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Like a Dragon role-playing games are based on facsimiles of gangsters from Japanese cities. With real clumsiness, they discovered a foreign audience.
By Brian Feldman
It all started with a chicken named Nugget.
For about a decade, American audiences largely overlooked Yakuza role-playing games that stick to the exploits of Kazuma Kiryu, a gangster with a gold center and a wide range of characters in facsimiles of Japanese cities.
When the first Yakuza arrived in the U. S. When released in the U. S. in 2006, it was billed as a Japanese Grand Theft Auto, relying heavily on a serious detective story and the voice of a celebrity. But it wasn’t until 2015, when the prequel Yakuza 0 was released, that the franchise’s real awkwardness (games switch between simulation, melodrama, satire, and parody) made its way into America.
One of the many aspects of Yakuza 0, set in the Tokyo boom of the 1980s, is an asset control simulator in which Kiryu assigns workers to corporations based on their skills. After a GIF of Nugget running as a business owner went viral, the game became a word-of-mouth hit in the United States, attracting new players and sparking interest in previous titles.
Since then, Sega has remade or remastered several games in the franchise to run on trendy hardware. The series stopped being called Yakuza last year and new games are now being released around the world. As its ninth main installment, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, premieres Friday, Kiryu will venture outside of Japan for the first time on an adventure in Hawaii.
“Sega smells of blood here,” said Serkan Toto, a video game industry representative in Tokyo.
The Like a Dragon series has sold more than 21 million copies. Its overabundance of content, harsh tone shifts, and aversion to subtlety (players battle a giant shark in Infinite Wealth) make it a difficult source of memes in an online ecosystem that rewards videos. Clips presented without context. Access to gaming has also expanded beyond Sony’s PlayStation, with the maximum being available on PC and Xbox through the Microsoft Game Pass subscription service.
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