"Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii" Review

Publisher: Sega

Developer: RGG Studio

Platforms: Playstation 4, Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Ever since Yakuza 0 came along in 2017 to sweep up my GOTY award (before cohabiting that spot with Persona 5), I've been a loyal Yakuza fan...at least for all of the real-time ones. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life also earned a spot on the GOTY list in its year, as did 2023's Like a Dragon: Ishin (after the series rebranded from Yakuza to Like a Dragon). This series is also rivaled only by Pokemon in how lazy and hashed together its entries are. The best example for me has to be when in Yakuza 6, the instructions menu for two minigames moved at different framerates. The reason? Because one of the minigames existed in prior titles, so they just lifted the menu from that title with its native framerate. Lazy, lazy, lazy...but literally nobody on earth cares. I certainly don't! After all, Yakuza games largely exist as giant playgrounds with both new attractions and a whole host of familiar ones we've seen time and again. Enter Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii (which I'll just be calling Pirate Yakuza from here on out), probably the laziest one of the bunch, and also the weakest of the ones I've played. But don't let that fool you. The world's weakest realtime Yakuza game is leagues better than most of the slop the AAA industry puts out in a given year. So Pirate Yakuza still comes with a firm, firm seal of approval from me. So, hold onto your booty, swab the poop deck, and join me as I regale you with reasons to procure this swashbuckling adventure!

For the first time since Yakuza 0, Pirate Yakuza puts us in the shoes of series co-protagonist Goro Majima: kind of a Joker to leading man Kazuma Kiryu's Batman, to put it simply. At the start, Majima has just woken up as an amnesiac on the shores of Rich Island: a tiny little village somewhat near Hawaii. Our eyepatch-wearing hero is discovered by Noah, an asthmatic child with a heart of gold and a burning desire to see a world beyond the island...and his pet tiger cub who also is named Goro. After Noah gives him some water, Majima more or less swears to protect him with his life...which he gets the chance to do fairly quickly, since some pirates straight out of the 18th Century arrive to cause some trouble. 

No Yakuza story is "straightforward" by any stretch of the imagination, but Pirate Yakuza comes closer to that descriptor than any previous title. Essentially, after some character introductions and scene-setting, Majima gets his own pirate ship: the Goromaru (named after the tiger since Majima doesn't remember his own name). With his ship and a new crew of friends in tow, our band of merry men sets out on the high seas (and Waikiki) in search of the ultimate fortune: a hidden trove of Incan treasure said to contain an elixir for eternal life. So, a pretty straightforward treasure hunt, and that's actually one of my complaints. 

Half the reason I come to a Yakuza game is for plots so ridiculously convoluted as to be laughable. I come to these plots to witness not double-crosses, not triple-crosses, not quadruple-crosses, but super-mega-quintuple-crosses from people who were actually double-triple agents working for the bad guys to work for the good guys to secretly work for the bad guys again, all in the service of some insane scheme. And furthermore, I come to those plots to watch the developers take them so seriously that you'd think someone died of cancer. These plots are the one thing that effort usually goes into, so they're always a highlight. But while there are occasional bouts of extreme seriousness, some double-crosses, and a ridiculously fun Muppet Treasure Island-style song sequence that kicks this whole thing off, it's honestly a pretty boring story, which a pirate story should never be. This is due in large part to the fact that most of the plot is padding. There's an awful lot of sitting around and reviewing what the team has learned so far. That and "we'd better upgrade our equipment and reach 'x' rank of notoriety". The biggest draw of a Yakuza game is always the side stuff, but normally the main stuff is an excellent palette cleanser...this time it felt like a bit of a chore to do the story. So, not exactly a small complaint, but it could be worse.

On the subject of side stuff, Pirate Yakuza is as packed with excellent diversions as you might expect. You have the usual suspects such as mahjong, karaoke, shogi, etc. But there are also new iterations of older activities that breathe some new life into them. For instance, batting centers have always been a staple of the Yakuza series, but here the batting is kind of like an explosive pirate Candy Crush where you hit cannonballs (instead of baseballs) to strategically blow up red barrels to unlock a hidden treasure. As I was writing that out, I realized that it probably sounds mega-lame, but it's anything but! There's also an excellent golf minigame that I think is new, and if you're like me and you refuse to play the new turn-based Yakuza titles, side activities such as Dragon Kart, Crazy Delivery, and Sicko Snap might as well be new! Those particular minigames may be taken directly from last year's Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth alongside its entire Hawaii map, but whenever reuse of old content is brought up, I just remember that the Kamurocho map has been used upwards of 6 times altogether. 

So, altogether a solid array of the kinds of things that are always the main draw of a Yakuza title. The familiar stuff plus one or two newer ideas to make it interesting! 

The only weak link of the bunch that I can point to is some of the substories. There are, of course, the usual slew of zany little concepts to enjoy (such as a substory that implies the tiger cub is secretly a tsundere with feelings for Majima), but there are also some pretty stale ones (like one about a coffee shop duo who used to work in comedy). Many substories also revolve around the minigames themselves, requiring reaching certain levels of skill to even unlock, which I always find less-than-ideal. This is where that aforementioned laziness comes through the most: when it comes to thinking up new side quests, it feels like RGG Studio more or less gave up after a handful of good ideas. That being said, I still felt compelled to complete all of them, and I still occasionally feel like going back to engage with the side activities like I always do, so Pirate Yakuza still pulls its weight as far as I'm concerned!

With all that talk of content out of the way, I'm realizing I didn't touch on gameplay at all...so let's change that! Like all good Yakuza titles, this is not turn-based, but a straightforward brawler. In any combat scenario, you'll be greeted with street thugs or some big character boss, and you'll use punches, quick dodges, arm blocks, grabs, and nearby objects to fight your way to victory. If you've ever played a title in this saga before, this will be nothing new. 

However, in Pirate Yakuza, a new combat mode for most fights is unlocked: Sea Dog mode. In this mode, Majima fights like a pirate: with cutlasses, pistols, and a grappling hook. This is the better combat mode by far, as it comes with better crowd-control capabilities as well as built-in distance-closing with the grappling hook. And that's to say nothing of the magic instruments he can play in this style to summon things like spectral sharks. 

My only real complaint is that you don't get to choose a default mode. If you're on the streets of Waikiki, you'll default to the standard Yakuza mode, and everywhere else you default to Sea Dog mode. You can switch between the two at will, but it doesn't save which one you chose. So if you're anything like me, you'll find yourself constantly having to switch back to the pirate style as you tackle side objectives in Waikiki. Anyway, that's combat while out of your ship.

When you're sailing the open seas, combat is an entirely new beast....for this saga that is. Obviously, the Assassin's Creed series has the right to claim the beginning of proper ship combat, but Pirate Yakuza also does it pretty well! You have cannons on both sides of the ship, swivel machine guns for chip damage between cannon shots, jets on the back to speed up and drift, smokescreens to temporarily hide while you make repairs, and if all else fails, you also have a rocket launcher to use from the deck. All this weaponry can be as simple as I've described it or it can be as typically Yakuza-zany as purple laser cannons, coconut machine guns, and squid rocket launchers. It's up to you! You'll also recruit new pirates from all corners of the map with different stats, and you'll assign them to stations in order to maximize your combat/repair capability. There's a lot more to it than that, but it's a good starting point to understand what goes into ship combat.

I do have some small complaints on the ship side of things, however. For one thing, when you're trying to get from point A to point B, you move SO slowly, and the ship ultimately has a stamina bar for going faster...a feature that I'm pretty sure was one of the rightfully-panned aspects of Skull and Bones. This saga used to be rife with stamina meters while running, but they took that out...so I don't know why they chose to add this back in for simple traversal on the seas. During combat? That would be understandable as a kind of resource management. But for out-of-combat movement? No thanks. 

In addition to this, a problem that I've tended to have with prior titles is the frequency of small battles where you beat the enemies in two seconds. With this complaint, it's kind of a similar story to the stamina factor. Recent entries in this saga have still contained bands of easily-dispatched time-padding enemy bands, but it's been a lot easier to avoid them. On the high seas, though, it's damn near impossible to do so.

So, not only is it painfully slow to get where you're going, but you're going to be interrupted constantly by ship battles that you can't avoid. And if you try to avoid them by just sailing to the edge of the combat area to flee, then your crew's morale drops. The series has made some major quality-of-life strides in recent years, so I don't quite get why they couldn't apply the lessons they've learned to these ocean scenarios. 

On the technical side of things, what is there to report, really? Yakuza games are always stable, bug-free, and graphically unimpressive as a result. There's never anything to complain about. That's one of the benefits of being as lazy as RGG tends to be. After all, Ubisoft does the same thing, and they can't put out a stable release to save their precious french lives! I suppose if I had to make a note of something, it would be the overall lack of NPC dialogue in the overworld. That isn't to say there is none, just that there's so little that you'll hear the same things over and over again within a millisecond of each other. When you're detected by a gang of thugs, you're going to hear this: "get your ass rea-I'll curb stomp ya!" These are two separate lines that are spoken over each other every single time. Likewise, when you find yourself in a crowded area like the Anaconda Shopping Center, you'll hear approximately 3-4 women at a time say either "today is gonna be a blast" or "our reservation might be soon" or some combination of the two constantly. These little hiccups don't affect anything, but I'd be remiss not to at least note that they happen.

So, folks, I know how this all looks. I started this review off by saying this is the weakest of the Yakuza games (the realtime ones). I complained about the story. Then I complained about some of the side quests. Then I complained about some of the street combat limitations. Then I complained about the ship sections. All of that probably makes it seem like my feelings are negative...but that really couldn't be further from the truth! You have to remember that I'm tremendously biased when it comes to this series. I eat it up like nothing else, and it never truly disappoints me (except with the turn-based stuff). I've neglected to mention it until now, but I did get the platinum trophy for this, and I completed a bunch of other 100% completion criteria as well. I recruited all possible pirate crew members, I collected every last treasure in the compendium, I knocked out all the bounties, I unlocked every skill upgrade, I conquered the entire pirate coliseum, the list goes on. At time of writing, I'll still occasionally pop back in to try and make progress on the last completion item: the challenge list. I think it's safe to say that I loved this game...it's just that other iterations have done it better. So, keep all of that in mind when considering whether or not to purchase this particular entry. If you're in the mood for a fun but fairly shallow pirate story, look no further! If you want a smorgasbord of entertaining activities to take part in, here you are! If you want some more of that tried and true Yakuza brawling action and an even more fun pirate option on top of it, do not pass go, do not collect $200! Despite earlier entries being pretty clearly stronger than this one, Pirate Yakuza is a worthy title alongside the best of them.

Let us review:

Weak story - 0.5

Some weaker side stuff - 1.0

Combat and ship woes - 0.5

The final score for Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is...

8.0/10 - Great

Great work as always, RGG Studio, great work as always!