The class system is cleverly disguised inside of part time jobs. This creative license with the enemy composition meant that getting caught in a battle never became a chore. On the surface I might really be slugging it out with a salaryman who had one too many drinks at the bar, but due to Ichiban’s overactive imagination, I saw him as a 12-foot-tall giant with a telephone pole for a weapon. Unique enemies with outlandish attacks prowled around every corner. While I strolled through the town, various thugs would initiate fights, giving Ichiban and I a chance to level up our experience. Yakuza offers a fully fleshed-out rendition of Yokohama, with convenience stores, vending machines, restaurants and traffic that made me feel right at home. I was able to customize my party with a variety of different moves and personality styles, ensuring that entertaining banter always followed me across the streets of Yokohama. These include, but are not limited to an ex-cop, a restaurant hostess, and an assassin. Along the way, he meets quite a few friends, some of which join the combat party and others who support from the sidelines. Without spoiling anything, the titular hero Ichiban has a series of unlucky experiences and suddenly finds himself climbing up from rock bottom. Making successive games about the seedy criminal underbelly of Japan sometimes needs a twist to keep the storytelling exciting, and the narrative here does not disappoint. These homages to great games that came before continued throughout the adventure, and if I got the reference, I always smiled at how the developers were able to seamlessly weave in so many disparate ideas. Our intro battle involved my team taking out a trio of yakuza in green, red and blue suits, a clear nod to the original starter pocket monsters. I met a mad scientist clearly inspired by Pokémon’s Professor Oak, who provided me with a smartphone app that categorized all of the unique ne’r-do-wells I’d meet over my travels. While the Yakuza franchise is a powerhouse in its own right, this particular game reads like a love letter to Japanese games writ large. I was enamored with both the atmosphere and characters of the game almost as soon as I picked up my controller. The combat mechanics have been reimagined as well, trading the active fighting game style of the previous games for a turn-based combat system that will be familiar to Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest players. Yakuza: Like a Dragon debuts an all-new protagonist to the series, Ichiban Kasuga. While I would probably be safe saying that they have carved out their own genre at this point, the title would be best described to a newcomer as a Japanese-inspired Grand Theft Auto-style adventure game. This battle arena was becoming more and more metal by the minute.Īs bizarre as that sequence sounds, it’s par for the course for Yakuza: Like a Dragon, a soft reboot of the beloved Yakuza franchise. A few floors after that, my team of four needed to defeat a 60-ton excavator. A few floors later, I was greeted by a tiger as the floor boss. Here, however, I found myself dealing with a top-hat-wearing man juggling purple flaming bowling pins, a lost surfer looking like a fish out of water, and a nine-foot-tall Captain Blackbeard lookalike with a massive trident. Most of the enemies thus far had been standard yakuza thugs. My team entered the Sotenbori Battle Arena, and successfully reached the 6th floor.
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