Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Game That Erased Some DLC
This piece includes discussion of major plot points from Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, Yakuza: Like A Dragon and Like A Dragon: Gaiden.
We could have just told of Kiryu’s past through a thirty-minute interlude as part of Like a Dragon 8, but we decided it would be a lot more interesting as a game of its own, which is how the project came to be. Though this meant having a whole extra game to make, it still uses the same engine, so we thought ‘It’s not like we have to make it from scratch,’ and decided to go with it.
We’re starting off with a quote from the director of Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name so it can hang over the premise of this piece much like it did over my playthrough of the actual game. In retrospect, it was a ballsy move to admit in public while promoting your £44.99 game that it was grown together in six months and could have been a 30 minute cutscene in your next release instead, but sitting here now on the other side of playing through Gaiden it seems even 30 minutes would have been somewhat of a stretch.
There’s no succinct way to summarise all the twists and turns that lead longtime series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu to the events of Gaiden but we’ll try and hit the high points to examine what was so important about this story that Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio felt they needed to commit a near full-priced separate release to it. At the end of Yakuza 6: The Song of Life Kiryu faked his death as part of a pact with an organisation called the Daidoji Faction where he would disappear from the world to protect the earth-shattering secrets he discovered during the events of the game in exchange for the guaranteed safety of everyone he cares about in his life. Despite SEGA promoting Yakuza 6 as the end of Kiryu’s story, he unsurprisingly shows up anyway in Yakuza: Like A Dragon as hired muscle for one of the series’ prominent Yakuza clans (the Omi Alliance) to keep the planned dissolution of the Yakuza itself silky smooth.
Gaiden hopes to bridge the gap and explain what became of Kiryu inbetween these two games but the very nature of this premise runs into two problems: 1) the story of Gaiden cannot contradict the events of either game, but it also cannot eat any of the upcoming Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s lunch in terms of offering resolution or development to Kiryu’s situation and 2) Kiryu’s appearance in Yakuza: Like A Dragon is a glorified cameo where his only role in the story is as hired muscle and later as a meta baton-passing boss battle for new series protagonist Ichiban Kasuga, so there’s little justification for why we need such a detailed explanation for these events in the first place.
In the end these parameters turned out too strict to give Gaiden anywhere meaningful to go. In the first couple of chapters the game threatens to become interesting where the Daidoji and Omi Alliance get into a scrap over who gets to hold Kiryu’s leash and eventually the Dragon of Dojima has heat moved his way into opposition against both factions. Fortunately, the events of Yakuza: Like A Dragon are destined to happen, so a tensionless execution scene is conveniently resolved by the announcement that the Daidoji and Omi Alliance have made a deal somewhere off screen with all the logic and narrative catharsis of “a wizard did it” as an explanation. The second half of the game sees the Daidoji fade into the background as Kiryu is given free reign to work with the Omi Alliance and fend off a debuting family captain who threatens the planned dissolution. While this character makes for a decent villain this whole episode feels dramatically hollow since Kiryu has no personal beef with this guy and the greatest threat he presents is undermining events that we already know for sure will happen.
This is where Gaiden’s story strains and struggles to justify its own existence, the results of Kiryu’s decision at the end of Yakuza 6 and the impossibility of breaking that arrangement during this portion of the continuity strips Kiryu of most of his agency, and the times where he has to make decisions that undermine this arrangement to protect the intregity of the character we’ve know for nearly two decades are handwaived off with pure contrivance. There’s dramatic scenes early on where it feels like Kiryu will have to compromise his morals to keep his agreement with the Daidoji, but there’s always another twist hiding around the corner to bail him out of the consequences for any of his actions. At the very least you’d think Gaiden would dedicate some time to exploring how Kiryu feels about the planned dissolution of the Tojo Clan, which he wasted most of his adult life protecting or rebuilding in some way, but even that is quickly dismissed within a couple of lines of dialogue where Kiryu essentially says “that decision is above my paygrade”. Gaiden doesn’t tell us anything interesting that we didn’t already know before, neither about any events in the story or Kiryu himself.
So the claim that Gaiden’s story was meaty enough to become its own entry feels flimsy at best given it doesn’t offer any explanation for Kiryu’s post-Yakuza 6 appearances more satisfying than a single line of dialogue “the Daidoji and Omi came to a mutually beneficial arragement” woud have done. In most Like A Dragon games the soap opera twists and turns where characters switch sides, people “die” only to show up later and the layers of politics and faction warfare grow more and more complex are endearing knee-slapping highlights, but in Gaiden these moments end up more frustrating than fun since they feel more like necessary mechanisms to steer the story away from anything too interesting while stretching out the runtime.
The strain felt in the narrativecan also be felt in the game design as well, many of the mandatory main story objectives feel needlessly padded out too, witih the worst offender being when you’re forced to run between your home base and your weapons guy on opposite corners of the map about half a dozen times. The game also presents a facade that it comes packaged with the series trademark hefty pick n’ mix of side content, however the majority of it is copy and paste colliseum matches, fetch quests and phoned-in substories. There are a couple of highlights such as substories about ChatGPT and a streamer who wants film ghosts, but most of them are the definition of filler with the most egregious example being a “story” where you have to run to over a dozen random spots on the map to beat up generic gang members, and since there’s three gangs the game charitably counts this as three substories. Not only does it feel like the game leans on combat more than usual within these stories, but even the fights themselves show stretchmarks with random ordinary people you meet in these missions metamorphically rip their shirts off to reveal purple multi-layered health bars for you to grind away at for a couple of minutes, when in a better entry like Yakuza 0 they likely would have been presented as a subversive one-and-done combo non-fight.
The Like A Dragon franchise is rightfully celebrated for its side content and overall structure and you could argue Gaiden would feel off if it streamlined the experience too much to hyperfixate on the narrative…you could also argue that Kiryu having free reign to piss about doing his usual daily routine of side quests contradicts what little themes the story has regarding “a man who erased his name”. Either Way, when it comes to adding value to an open world role playing game, the key aspect of side content is it actually has to have some content…otherwise it’s just a list of chores between the player and the upgrades that make the game fun.
All of this is frustrating because on paper Gaiden is the exact kind of release that the big-budget games industry needs to be pivoting towards. We all saw the spark of a dreamlike future when Rockstar put out Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008 and followed it up two years later with multiple narrative-focused expansions The Lost and The Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony set in the same city. The cost and time needed to develop blockbuster games has magnified to the point where the entire industry is on the brink of collapse, so if we’re going to commit to building these mammoth spaces for play it only makes both economic and artistic sense to reuse them for multiple experiences. The few times the major developers have dipped their toes into these tactics, such as The Last of Us: Left Behind and Spider-Man: Miles Morales, having many ingredients ready to hand opens the gate to different types of creativity and often leads to more focused, intriguing works that can outjoust their bloated older siblings. Little did we know back when Grand Theft Auto IV expansions were releasing that Rockstar would set this dream on fire by only reusing the future Grand Theft Auto V’s world to tell the story of themselves converting their game into a casino where you can pay real money to gamble with fake money. We didn’t need them though, because on the other side of the world there was a studio who had been sprinting full force towards that dream since the PlayStation 2 with annual Like A Dragon entries predominately set in the exact same city each time.
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio are lightyears ahead of the industry on this front and make no mistake their ability to economically recycle is a core strength of the Like A Dragon game. It allows the developers to churn out expansive scale-breaking sequels on a regular basis without losing the charm of a series that is still using the exact same canned animations from the PlayStation 2 games in substory textbox scenes. There’s no doubt that after nearly two decades the team have got development for these games down to a science, which is the exact reason Gaiden reeks of a word that’s never been associated with the series before: cynical.
As I ran laps of the map between substance-lacking fetch quests I thought of the trailers proudly boasting a list of extraneous minigames, most of which are now at least ten years old, as a diverse range of content. I thought about the developers candidly admitting that that knocked this out in six months and it could have just been a 30-minute cutscene in the next entry that’s out in two months time. And I thought about the £45 price tag the poor marks who don’t have access to Xbox Game Pass have to pay to experience a pointless story that’s doomed to rot on subscription services and two-disc Infinite Wealth special editions after this release window passes. Perhaps even this would be forgivable if Like A Dragon: Gaiden truly was skippable and only existed as fan service for Kiryu fanatics, but given the fact that many of new characters appear to be returning for Infinite Wealth the game somehow manages to tiptoe across the line where it may punish some of the audience for ignoring it while remaining unessential.
All the strengths of the Like A Dragon franchise are firmly on display in Gaiden, but they don’t hit the same because for the first time it feels like the formula has been weaponised against the audience for the sake of coin.
Which now leads us to the punchline of this piece: I still quite enjoyed my time with Like A Dragon: Gaiden. Oops!
It’s my least favourite of the series, almost by default, but these games are still my babies and formula’s gonna formula. As unfulfilling as the narrative itself is Kiryu is a charismatic enough lead that his return to the protagonist spot will be enough to carry the game for many people, especially with his new rocket shoes and Takaya Kuroda’s performance in one of the climatic scenes being gutwrenching to let enough fans come away from the game convinced it was about something. For all my gripes about the quality of the side content I still did 90% of it for a near 20-hour playtime, that’s more than long enough for a videogame, right?
Perhaps this is why this piece has come out a little bit spicy; SEGA and Ryu Ga Gokoto know they have a winning formula with this series and an established audience of millions of people like me who will still eat the gruel off the floor as long as it’s the gruel we know, and there’s the potential for a disastrous slippery slope to emerge here. There’s a chance that Gaiden is a one-off calculated risk; they have somehow put an entire Animal Crossing game inside the next entry and that’s not even going to be the bulk of the side content, so there is a possibility that Infinite Wealth has tiptoed over budget and that’s why Gaiden exists in this state as opposed to a cutscene or cheaper piece of downloadable content. In case that is what’s happening, many of us can agree we’ll look the other way this one time, but this is the line.
So to answer my own question from a paragraph ago: 20 hours is more than enough for a videogame, but so is 5 hours, so is 2 hours, so is 10 minutes. Games don’t have to be any length to “count”, and they don’t have to be made from the ground up every time either, nor do you have to justify reusing larger spaces such as a city setting by sprinkling a lot of tedious chores over it, the space is there because you already made it, and that’s great. Sometimes large scale games need to have enough confidence to remain small, it can only lead to better games and healthier people making said games. Ryu Ga Gotoku understand the value of economic development more than anyone, and with an industry riddled with bloated development times, layoffs and crunch we need them to keep succeeding at what they do best to hold up as an example. I’ll accept Like A Dragon Gaiden, stretchmarks and all, but only with a plea to SEGA and Ryu Ga Gotoku to continue to use their powers for Good.