Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name is, for one, quite a mouthful, but also something of a conflicting release. On one hand, it’s a cool addition to the tale of Yakuza 7 and an important part of Kiryu’s story, especially in light of the upcoming Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth. On the other, it feels unnecessary in parts, largely forgettable in key ways, and extraordinarily expensive.
Story
I think the story of Gaiden is, at best, awkwardly delivered. I wholeheartedly agree with the majority that the finale is excellent, and some of the best work RGG have done in terms of an evocative and emotional narrative beat. The intro is pretty good as well, if perhaps a little odd. Everything else in between feels shoddy at best. Chapters 2-4 have merit and progression here and there, but they feel largely incomplete and force the player to do mindless stuff to just make the next plot beat happen. There were more than a few moments with the Daidoji x Omi plot in the first couple chapters that I went “What? Why? That doesn’t make sense.” As the game comes to its inevitable conclusion by syncing up with the events of Yakuza 7, these complaints fall away a bit, but the need to force in a whole narrative to explain how Kiryu ended up where he was while keeping it in line with the idea that the Daidoji were using him just results in a clunky story. Akame, Tsuruno, and Shishido are all exceedingly likable characters and don’t feel at all out of place in the wider series. The Daidoji agents, Hanawa included, are… ehh… I didn’t care too much for them. Overall, the switch from Daidoji being a political club manipulating government to actual superspy group with hundreds of agents and secret weapons comes off very strangely to me. Yakuza 3 has secret spy groups, sure, but this particular development feels out of touch with the ending Yakuza 6 was going for. All that said, yeah, that ending is phenomenal. Kuroda’s performance is fantastic. I hope we see more of this caliber from Infinite Wealth.
Gameplay
Sotenbori is overused. There, I said it! This version of Sotenbori is such an afterthought in terms of player enjoyment. Usually, there’s an effort to make even repeated areas feel different from game to game, giving them new locations and activities to stave off the repetition. Here, the Castle is sort of supposed to take the edge off, but given that its activities are limited to coliseum battles and the gambling minigames, it really only serves as a pretty area to look at. Combat is an improvement over Y6 in some ways, but the Yakuza style is largely the same and, as such, a bit clunky, and Agent style has some neat gimmicks but hardly feels like a full on style to me. This was a great opportunity to bring Kiryu’s style into Lost Judgment’s combat engine but they completely swerved away from that, resulting in what feels like, to me, a lot more of the same. In a related sense, tying all of the upgrades (which are largely just single move unlocks and stat upgrades, very lacking in any meaningful changes to your kit) to Akame’s point system AND money is such a drag. Yakuza 6 / Kiwami 2’s upgrade system was awkward, but consistent. The Judgment style is probably the best, giving you free reign to spend your upgrade points. Tying it to multiple sources of imaginary income weighs down the narrative as getting to meaningfully increase your combat potential means going to grind not just for money, but ALSO Akame points. For a game as short as this one is, I can’t see this any way other than an attempt to stretch the runtime. Add to it that substories are now packaged as part of Akame’s storyline and it really feels at points like they were lacking central mechanics or ideas to make this game click and instead relied on the existing systems to make it work. The story segment where you show off to Nishitani by going to Sotenbori and spending money is so sloppy, just making the player run around and do the minigames that have been a part of this engine for damn near a decade at this point. Is it still fun to shoot pool? Sure! But is it meaningful as story content when I can just do that on my own for kicks? Not really. The coliseum is the biggest offender in this regard. A random coliseum battle here or there in the main series is not uncommon, but it’s usually a one-off as an introduction to the side content or for one plot beat. Making it a key point of this game’s story and tying it directly to the upgrade system is seriously uncreative. Even the advertised “Elite Fighter Pack” with Saejima, Daigo, and Majima is just recycled movesets from previous games! Yakuza 5 is one of my favorite games of all time but I’m not going to spend a couple bucks to see half of Saejima’s animations from 2010 in the year of our lord 2023.
Price
It might not be clear from the number of games I log and review each year, but I do buy a lot of games. I have little issue spending $50-70 on new releases upwards of a dozen times a year. Despite that, and despite the fact my own spending has never bothered me, I spent more than a couple points of Gaiden regretting my purchase. Initially I criticized RGG online for making this a digital only release in the West, and while I still do, I wonder if it wasn’t intentional for its size. See, tying the story to multiple different mechanics that are, at best, secondary in other RGG releases in order to make it stretch to a 10-12 hour ordeal feels bad to me. For many people, playing all the minigames and doing all the substories will warrant them another 5-10 hours, and they’ll feel perfectly happy with a 25-30 hour jaunt. That’s great! I seriously hope they got everything they could out of this. But for me, having played the whole series to this point, doing coliseum battles and grinding for money and doing substories just to have upgrade points feels like a huge slog and less than I expect from Ryu Ga Gotoku. It feels like to me that they had a couple of great ideas - Kiryu hiding out, tying into the Omi dissolution, Shishido and Tsuruno’s story, the character of Akame - and then had to figure out a way to make this hit a $50 price point. I kept thinking back to Lost Judgment’s The Kaito Files expansion for comparison. That goes for $30 solo, and is included in the $35 or whatever season pass. You can check my review of that release here - I quite liked it a lot! Despite its length (8-10 hours doing nearly everything) it told an original story about a fan favorite character, provided new locations to explore, and the plot felt all-killer-no-filler to me, a lean and mean distillation of a whole Yakuza plot into a tight ~7ish hours. Gaiden did not give me this feeling. Kiryu’s moveset has fewer original moves and ideas than Kaito’s two styles, the upgrades are far worse, the story meanders more, and the bosses are far less imaginative - minus the final boss, who is excellent. I just couldn’t shake the feeling while playing Gaiden that I was being ripped off. All that work went into a DLC for $30 (which people thought was too expensive!) but here we have a full release for $50 which feels like it does less? I’m not the arbiter of what’s worth it or not in a video game, so take all this with a grain of salt, but at the absolute minimum I don’t think Gaiden is 5/6ths of the value of the Ishin! remake from this same calendar year. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it was worth it for you or not.
At the end of it all, there’s always going to be fun to be had in a release like this. Kiryu is fun, there’s great activities to do, lots to see, and karaoke to be sung (First Summer Uika knocks it out of the park as Akame here). The story feels unnecessarily stretched out and I think imperfectly delivered. I have serious issues with the pricing of what feels like a glorified DLC. But despite it all, it will stick with you. The ridiculous spy gadgets, the excellent final boss, the phenomenal finale cutscenes. I hope the latter elements are signs of what’s to come in the next mainline release, because in that case, we’re in good hands.
Story
I think the story of Gaiden is, at best, awkwardly delivered. I wholeheartedly agree with the majority that the finale is excellent, and some of the best work RGG have done in terms of an evocative and emotional narrative beat. The intro is pretty good as well, if perhaps a little odd. Everything else in between feels shoddy at best. Chapters 2-4 have merit and progression here and there, but they feel largely incomplete and force the player to do mindless stuff to just make the next plot beat happen. There were more than a few moments with the Daidoji x Omi plot in the first couple chapters that I went “What? Why? That doesn’t make sense.” As the game comes to its inevitable conclusion by syncing up with the events of Yakuza 7, these complaints fall away a bit, but the need to force in a whole narrative to explain how Kiryu ended up where he was while keeping it in line with the idea that the Daidoji were using him just results in a clunky story. Akame, Tsuruno, and Shishido are all exceedingly likable characters and don’t feel at all out of place in the wider series. The Daidoji agents, Hanawa included, are… ehh… I didn’t care too much for them. Overall, the switch from Daidoji being a political club manipulating government to actual superspy group with hundreds of agents and secret weapons comes off very strangely to me. Yakuza 3 has secret spy groups, sure, but this particular development feels out of touch with the ending Yakuza 6 was going for. All that said, yeah, that ending is phenomenal. Kuroda’s performance is fantastic. I hope we see more of this caliber from Infinite Wealth.
Gameplay
Sotenbori is overused. There, I said it! This version of Sotenbori is such an afterthought in terms of player enjoyment. Usually, there’s an effort to make even repeated areas feel different from game to game, giving them new locations and activities to stave off the repetition. Here, the Castle is sort of supposed to take the edge off, but given that its activities are limited to coliseum battles and the gambling minigames, it really only serves as a pretty area to look at. Combat is an improvement over Y6 in some ways, but the Yakuza style is largely the same and, as such, a bit clunky, and Agent style has some neat gimmicks but hardly feels like a full on style to me. This was a great opportunity to bring Kiryu’s style into Lost Judgment’s combat engine but they completely swerved away from that, resulting in what feels like, to me, a lot more of the same. In a related sense, tying all of the upgrades (which are largely just single move unlocks and stat upgrades, very lacking in any meaningful changes to your kit) to Akame’s point system AND money is such a drag. Yakuza 6 / Kiwami 2’s upgrade system was awkward, but consistent. The Judgment style is probably the best, giving you free reign to spend your upgrade points. Tying it to multiple sources of imaginary income weighs down the narrative as getting to meaningfully increase your combat potential means going to grind not just for money, but ALSO Akame points. For a game as short as this one is, I can’t see this any way other than an attempt to stretch the runtime. Add to it that substories are now packaged as part of Akame’s storyline and it really feels at points like they were lacking central mechanics or ideas to make this game click and instead relied on the existing systems to make it work. The story segment where you show off to Nishitani by going to Sotenbori and spending money is so sloppy, just making the player run around and do the minigames that have been a part of this engine for damn near a decade at this point. Is it still fun to shoot pool? Sure! But is it meaningful as story content when I can just do that on my own for kicks? Not really. The coliseum is the biggest offender in this regard. A random coliseum battle here or there in the main series is not uncommon, but it’s usually a one-off as an introduction to the side content or for one plot beat. Making it a key point of this game’s story and tying it directly to the upgrade system is seriously uncreative. Even the advertised “Elite Fighter Pack” with Saejima, Daigo, and Majima is just recycled movesets from previous games! Yakuza 5 is one of my favorite games of all time but I’m not going to spend a couple bucks to see half of Saejima’s animations from 2010 in the year of our lord 2023.
Price
It might not be clear from the number of games I log and review each year, but I do buy a lot of games. I have little issue spending $50-70 on new releases upwards of a dozen times a year. Despite that, and despite the fact my own spending has never bothered me, I spent more than a couple points of Gaiden regretting my purchase. Initially I criticized RGG online for making this a digital only release in the West, and while I still do, I wonder if it wasn’t intentional for its size. See, tying the story to multiple different mechanics that are, at best, secondary in other RGG releases in order to make it stretch to a 10-12 hour ordeal feels bad to me. For many people, playing all the minigames and doing all the substories will warrant them another 5-10 hours, and they’ll feel perfectly happy with a 25-30 hour jaunt. That’s great! I seriously hope they got everything they could out of this. But for me, having played the whole series to this point, doing coliseum battles and grinding for money and doing substories just to have upgrade points feels like a huge slog and less than I expect from Ryu Ga Gotoku. It feels like to me that they had a couple of great ideas - Kiryu hiding out, tying into the Omi dissolution, Shishido and Tsuruno’s story, the character of Akame - and then had to figure out a way to make this hit a $50 price point. I kept thinking back to Lost Judgment’s The Kaito Files expansion for comparison. That goes for $30 solo, and is included in the $35 or whatever season pass. You can check my review of that release here - I quite liked it a lot! Despite its length (8-10 hours doing nearly everything) it told an original story about a fan favorite character, provided new locations to explore, and the plot felt all-killer-no-filler to me, a lean and mean distillation of a whole Yakuza plot into a tight ~7ish hours. Gaiden did not give me this feeling. Kiryu’s moveset has fewer original moves and ideas than Kaito’s two styles, the upgrades are far worse, the story meanders more, and the bosses are far less imaginative - minus the final boss, who is excellent. I just couldn’t shake the feeling while playing Gaiden that I was being ripped off. All that work went into a DLC for $30 (which people thought was too expensive!) but here we have a full release for $50 which feels like it does less? I’m not the arbiter of what’s worth it or not in a video game, so take all this with a grain of salt, but at the absolute minimum I don’t think Gaiden is 5/6ths of the value of the Ishin! remake from this same calendar year. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it was worth it for you or not.
At the end of it all, there’s always going to be fun to be had in a release like this. Kiryu is fun, there’s great activities to do, lots to see, and karaoke to be sung (First Summer Uika knocks it out of the park as Akame here). The story feels unnecessarily stretched out and I think imperfectly delivered. I have serious issues with the pricing of what feels like a glorified DLC. But despite it all, it will stick with you. The ridiculous spy gadgets, the excellent final boss, the phenomenal finale cutscenes. I hope the latter elements are signs of what’s to come in the next mainline release, because in that case, we’re in good hands.