As I’m still trying to catch up with the Yakuza series, it has managed to end it’s main storyline and start a new one. Like a Dragon, while technically a “Yakuza 7”, is an attempt at having a fresh start, in more ways than just the story. For one, despite looking and playing mostly like the previous games, its combat has been switched from a beat em up to a full on party turn-based jRPG. And while it sounds pretty wild, the results are a bit tamer than I would’ve hoped.
The overall progression of the game is more or less the same as in previous entries in Yakuza series. You have an open world that is less huge in terms of pure size and more about being dense with details and stories. You have a story told in chapters, which combines comedic and dramatic turns and tells a story of a yakuza, except this time it’s Ichiban Kasuga and not Kyriu, who’s story more or less concluded in the previous title. You have a bunch of substories/side-quests that tell amusing and often touching stories. You get a ton of mini-games and a few of them have a bigger role in the story. It’s all very familiar apart from the combat, which, as I’ve mentioned, has now switched to what you’d expect to see in a jRPG.
The switch isn’t that shocking, given that all combat encounters in previous games used to work not entirely dissimilarly from random encounters in jRPGs and since concepts like skills or leveling up were with the series for a long time as well. But what is surprising is that a lot of the mechanics, principles and animations from previous games are repurposed, often in a very innovative way, in this new turn-based jRPG structure. You have a “jobs” system for switching classes, you get special skills, you get a party of 4, with additional characters joining in later. You get class-specific gear and the ability to upgrade it. It’s all common for jRPGs and works as expected in combat. Yet, while you cannot move the characters directly during the encounter, the positioning is as vital as it was in the older games. Because your attack can be blocked by other combatants. Or, if there’s a piece of scenery that can be used in combat, your party will use it against enemies for additional damage. While the concept of “summons” works not entirely dissimilar to how people you helped during side-quests could help you during fights in some of the previous games.
Sometimes it works to the detriment of the game, however. For example – normal attacks and some of the skills need to actually connect to hit, yet the character movement to get in position is automated and not always perfect. So you can get into street fights where your characters start doing bizarre movement around the location to get to the enemy and may miss a hit or two. It also seems that the killing blows with combo and environment are automatically scaled to only kill on the last hit, yet, due to the pathfinding and obstacles, that final hit may miss. It’s a very strange approach that, while novel, can be frustrating more than anything. But at least the idea of actively blocking attacks as they happen to get a “perfect block” is a nice idea, since it means that doing a block via combat commands is often reserved only for fights with gimmicks to them.
But boy does it get tedious after a while. The enemy spawn rate, which was often frustrating in older games, is not tweaked here either. You may defeat a group of enemies and have a new one spawn pretty much on top of you, immediately getting you into the next fight. Which, while frustrating, at least wasn’t too slow in some of the previous games as you got stronger by the end of the game. But in this one, to work as a jRPG with a party, every fight still takes longer to go through. There’s an option to turn on auto-pilot, but it’s really garbage with party members doing ridiculous things with no real way to edit their behavior. Even a Persona 4-like smart use of skills, items and weaknesses would’ve helped, no need for a wonderful FFXII-like configuration. But instead, your party would do the dumbest things possible if left on auto-pilot.
It wouldn’t have been as boring if the story was exciting, yet for most of the time it simply isn’t. It’s a good start with strong potential to turn all of the characters you meet into someone you’ll like several games from now, but… Right now, in this game they are not really that interesting. You get wonderful moments here and there and the main plot gets engaging by the very end, but most of the time things are shockingly boring or just plain silly, without a rewarding dramatic sting to them.
What’s not boring is the take on urban fantasy that the game has. The whole turn to jRPG mechanics is explain in the story by Ichiban’s fascination with Dragon Quest series and through his vivid imagination and a desire to be a Hero, he starts seeing the world differently. Because of that you get some hilarious enemy designs with fantastic puns in their titles and lots of unrealistic genre concepts fit really nicely into this “realistic” game world.
Overall, I didn’t enjoy Like a Dragon as much as I’ve hoped I would, mostly because of how it managed to fall into many traps common for both jRPGs and Yakuza series, while also not delivering a truly magical story that would feel completely fresh and exciting. Yet, it is a really curious game with lots of things to like and this direction and new characters have potential to be something that becomes great in the future. I can only hope it will.