Yakuza: Like a Dragon

I went into Yakuza: Like a Dragon fully prepared to be skeptical. Swapping the series' kinetic beat-em-up brawling for turn-based JRPG combat sounds like a committee decision made by people who never played either genre well. It is, instead, one of the most confident genre pivots I have seen a long-running franchise pull off without losing its identity. The bones holding everything together, the dense city life, the whiplash tonal shifts between crime thriller and slapstick absurdism, the karaoke, stay completely intact. Only the fighting has changed, and it changed for the better. The setup is pure pulp: Ichiban Kasuga, a low-ranking Tojo Clan grunt, takes an 18-year prison sentence for a crime he did not commit, walks out, and immediately gets shot by the man he idolized. From that premise the game assembles a party of genuinely broken people, an ex-cop, a homeless man named Nanba, an ex-hostess, a shady Korean hitman, and asks you to care about all of them. Remarkably, you do. The found-family dynamic is not a marketing bullet point here; the bond system actually feeds into gameplay, with stronger party relationships unlocking new jobs and triggering assist attacks mid-combat. The writing earns those moments. Ichiban is relatable in a way Kiryu never was, less stoic legend, more hopeless optimist who frames reality as a Dragon Quest game in his own head, which conveniently explains why the combat is turn-based at all. It is a good in-fiction justification that also sets the game's emotional register perfectly. The job system is where the build-theorycrafting crowd will spend most of their mental energy, and it holds up surprisingly well past the midgame. Jobs unlock at the Hello Work temp agency from Chapter 5 onward, and the framing, pop idols, construction foremen, chefs, hostesses, musicians, Enforcer tank builds and Breaker dancing beatboxers, keeps the absurdity alive even during stat-checking spreadsheet sessions. Permanent stat bonuses carry over between jobs, which means multiclassing actually rewards patience rather than punishing it. Adachi running Enforcer to taunt enemies off your squishier members, Nanba cycling between Homeless Guy and Musician depending on whether you need elemental coverage or party buffs, Saeko slotting into Idol for support or Night Queen for damage: the party composition space is wide enough to keep hour 40 feeling different from hour 15. Attacks and blocks also incorporate timed button presses, a small nod to the series' action roots that stops combat from becoming fully passive menu navigation. The real criticisms are legitimate. The grind walls are not subtle. There are at least two points in the main story where the difficulty spikes sharply enough that you will need to run repetitive encounters just to hit the required level threshold, old-school Dragon Quest style rather than the gentle cushion modern JRPGs typically build in. The Business Management minigame, Ichiban Holdings, wears out its welcome faster than it should, and it gates a party member behind progression in it, which feels punishing. Some side content is genuinely brilliant; the substories range from touching to outrightly hilarious. Others are pure filler, and the series' tendency to pad XP requirements has not been cured here, only managed. The story also has a few twists too many in its back half, which dilutes some of the emotional payoff the first two-thirds carefully builds. None of that changes the core verdict: this is a 60-to-80 hour JRPG with a Metacritic score of 83 that feels considerably better than that number suggests. The ending left multiple reviewers (and me, vicariously, through dozens of community posts) genuinely emotional. Ichiban's arc is about dreams, about middle-aged people refusing to accept that the world has moved on without them, and the game commits to that theme harder than most RPGs with twice the budget. If you have any patience for turn-based combat and any tolerance for deeply earnest crime-drama storytelling, this one does not disappoint.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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