios imaginable, from underground fights against giant tigers to street battles against lubed-up sex predators.
But at the same time, between and throughout those moments, it's also one of the most sincere video game franchises on the planet. Some real shit goes down over the course of a 100-hour Yakuza game, including genuine, heartfelt attempts at exploring fatherhood, fraternity and what it means to belong to something and defend those you love.
There's even contradiction in the series' gameplay. Sombre walks through rain-soaked streets can give way to bruising fistfights against a band of thugs at breakneck speed, and ten minutes after fighting for your life in a cinematic rooftop battle you can be inside an arcade playing Virtual On.
None of these things on their own are what makes Yakuza great. It's the duality itself that defines the series. The dumb stuff is so good because it stands in such stark contrast to all the heavy stuff, and moments of sincerity hit you so hard because your emotional guard can be down after 45 minutes of remote-control car racing.
I basically said much of this already last year when discussing the series' live-action Amazon adaptation, which tries some interesting things when it comes to Yakuza's timeline, but ultimately failed because:
...the straight-laced sitting alongside (and being frequently punctuated by) the absurd, is what makes Yakuza Yakuza. Kiryu isn't Kiryu if he's not splitting his time between grimly serious dialogue and a batting cage. So seeing him portrayed as he is in this TV series, with only the drama, is like seeing yin without yang, light without shadow. He's only half a man, and this is only half a show.
Now here we are just a few months later and I'm about to say the same things about a new game in the series. From the vibes to the setting to the fact we’re playing (in that particular setting) as longtime fan favourite Goro Majima, nearly everything about Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii felt off from the moment it was first announced. Matt Elliott's review for Eurogamer nailed the questionable energy:
Even the choice of protagonist—the pleasantly unhinged Goro Majima - a man who, right now, you’re probably imagining screaming, stabbing, or both - speaks to a heightened sense of throwaway irreverence. It's the sort of concept people who don't play Yakuza probably think series obsessives would love, when, actually, all we want is to try all the different whiskies at a sunakku bar in the Champion District.
That paragraph basically nails the Pirate Yakuza experience for me. The whole game feels slightly off, like it was pitched by someone who had never actually played a Yakuza game but had wet their finger, stuck it in the air and tried to gauge the series' appeal from the thinnest of breezes coming from the general direction of the series’ fandom. Yeah, the game is full of gags and wild shit and bombastic sequences, but you can't just do anything weird and pass it off as Yakuza when the series has two decades of a very specific kind of weirdness.
Goro Majima has existed throughout the Yakuza series as a foil to Kazuma Kiryu. They're an inseparable duo, right down to the fact we had to play as both of them in prequel Yakuza 0 to get their full story. They're Batman and The Joker, Abbott and Costello. Majima's craziness works when it's in contrast to the stoic Kiryu, but even alone, his craziness works within the context of his character. His origin story, explored in Yakuza 0, is tragic, and his later years, where his life's meaning as part of the Yakuza has been taken away from him, are painfully melancholy. His bio is "crazy guy" in only the most reductive way; Majima is such a wonderful character because he's crazy in spite of everything, not just because.
In this game, though? He's got a very convenient case of amnesia, so for most of the storyline all that context goes right out the window. He spends the bulk of Pirate Yakuza as a cardboard cutout, a "hey guys, look how wacky Goro Majima is, he's a pirate captain wearing stupid clothes in 2025!" schtick in ways the game somehow manages to explain, but can never actually make work. He's all joke, no brakes, and the whole game feels paper-thin as a result.
Even when it tries (and fails) to more seriously examine Majima and his past, there's just no gravity in this game. It's the outline of a Yakuza game with none of the depth, a series of bullet points being ticked--outfits, check; diversions, check; combat, check--as though Pirate Yakuza wasn't an actual part of the series, but was something being made by someone else, tracing over it.
I'm not saying this is a bad video game. Yakuza is nothing if not dependable, so there is the scaffolding of the series experience here if that's solely what you're into: lots of gags, punishing melee combat, retro video games, some baseball. The highlight of all the diversions, though, is actually its surprisingly detailed naval combat, harking back to Assassin's Creed Black Flag and its combination of ship-to-ship battles that can culminate with a brawl on the deck. Only here you also have machine guns.
But it is a bad Yakuza game. This series is no stranger to spinoffs, but even the worst of them--like Dead Souls--have always had some trace of Yakuza energy to them. The most successful deviations, the Judgment series, are probably the best example of what has gone wrong here: They showed it was gangland drama and a cityscape that was key to the appeal of Yakuza, not any one character or storyline in particular. Pirate Yakuza's reversal of that--casting a series stalwart in a novelty location and cranking the absurdity levels to max--feels like a prank game, only the joke doesn't land.
