Around 10 minutes into the game, there’s a cutscene showing Kiryu navigating his modern day life; as every second that passes showing just how hollow he’s become. Every semblance of human connection has been lost, every thread has been cut. The smiles on the faces around him don’t matter, or rather he won’t let them matter. All he can do is submerge himself in vices that are probably accelerating his incoming diagnosis. Yet despite his somber face, even when the feeling of melancholy literally bleeds through the screen, you know he is content. He chose this. This is nothing more than a culmination of every decision he’s made since the late 80s, being defiant at every single turn. Ironically, his only escape was death itself and he denied even that. His entire life he’s followed nothing but the way of life that is the Yakuza, even when he stated otherwise.

The most restrained entry in the series yet. Every time it feels the façade that is Kiryu’s current life is about to be shattered it purposefully holds itself back, putting its hand on its own shoulder and telling itself “Not yet”. For a franchise as bombastic as Yakuza/Like a Dragon, a lot of the games are defined by their tendency to explode and it’s precisely because of that absence that The Man Who Erased His Name works so well. That tendency to not go overboard works in its favor, yes it serves to tease the audience but when it does finally get to the parts when it lets loose you realise that it really doesn’t have much to show with a lot of it being what you’ve already seen in the previous main entry. This isn’t Yakuza 2’s sprawling conspiracy, this isn’t Yakuza 5’s thesis on dreams, this is the dejection of Kiryu Kazuma and what he has become.

The grand finale isn’t the traditional Yakuza one. Yes, two shirtless men are duking it out over their ideals but no amount of blood-pumping fistfights this game could have ever offered will top what Gaiden leaves you with. There’s a reason why so many people I know say that they’ve teared up at it, because it’s a release of every emotion that was bubbling under this game’s skin itching to be let it for the whole 15-hour duration where you’re left with nothing but tears of the strongest man in this franchise’s history. It’s an end to the denial of Kiryu’s true nature, showcasing just how far he’s fallen and how deep his love really runs. Every game in the series follows the lengths of his stubbornness and this game is no different, he is still steadfast in what he believes but at the end of it you realise that there’s a limit, that at one point he can’t do this anymore.

As the camera comes up to his face at the end, as his head turns around, you see the glimmer in his eyes and the slight smirk on his face. You see a renewed hope inside of him, you see Kiryu Kazuma as he once was. You see The Man Who Erased His Name.