Like a Dragon – the game series formerly known as Yakuza – has been going for almost 20 years. These are melodramatic games about the feuds and inner humanity of Japanese gangsters, one part soap-opera, one part kerb-stomping, chair-throwing over-the-top brawler and one part surprisingly true-to-life recreation of Japanese city nightlife. In their cities, from Osaka to Yokohama, in between knocking thugs’ heads together and navigating Yakuza clan drama, you can eat and drink at real-world bars and restaurants, duck into an arcade and play the games there, visit hostess clubs and sing karaoke. For a lot of its overseas players, its vibrant, sleazy recreations of Tokyo’s nightlife have been their first introduction to modern Japan.
But that was never the intention. “When we made this game, we never planned on releasing it overseas. We didn’t think people would like it,” says Hiroyuki Sakamoto, now series director, who’s been working on the series since its first planning meetings in 2003. “So we were able to focus on our Japanese audience, on making a game for and of Japan … we thought we were making a game that was probably only ever gonna be enjoyed by older guys with an interest in [Tokyo nightlife district] Kabukicho and its criminal underworld.”
When Sega released the first game in 2006 in North America and Europe, a year after its Japanese debut, its positive reception came as a surprise to the publisher. The sequels took even longer to make it out of Japan – up to two years – but over time, as it became a smash hit at home, the series also amassed an ever-growing legion of fans who appreciated its hardbitten stories and unexpected, oddball humour. “Eventually we started taking localisation seriously, and a great many more people were experiencing them,” says Sakamoto. “Because of all the time and effort we’ve spent developing games about this side of Japan, I think we are in a unique position to represent it to the world.”
The studio’s latest, Like a Dragon: Ishin!, is out today – though it is actually a remake of a Japan-only spin-off thatv was originally released on PlayStation 3 in 2013. Like a Dragon, though, hasn’t really changed much in the last decade, so you’d be forgiven for thinking it was new. Set during one of the most interesting and tumultuous periods of Japanese history, the Bakumastu period, during which the shogunate was clinging to power, Ishin improbably transplants all of Yakuza’s tongue-in-cheek violence and macho posturing to 19th-century Kyoto. It has brothels, restaurants, even karaoke, alongside chicken-racing and mahjong.
Ishin does for historical Japan what the rest of the series does for modern Japan: it makes you feel like you’re there. It follows the life of Sakamoto Ryoma, one of the most famous real-life samurai in Japanese history, but played by Kazuma Kiryu, the stoic gangster-with-a-heart-of-gold hero of the rest of the Like a Dragon games. Wild characters from the series stand in for other historical figures, making for a livelier, weirder take on Japanese history than what you’d see in samurai cinema. I’m playing it in Berlin’s Samurai Museum, surrounded by artefacts from the period in history that it recreates.
This is hardly an underexplored era in fiction, but I’ve never seen it depicted quite like this, with strange little side-stories and drunken nights out interspersing the clashing of blades (and bullets). In two hours with the game, I ingratiated myself with the shogunate’s samurai police force by slicing up one of its generals, out-drank a courtesan and played strip rock-paper-scissors (this series’ sexual humour is nothing if not unselfconscious), and found a quiet spot in the slums for some fishing. Even when it’s trying its hand at historical fiction, Like a Dragon doesn’t take itself overly seriously.
I’ve always imagined – given the playfulness that lurks just beneath the macho crime drama – that the development team must enjoy themselves while making it. But Sakamoto puts me right. “Making games is horribly difficult. I can’t think of anything I especially enjoy about it,” he tells me, deadpan. (He’s been in game development since 2000, when he worked on Sega’s arcade games.) “Every aspect of it is difficult. I try not to think, ‘this is fun’, because actually this is all hard work.”
I guess the fun is left up to the players. As a result of all that hard work, these games are transporting – the detail of their settings is the result of months of research and effort from the developers, who have travelled the country taking pictures and soaking up the atmosphere. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has recreated almost every major city in the country now, and several small towns, such as Onomichi in Hiroshima, that you’d be hard-pressed to tell from the real place in screenshots. If you’ve ever spent time in Tokyo, wandering Yakuza’s virtual streets feels powerfully nostalgic, like walking through a memory.
“The thing that we focus on the most is the atmosphere of the place,” explains Hiroyuki Sakamoto. “We want players to feel like they’ve been there, even if they never have … we play with lighting, we play with texture, we play with the foot-traffic on the streets … we think not just about accuracy, when you compare our locations to real life, but also how it would feel to play it. We take a lot of effort to balance the real and the unreal, to make it as enjoyable as possible.”
Like a Dragon: Ishin! is out now on PlayStation 4/5, Xbox and PC.
Keza MacDonald attended a press trip to Berlin with other journalists. Travel and accommodation was provided by Sega.
