‘Like a Dragon’ Is a Gangster Story With Both Beatings and a Beating Heart
‘Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii’ is the latest, silliest illustration of the series’ enduring code
I have a lot of respect for Martin Scorsese, emperor of cinema and TikTok sensation, and as such I am ready to go to war with anyone who puts the man in the “He only tells gangster stories” box. (Kundun, HEARD OF IT???) But I must confess: I really love Scorsese’s gangster stories. Frankly, all gangster stories rule, not just for their slick power fantasies and spectacular demises (which I also enjoy) but for reasons closer to what writer and You’re Wrong About podcaster Sarah Marshall once described as their subtextual exploration of straight men’s inability to form intimate relationships under capitalism. In other words, it is hard for dudes to rock when dudes are constantly operating under a code of omertà or endeavoring to become “made.”
The Like a Dragon series of video games poses a powerful counterargument: What if it weren’t?
Like a Dragon, originally known as Yakuza, chronicles the exploits of legendary mobster Kazuma Kiryu and his associates, which unfold roughly in real time from 2005 to the present over nine mainline games, plus a dozen spinoffs. The series’ latest entry, out this week, appears at first glance to have lost the plot. For one, it’s called Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, a title that’s both audacious and quite literal. In the game, you play as an amnesiac former yakuza member who becomes a modern-day pirate in Hawaii, complete with a ship and Jack Sparrow–y cosplay. What else would you call it?
Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is absurd on its face, but also in context. It is, after all, the latest installment in a 20-year-old series about gangsters warring over narrow slices of Japan, one that heretofore has not once suggested that there are grown-ass men pretending to be Blackbeard in and around the Hawaiian Islands. In most other long-running series, this would be a jump the shark moment, the kind that introduces an idea so outlandish that business as usual suddenly seems impossible. That’s not the case with Like a Dragon, though, and the reason for that is astonishingly simple. At the end of the day, even the latest game, like its less piratical predecessors, is still a gangster story with an unshakable conviction in one guiding principle: Nothing can come between a man and his code.
In Pirate Yakuza, that man is Goro Majima, who washes up on the shore of the fictional Rich Island with no memories of his past life. This makes the game as good an entry point into the series as any—although longtime fans know that his past life is a storied one, going all the way back to the first Yakuza game, in which Majima was introduced as the Joker to the series' Batman, Kiryu. Across many games, Majima grew in depth and in fan regard, becoming one of the most pivotal and popular characters in the series. But here, he’s just a guy who wakes up, sees a bunch of other guys cosplaying the pirate life, and decides, yeah, that would be fun.
He also learns that he hates bullies.
“No matter who I am or where I come from, if I just stand by and watch,” Majima says when he sees a wannabe pirate about to hit a kid, “how can I call myself a man?”
That’s the heart and soul of Like a Dragon, distilled into a single moment. In the grand tradition of crime fiction, Westerns, and adventure stories, Like a Dragon is overwhelmingly focused on the moral cost of doing nothing when others are in danger and you have the power to help. Usually, violently.
This is one of the most durable tenets in fiction, the motivational fuel powering everything from Spider-Man comic books to Jack Reacher novels (and shows!) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The magic of Like a Dragon lies in how it takes that moral core, pairs it with the rigid social mores of the criminal underworld, and then gives players the room to interact with people who are not from that world. This is where the humor of these games kicks in: watching Like a Dragon’s comically stoic heroes, who mostly think about their blood oaths and duties, suddenly be forced to form opinions on things they’ve never thought about before.
They often face these quandaries in what are called substories, which are meant as a break from the gangster soap opera of the main plot and are, generally speaking, a riot. Play any game in the series, and you’re likely to find a substory worth talking about. I’m partial to several from 2015’s Yakuza 0, an ’80s-set prequel, in which, should you choose to take the time, you can find a film set where everyone confuses you for a producer simply because of how you’re dressed, asks for your opinion on everything, and flatters you even if your responses are patently stupid. There’s also the one from 2017’s Yakuza Kiwami 2 where a fellow yakuza member rewards you by setting you up at a role-play brothel that your character isn’t into, which leads to an after-school-special-style lesson about not imposing your kink on other people.
Fans like me live for these substories because they’re funny, for one, but also because they’re principled, after a fashion. While Like a Dragon protagonists can change, all of them tend to embrace a sort of macho pluralism, largely adhering to heteronormative standards but even more strongly believing in a live-and-let-live philosophy. There is nothing more offensive to a Like a Dragon protagonist than someone imposing their will on others. That calls for an ass kicking.
Thus, it’s not that big a leap for one of Like a Dragon’s most beloved characters to wash up on a beach, discover that some assholes are out on the open ocean pretending to be pirates, and decide that dressing up to yo-ho his way to beating them down is a good idea. For Pirate Yakuza protagonist Goro Majima, the arena and clothes might be different, but the principle is the same: Bad guys who set themselves up on the backs of others need to be taken down a peg. And if you can replace them on the top, why not give it a shot?
For the uninitiated, Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is not the total Like a Dragon package. It’s more of a sampler of the series’ zanier traits, less concerned with its love for melodrama and character development. It’s also extremely short, inviting the player to pad their playtime by indulging in many arcade-y diversions—Gladiator II–style Colosseum naval battles, Tetris-flavored batting cages, and a raft of goofy new substories. Blitz past all that, and you’ll find an intriguing but shallow story of rootless men adrift after the dissolution of their crime families and ensnared in a new form of zealotry.
This is the drawback of a series this sprawling and its annual release schedule, in which massive “main” games (like last year’s Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth) alternate with more incremental diversions like Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. In many respects, this is fine—these games have tremendous appeal beyond the main story they tell, which now spans the equivalent of many seasons of television. (Ironically, the series isn’t very good as actual television.)
However, while Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii demonstrates Like a Dragon’s astonishing elasticity, it may not hammer home what keeps people coming back to this prolific series: the one small way it continually zigs where other gangster stories would zag. If the gangster story as modeled by Scorsese and his many contemporaries and imitators operates in the tragic mode, where ambition and trust erode each other to the point that genuine bonds are impossible, then Like a Dragon games obsessively insist on the opposite. They’re just as indebted to tropes, but they draw from a different well: Japanese classics like the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series, or the crime oeuvre of legendary actor Takeshi Kitano. And at their most memorable, they are grand, violent struggles in which men strain against their conditioning to slowly reach the bloody realization that they mean something to one another, and then fight on in the hope that it’s not too late to do something about it.