I thought Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii would burn me out on the Like a Dragon series, but now I know that's never going to happen

When I look at the trajectory of the Yakuza series over the last decade I feel dizzy. Yakuza 0 released 10 years ago and is arguably the game that catapulted the series from cult awareness to mainstream success in the west. The following year, in 2016, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio released Yakuza 6, which was meant to capstone the long and elaborate Kazuma Kiryu saga, thus making room for a series refresh. And boy did the series get a refresh, even if RGG refuses to let go of Kiryu.

After a relatively quiet 2017 (we got Yakuza Kiwami 2), the brilliant Judgment made its debut in 2018, which was meant to keep us company until the big seventh Yakuza instalment arrived in 2020. Yakuza: Like a Dragon famously swapped the series' crisp beat 'em up fighting with JRPG-inspired turn-based combat, and replaced the steely-but-gentle Kiryu with starry-eyed puppy dog Ichiban Kasuga.

A lot more has happened since then. Like a Dragon has had a sequel in the form of Infinite Wealth. We've also had a Judgment sequel, and a Like a Dragon: Ishin! remake. For tragics who used to import these games from Japan near the beginning of the century, this embarrassment of riches is welcome and, to a degree, enduringly inexplicable. What's even more surprising is that Yakuza hasn't sanded away its quirks for the sake of international success. To the contrary: it's become quirkier.

Yakuza 7's turn-based combat was revealed as an April Fools joke. Everyone knows RGG are cheerful lunatics, but when this "joke" turned out to be true it was a real statement of intent from the studio, while also giving many diehards a valid reason to abandon the series. It was a huge shift in the series' DNA, the likes of which few—or no—other studios would dare attempt. Even if you weren't super onboard with the zany melodrama of its meandering plots, you could at least play Yakuza games as action games.

Fast forward to 2025, and the turn-based Yakuza outings are now considered main courses, while the beat 'em up Yakuza games come in the form of offshoots: see Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, and now, um, let me check my notes: Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. It takes series favourite Goro Majima—a zany, charismatic but utterly lethal Yakuza—and turns him into a pirate.

I was pretty sceptical of Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Like most Yakuza enthusiasts, I love Majima, and have long wanted him to have his own game. But Majima-as-pirate seemed to be a step too far in the zany direction for RGG. After all, as funny and bizarre as Yakuza games can be, those qualities usually complement the straightfaced melodrama of their main stories. Remember, this series used to be set almost entirely in the streets of a small pocket of Tokyo, and was pretty much entirely concerned with the endless bickering and politicking of Yakuza families. Nowadays they're hardly about the Japanese criminal underworld at all.

Which is fine, but pirates? To use an analogy: When a kid does something silly that's funny, and people laugh at them, the kid will do it again, but more intensely. This usually keeps going until the kid completely over-eggs the whole thing, the spectators get annoyed, and the kid somehow hurts themself. That's close to what I imagined happening to RGG after Pirate Yakuza was announced. This is too stupid, gang. You're veering too zany. You're going to hurt yourselves.

But I'm happy to report that Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is another goddamned masterpiece. Within the first hour I had beaten the shit out of a bunch of dumb pirate LARPers, sang in an elaborate musical-inspired jaunt aboard my ship, and made friends with both a chicken and a cat. Later on, I wander the streets of Honolulu shouting "aloha!" at people, which adds them to my friends list on an in-game social media app. I meet an embittered mascot who wants me to collect cards, for some reason. We are back.

You know the drill by now: it takes Pirate Yakuza about 10 hours to get going. The story is drip fed amid countless invitations to partake in its side content: want to play a batting game with explosives? How about a spot of mahjong? Or karting? Why not recruit a pack of weirdos to help on your pirate ship? Etc etc. Brilliant stuff, obviously.

Having played every single mainline Yakuza game, I can confidently say that Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii isn't doing much that's new. Sure, there is sailing, but it's arcade sailing, and anyway, I'm speaking broadly: every Yakuza game brings some new feature to the table, some new novelty, but the broader format has not changed much, save the switch to turn-based combat in 7. Elsewhere, the Yakuza series continues to get away with the flagrant re-use of maps, mini-games and locations, which is usually enough to get any studio drawn-and-quartered on Reddit.

But Yakuza is (mostly) resistant to this kind of criticism. It coasts along because it's an inherently charming series with a much stronger sense of what it is than any other living videogame series. In 2025, everywhere you look, blockbuster games are having existential crises trying to adapt to the ephemeral tastes of an indeterminate "mass audience". Not RGG: they've just released a 30-hour joke game about a Yakuza roaming the Pacific Ocean as an amnesiac pirate, with a baby tiger as a companion, and a rhythm-based cooking mini-game, and they're charging $60 for it, and people are buying it.

It's true that RGG benefits from working with a 20-year-old series, and has carved out a production routine that works efficiently for them. But that only explains how the studio manages to dole these games out at such a brisk pace. It doesn't explain why all of them are so reliably engaging. The Yakuza games remind me of Twin Peaks more than anything: there's a deliberate meshing together of tones that would normally be at odds. This constant tonal conflict contributes to an identity and an atmosphere that is near ineffable. In Yakuza's case, the major ingredients seem derived from TV melodrama, action movie machismo and surrealist comedy, but there's also gameshow elements, 1990s action cartoons, and now… musicals. All of this combined makes Like a Dragon feel like a truly wild experiment.

I may have characterised Pirate Yakuza as an offshoot earlier, but in reality it's not, and that's the most amazing thing. Whereas earlier "offshoots"—the zombie-slaughtering Dead Souls, the 19th century-based Ishin—were totally separate from the main Yakuza games, Pirate Yakuza is emphatically not. Its story very clearly intersects with the mainline games, disallowing the possibility that this weird 'n' experimental pirate game—so beyond the scope of feasibility—is not canon. No, this is what you now have to accept as Like a Dragon canon, folks: it's total bullshit, you never saw it coming, and 10 years ago we would have written it off as a joke. And [psych!] that's why it's good.