Four years after Yakuza 6: The Song of Life came out in Japan in 2016, its followup released worldwide. Although the Japanese version has 7 in the title, this game marks the end of the series being numbered for English releases. For the first time in the Yakuza main series the game does not follow Kazuma Kiryu’s story, though it still takes place in the same world as the previous Yakuza games.
Dragon Quest
One meaning of the subtitle of the game is that it is similar to Dragon Quest. This is said explicitly in the game, but it is also obvious in the gameplay. By any definition Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a JRPG. Similar to Earthbound, it brings the genre to an unexpected scenario.
The combat is basically standard turn based combat. Encounters happen by running into people on the street, as usual for Yakuza games. There are quick time event style things that happen during battle which are appreciated for helping break up the monotony. One annoying thing is that your positioning matters during combat, but it is largely not under your control, similar to Final Fantasy XIII.
Compared to other JRPGs, Yakuza: Like a Dragon surprisingly stands out in a few areas. One of them is enemy design. Although you will fight a lot of the same enemies all the time, the variety is still pretty good for the genre. There are a lot of creative designs that result in you having to play in different ways much more often than you would expect in this genre. The difficulty is also pretty good once you get to the latter half of the game, though it would have been appreciated if the difficulty curve was more traditional.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s map is all open from the start with areas of varying difficulty, but it isn’t quite like Xenoblade Chronicles X or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for example, where this would allow you to practically play the game in a nonlinear way. It is still appreciated though, and definitely better than invisible walls or something like that.
As is standard for Yakuza games, there is a variety of things to do outside of combat and the main story. There are ports of arcade games, minigames, and entire side stories to play through. It is obvious a lot of effort was put into this area, and it definitely paid off with how much fun you can have doing the different side activities in this game.
Graphics
This has never been a particularly high point for the series. Although this was somewhat remedied by the new engine introduced in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, this game is definitely a downgrade from that game graphically. Although it is much longer and full of things to do, Yakuza: Like a Dragon looks like it had a lower budget and has a lot more space for improvement. This is a fair tradeoff, though, but it doesn’t earn this game any points in the graphics department.
As is the case with many modern console games, there are some options for what graphical settings you want to play with. The high resolution mode is basically worthless for this version of the game. With it activated the game looks and feels laggy compared to the other mode, while hardly looking any different visually. It is still good that they included it for the possibility of future Xbox consoles to make it run smoothly and with high resolution, though. The mode you want to use is the high framerate mode, which looks basically just as good but plays significantly more smoothly.
Sound
This is one of the most well known part of this series, and it is easy to see why. Unlike previous Yakuza games, this one has the option to play the game fully dubbed in English. It isn’t really a fair competition, but the Japanese dub is basically just better. Unless you really hate reading or listening to Japanese, you should probably just stick to the Japanese language track. Overall the voice acting is better than most other games.
As far as the soundtrack goes, it isn’t overly impressive. They don’t have any blatantly bad music, but most of it is forgettable. It is often questionable if the music is really fitting, but it does kinda make sense for the time period this game takes place in. The main exceptions are the karaoke songs, which are good as usual.
Story
Debatably the best part of the Yakuza series is the stories. Compared to the majority of the main series, Yakuza: Like a Dragon does not really impress. For the first game with this new main character they basically just copied the story they started the previous main character’s story with. The characters are at least about as good as the old ones were, which is nothing to complain about. The setup for the plot is also a bit more interesting than other Yakuza games, and most games in general. The direction they ended up taking with it was a bit disappointing in the end, but it would have been difficult to fully capitalize on what they had set up.
The game is debatably better than most of the other Yakuza games in the bits of story that aren’t part of the main story. This is probably the case because they made a huge new map to put stuff in, rather than trying to fit new content into existing maps most of the time. If you are a video game fan in general, you will definitely appreciate a lot the aspects of this version of the Yakuza world. This aspect really helps the game not feel to dragged down by its main story that isn’t too exceptional.
Overall
Assuming you can handle turn based combat (which seems to be most gamers, based on how popular Pokémon is), you should probably give this game a shot. There is payoff in this game for playing the rest of the main series first, so you should do that first if you think you ever will. Even if you hate RPGs, there is definitely a chance you would like this one. Considering the amount of content the launch price was definitely reasonable, but as cheap as it is now it is definitely worth it.
Overall the game is a 8.5 out of 10.
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