Why Yakuza: Like a Dragon May Be One of The Biggest Games of the Year
567These days, few of Sega’s franchises are as healthy and vibrant as the Yakuza series. The in-depth look at various Japanese cities, and its examination of the crime families that run the underground of those cities has proven to be a setting that has no limit on the number of stories that can be told and characters that can emerge from it. On top of that, the engine and gameplay style that Yakuza games rest on has shown itself to be formidable in the face of gamers’ ever-changing expectations with many great Yakuza games benefitting from the format, even other games like Judgement and Fist of the North Star, that clearly have the same skeleton of the Yakuza games underneath, are fantastic experiences despite deviating little from that overall structure.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the franchise’s newest installment; Yakuza; Like a Dragon, is doing well in Japan and has plenty of people excited in the West, awaiting its official western launch later this year. This isn’t going to be just another Yakuza game though. Despite Keeping the namesake of the almost 20-year-old franchise in-tact, Yakuza Like a Dragon is going out of its way to shake things up in several areas that might just give the game an edge over the competition once all the dust settles.