Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii Review
I can only imagine what it is like to be a developer at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio.
It seems like every year, RGG releases a brand-new Like a Dragon game (and some years, two of them). While they’ve mastered the art of asset recycling, that still has to be a strain and probably why they started making gaidens, or shorter LaD stories. Rather than hundred-hour-plus games, gaidens tell a more manageable 40-hour story that often fills in the blanks of the larger narrative. For example, in the previous gaiden, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, we learned what Kiryu was up to after his “death” in Yakuza 6; he was playing secret agent! Like if James Bond was Japanese and a virgin (allegedly). Now RGG is back with their latest gaiden, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, and they’re casting another of their main characters in an archetypal role, this time as a pirate.
Hawaii is in crisis. Pirate ships sail the high seas like it’s the Age of Discovery. Roving gangs of rogues roam the islands, looking for good times, fights, and booty. Amidst this chaos, a young boy, Noah Rich, finds a half-drowned man washed up on the beach of his small island village. Tattooed and wearing an eyepatch, this stranger does not remember his name or past but relies on his muscle memory to save him and Noah from a vicious gang of wannabe pirates. We know this man as Majima, the Mad Dog of Shimano, but this is a Majima who has lost all his memories. With a blank slate, who will he decide to become in this era of pirate-y chaos in Hawaii?
I mean, come on, he has an eyepatch. What do you think he’s going to do?
After completing Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, I wondered how the developers would reuse the wonderfully realized environment of Honolulu, Hawaii. They’ve neatly dealt with this problem by treating Pirate Yakuza as a coda to the story of Infinite Wealth, using Majima’s pirate-y adventure to tie up dangling plot points. While this approach could have left the game as a rehash rather than its own unique experience, a few elements keep the gameplay feeling fresh.
The first is the return of the real-time combat system of earlier Yakuza entries and Judgment. Button-mashing your way through Hawaii gives the game a significantly different flavor than Infinite Wealth‘s turn-based action. Unlike in Yakuza 0, where Majima had four distinct combat styles, RGG has streamlined it to two. The first is his classic Mad Dog style, which incorporates vicious knife work, acrobatic moves, and complete madness to overwhelm smaller groups of opponents with style and violence.
Now that Majima has become a pirate captain, he also has a brand-new style: Sea Dog! Here, you utilize pirate-friendly weapons like sabers and pistols to blow through massive crowds of scallywags. And you need those crowd-cleaning abilities because, boy, are there some big fights in this game. Though it never reaches the scale of the Dynasty Warriors series, these might be the largest battles in LaD history.
Speaking of big battles: ship-to-ship combat. While navigating the islands of Hawaii, you occasionally come across other pirate ships, launching you into battles on the high seas complete with cannons, machine guns, and even rocket launchers. Unfortunately, ship combat is a little disappointing and lacks the classic Yakuza flair, such as over-the-top Heat Actions. Instead, we get an uninspired, though fun and serviceable, naval combat system.
If you want to be successful as a pirate, you need to assemble a crew. As you meet folks from across the islands, you can ask them to join your ship, usually by completing a substory. To any LaD fans, you might recognize this as the usual setup for the management sim, though they’ve incorporated it into the main quest in this case. You assign your crew members to various positions, including operating the cannons, firing the machine guns, repairing the ship, or joining the boarding party. I’ve always loved the management minigames, so I was delighted to see one integrated into the critical path, lending it greater importance than a sidequest.
One of the biggest joys of Pirate Yakuza is that it’s the first game with Majima as a playable protagonist since Yakuza 0 (if you don’t include the Majima Saga DLC for Yakuza Kiwami 2). Having him as an amnesic protagonist offered RGG Studio a chance to explore who he is at his core without forty years of emotional baggage. Unfortunately, this is a missed opportunity. He may have lost his memory, but he’s still the same Majima. Though many returning characters comment on how different he is acting, I just don’t see it. Losing his memory did not change his personality in the slightest. I suppose he found his paternal instinct, taking excellent care of Noah, but otherwise, he’s pretty normal (well, as “normal” as Majima gets). I wish we had gotten a story where Majima rediscovered who he was, rather than simply have his default personality shine through intact from the start.
Despite this missed opportunity for character development, Hidenari Ugaki delivers his usual compelling performance as Majima, significantly elevating the quality of the writing. He’s been playing the part for 20 years, but you can still hear the glee in his voice as he giggles his way through another death-defying fight against overwhelming odds.
Even though I played the game in Japanese with subtitles, I switched to the English track midway through out of curiosity. Majima’s original English voice actor, Mark Hamill, is a tough act to follow, but if you need to replace him, you could do far worse than famed dungeon master and voice-actor extraordinaire Matthew Mercer. I thought his dulcet tones were a little too smooth when singing karaoke or the game’s opening, a fully choreographed musical theatre number. However, on the whole, his first leading performance as Majima is almost as compelling as his Japanese counterpart. Most importantly, he nailed the laugh, so I have no complaints!
Some of the new supporting characters are fantastic. Noah could have been an annoying tag-along, but his enthusiasm for adventure makes him delightfully endearing. Plus, he has a pet baby tiger named Goro who follows you around and attacks enemies! His dad Jason, your navigator, also joins after spending years on an isolated Hawaiian island trying to drink himself to death. With Majima’s help, he finally starts opening up to his son, and this dynamic is lovely to watch unfold. The ship’s cook, Masaru Fujita, is another great character, although he unfortunately takes part in what might be the most cringe-worthy substory I’ve ever seen in LaD: a live-action dating reality show.
I’ve always found that the FMV segments in these games create a sort of reverse uncanny valley where the character models look more “real” than their live-action counterparts. But even accounting for that, the dialogue and acting found here are astonishingly painful. I hate skipping content, but after 20 minutes of awkward skit comedy, I couldn’t do it anymore. This substory was so bad that it may have knocked a point or two off the score.
My main issue with Pirate Yakuza, though, is a long-standing one. Heads-up: big spoilers ahead.
Early in the plot, we meet our main antagonist: Queen Michele, the ruler of Madlantis, a playground for pirates and ruffians of all types. She’s ambitious, without mercy, and pretty compelling. And, of course, because she’s a woman in a LaD game, she must be put in her place and murdered so the male villain hiding in the shadows can take charge in time for the climactic final battle.
Look, I know that the devs never wanted Kiryu to hit a woman (although this apparently didn’t apply to children or trans women). But we’re well past Kiryu at this point, and the series needs to grow up. And yes, I understand that the climaxes are traditionally two men ripping their shirts off for a bare-knuckle brawl, but this formula has gotten tired after almost a dozen games. If you’re going to give us a worthy female antagonist, don’t just swipe her off the board in the most demeaning way possible to give Majima a guy to punch. RGG, please stop using the story beat of “teaching” an ambitious woman a lesson in humility then killing her. You’ve done it way too many times. It’s a demeaning, old-fashioned, and sexist trope that LaD should have abandoned a half-dozen games ago.
So, does Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii deliver the madcap pirate-y quest starring Majima we were promised? Almost! It certainly isn’t the gold standard of Like a Dragon, or pirate games in general for that matter, but it delivers a solid representation of both. It features one of the series’ best protagonists, tells a pretty compelling story, and fills in many of the blanks left over from Infinite Wealth. I certainly enjoyed it more than The Man Who Erased His Name. Pirate Yakuza might not be the treasure we were hunting, but with its solid plot and a delightful cast of characters, maybe the real treasure was the friends (and enemies) we made along the way!
