Last November, I bought and booted up Yakuza 0. I had always been curious about the seri🐷es - what’s the deal with Majima’s eyepatch? How good can a karaoke minigame truly be? Why does everyone and their granny want to French kiss the ground Kazuma Kiryu walks on? Almost a year later, I’ve seen Kiryu’s saga through to the end and can confirm that I, too, would probably smooch dirty concrete for him. It is potentially the single most outstanding example of series-length video game storytelling in history.
So how do you follow that up? After a whopping seven games with one of the most beloved characters to ever grace the medium, how do you introduce someone new? How do you, in good and wise conscience, go about replacing the unequivocally irreplaceable? Simple: you develop 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Yakuza: Like a Dragon and make Ichiban Kasuga its incandescent star.
After stewing on the Yakuza 6 ending for a while - and settling on the fact it’s perfect - I started Yakuza: Like a Dragon earlier this week. I’m only on chapter three at the time of writing, but I’m already sold. I’d like to take a moment to emphasise how big a deal that is. Some people have been playing Yakuza for decades, and so the switch from Kiryu to Ichi was probably a bigger deal for them than it has been for me. On the contrary, I have played seven pretty hefty games in under a year. Ichi’s arrival should have been jarring. Yes, Yakuza 4 starts with Akiyama instead of Kiryu, and yಌes, we get to play as Saejima, Tanimura, and Haruka in later games. This, however, is a completely different phenomenon. It should have felt weird.
And yet it somehow felt like the most organic thing in the world. It’s obviously worth noting that i🔯f there’s any studio more attuned to the triumphs of its proprietary series, it’s probably Ryu Ga Gotoku. Beyond that, however, it’s i🎀mportant to address why those triumphs are so consistently resounding. Ichi isn’t the new Kiryu, nor is he a better version of him. In fact, Ichi is largely an inversion of the Dragon of Dojima, right down to the fact his suit is just Kiryu’s with the primary and secondary colours reversed. He’s not trying to outdo Kiryu. He’s not an evolution of Kiryu. He’s not even a radical opposite of Kiryu. He’s just another stupidly loyal yakuza with morals as admirable as his Kamurochan predecessor.
Consider Ichi’s first major action in Like a Dragon: after chasing down someone who scammed a bunch of teenagers out of their pocket money, he beats him up and takes the stolen wallets back. Ichi is supposed to be out on collections for his boss, meaning that this money is technically his take for the day. Instead of heading back to the family office like any regular yakuza though, Ichi turns to his partner and instructs him to return the money to the victims specifically because he is not a regular y🔥akuza. Do you know who else isn’t a regular yakuza? Kazuma f*cking Kiryu. The only single thing they have in common is that neither of them have anything in common with anyone else.
Yakuza is renowned all over the world for having excellent characters. Earlier this year, I wrote about how Kiwami 2&rsquo🌃;s Ryuji Goda is one of the most brilliantly writt💞en villains in video game history. Everybody loves Majima - especially since the advent of 0 - and despite never having the ♚chance to play as him, Date-san is a lot of people’s favourite recurring character. It’s unsurprising, then, that I’ve already grown to like characters like Adachi, Nanba, and, to some extent, Arakawa - but the main point of interest here is how much I love Ichi. All I can think about as I sit here typing this is “I can’t wait to play Like a Dragon tonight.”
There are obviously plenty of other video games that introduce new characters without ditching the series’ name. While 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mass Effect Andromeda’s Ryder is nowhere near as beloved as Commander Shepard, the space opera’s fantasy sibling, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age, has enjoyed massive success with The Warden, The Champion of Kirkwall, and the Inquisitor. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2 makes us play half the game as Ellie before assuming control of Abby, who a significant amount of people have actually come to prefer. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed specifically riffs off of the fact it can add new protagonists to each game based on shifting historical settings. GTA, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Red Dead Redemption, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy…𒁃 the list goes 🌠on. Yakuza’s move towards a fresh face is clearly nothing new - it’s just unmistakably best-in-class.
I think the main reason for this is because Like a Dragon never really tries too hard to replicate anything from previous entries in th🌄e series. Although we temporarily visit Kamurocho, the bustling streets of Yokohama instantly assert their authority as a gorgeous new setting. It would have been easy to implement a scenario where Kiryu brazenly passes the torch to a new Tojo yakuza, and yet the Dragon of Dojima is completely absent. This absence should theoretically be conspicuous, especially for someone like me who recently played through all of the games, but… it really isn’t. The largest testament to Ichiban’s strength is that at no point in time do I ever consciously or subconsciously compare him to Kiryu - as much as I love Uncle Kaz, his story has already been written and wrapped with finesse. I know he makes a cameo later on because the internet is a horrible place of spoilers and noise, but I’m not actively looking out for it or even particularly curious about what it entails.The only thing on my mind when I’m playing Like a Dragon is what Ichi and his buds are going to get up to next.
I’m not very far into Like a Dragon yet, although it’s already clear to me that this is a perfect, subtle evolution of the series’ storytelling. If RGG decided to make a game with Kiryu, Majima, Akiyama, Saejima, and the rest of the gang again, I’d obviously devour it with the ferocity of a Dublin man attacking his first pint on a Friday evening. At the same time, I don’t need that game. Right now, all I re⛎ally want to do is get to know Ichiban better - three chapters in, he&rsquo𝕴;s already worthy of his own seven games.