I’ve never played a Yakuza game. While it’s always been a series I’ve admired from afar, I’ve never leapt in myself. So, I booted up Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (what a mouthful), with only a vague idea of what I was in for.
Gaiden is Japanese for ‘side story’, which makes sense as the game originally started off as DLC for the upcoming Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
During development, it was decided that the Kazuma Kiryu led story deserved to be its own game.
Utilising the same engine as Infinite Wealth, The Man Who Erased His Name was developed in just six months! Which is both incredibly impressive for how good the game looks, but also somewhat disappointing as there are definite areas that could use some TLC.
Bright Lights, Big City
Most of the time, the game looks incredible, on par with what you would expect from a AAA game in 2023. The majority of game time is spent in Osaka’s Sotenbori district (based on the real-life Dotonbori district), which has been packed with details that bring the world to life.
Dozens of shops, stalls and window dressings fill the neighbourhood. You can peer into restaurant windows and see families inside enjoying a meal, watch a vendor cook street food or admire the Christmas displays.
While most of it is just there for show and can’t be interacted with, it massively adds to the ambience and believability of the place. Sotenbori is particularly special at night with its bright neon signs and bustling nightlife, creating an atmosphere that transported me back to my trip to Osaka IRL.
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As funny as it may sound, one of the coolest things in the game for me was walking into the super-accurate convenience stores. Conbibi, milkbar, dairy… Whatever you want to call them, Japan does it best.
From the wide array of cold drinks and onigiri to the rows of instant ramen and fluffy single slices of cake; there’s always a delectable treat waiting to be scoffed.
The game captures the spirit of the Conbini perfectly, right down to the hot food section at the counter selling crispy fried chicken 😍.
Kiryu’s character model is incredibly detailed, especially within cutscenes; I could count the pores on the guys face! Though not all characters in the game get such a loving treatment, often looking gaudy and ill-defined. There’s a newsreader near the end of the game that caught my eye in a bad way, looking more like an animatronic doll than a person. Character modeling looks to have fallen by the wayside a little, in order to get the game finished within the six month deadline.
There are plenty of eye-popping action set-pieces that had me grinning from ear to ear. Watching Kiryu kick butt will never grow tiresome; the epic finale is a shining example of this.
Even the cutscenes of just two people talking are made more dynamic and interesting with excellent in-game camerawork. Mixing wide establishing shots, long slow pans, and tight close-ups; it all brings a cinematic feel to the game.
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Gaiden
The man who erased his name, sounds like a great place to start right? The main character has left his past behind him, so I won’t need the backstory of the previous games to play this one? As you can imagine, that didn’t exactly go to plan.
During a flashback, we learn that Kazuma Kiryu had uncovered some damning information about a powerful faction called The Daidoji. To appease the faction and protect his surrogate family, Kiryu agrees to fake his death and leave his old name behind, hence The Man Who Erased His Name.
Removed from his old life in the Yakuza, he’s now doing odd jobs for The Daidoji under the name Joryu. Bodyguard work, security details, low key assignments that won’t draw attention. No one can know he is still alive. But as you might expect, Kiryu’s past doesn’t stay dead for long.
As story is such a key part of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games, I won’t go into much more detail than that. But I thoroughly enjoyed the action-packed events of the game; dripping with violence, drama, twists, turns, and engaging characters.
Being my first Yakuza game, there was definitely a sense that I was missing something, particularly when it came to Kiryu’s backstory. I often found myself a bit lost trying to remember the various factions and characters. Which isn’t a knock on the game, but it’s not a perfect entry point for new fans either.
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A Man About Town
Gameplay is fairly straightforward. You have your main missions, advancing the story, with optional side-missions and activities in between. It can be pretty cutscene heavy at times, with long conversations and action-set pieces.
The Sotenbori district initially appears to be a big open-world style section of city, but you soon find that it’s more akin to multiple corridors strung together. There aren’t the connective alleyways and short-cuts that make up a real city.
There isn’t much exploration to the game, focusing instead on mini-games and combat encounters. The main map and mini-map are a bit basic, and I often found myself taking a wrong turn or running into a dead end.
Early on in the game you meet Akame, a jack-of-all-trades type, running an information network. You’re tasked with helping her build her network by helping out the locals with various tasks. These range from more developed side-missions like tailing a Yakuza boss to gather information, to random tasks dotted around the map, such as fetching someone a treat of takoyaki.
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As you perform tasks for the community, you’ll earn Akame points and cash. These can be used to buy consumables and gear from various shops, or to upgrade and unlock new skills for use in combat.
You have up to four gear slots that you can equip accessories to that affect your stats in different ways. After trying a few different combinations, I decided to throw caution to the wind and use accessories that boosted my attack power as much as possible… Though it came at the cost of having negative defensive stats, which meant I had to avoid taking more than a few hits in battle!
There are dozens of collectibles hidden around the world in the form of suitcases, locker keys, and out of reach sparkly objects. Which are normally consumable items or pieces of gear. Kiryu uses his grapple-line spy-watch (yes, really) to grab inaccessible objects like a high-tech Scorpion, ‘GET OVER HERE BOTTLE OF ENERGY DRINK!’
Voice acting is excellent… From what I can tell. It’s all in Japanese with no English option, so it’s a bit harder to judge the quality of the performances. It sounded nice in my eardrums anyway. I do wish more of the dialogue was voiced though; text boxes do a lot of the heavy lifting in the game. This is another aspect they could’ve polished if they’d given more than six months for development.
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During your travels you’ll run into LOTS of groups of random thugs looking for a fight… Like, literally as soon as they lay eyes on you! These clashes are short, fun, and a good way to earn cash early on. Though it can feel a bit silly when you’re fighting gang after gang, as if half of the city’s population were thugs.
The Dragon of Dojima
Combat is very arcade-like and button mashy. Boss fights aside, you’re always fighting against a group of enemies. After 15 hours of game time, taking on a whole gang single-handedly never stopped being fun!
The combat style is sort of like a mix of Tekken and a Batman Arkham game. Mashing simple button inputs to deal flashy attacks, while juggling enemies to keep the mob at bay. Like Batman, you can wait for your enemy to strike before dodging and counter-attacking, feeling like a badass in full control of the battle. It’s fun arcade-style brawling at its best.
There are two distinct combat styles Kiryu can use: Agent and Yakuza.
Yakuza is his classic brawler approach; getting right up in the face of enemies to deliver devastating punches and kicks. Most useful in 1 v 1 fights where your enemy has a strong guard that needs to be broken.
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Agent is a more technical approach that Kiryu has developed while training with the Daidoji. It’s a much faster style, suited for dealing with large groups of enemies. There are a number of gadgets Kiryu can use with this combat stance, like the aforementioned grapple-line watch, to tie up enemies.
Switching between styles on the fly brings much needed variety to the flashy but simple combat system.
Both styles have unlockable skills and upgrades, purchasable with points and cash. There’s also a black market weapon smith who can craft new gadgets for Kiryu’s agent style of combat. The coolest was easily the rocket-powered shoes. These allow you to skate around the battlefield at high speed, knocking enemies to the ground like bowling pins.
Perhaps my favourite aspect of combat is the use of weapons. Not just your classic blades and guns either; traffic cones, bicycles, street signs, katanas, wooden training swords, tasers, shovels… There’s a lot of variety waiting to be swung at the nearest bad guy. You can also perform a devastating finishing move, whether it be crushing someone’s face with a sledgehammer or kneeing a knife deep into your enemy’s gut.
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Combat isn’t without its faults. There’s no enemy lock-on which makes 1v1 fights more annoying than they need to be, often I’d find myself attacking in the opposite direction I wanted to, breaking my momentum.
Instead of a dedicated dodge button, you need to hold R1 and then press X to evade. Which is fine when you’re calm and composed at the start of battle, waiting for your foes to attack you. But when you’re in a chaotic punch up, a two button dodge feels much more awkward than it needs to be.
A Man of Leisure
One of the things the Yakuza franchise is famous for is the insane amount of mini-games crammed in, providing hours upon hours of entertainment.
The Man Who Erased His Name doesn’t disappoint in that regard… There’s a bunch to discover and play, with points awarded for winning that can be traded for a variety of prizes.
- There are card and board games like Shogi, Mahjong, Koi-Koi, Blackjack and Poker. Oicho-kabu, a blackjack style game with a rotating dealer, quickly became my go-to gambling game.
- Bar activities like Pool, Darts and Karaoke.
- A golf driving range.
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- A bunch of old Sega arcade machines that are fully playable; like Sonic Fighters and Virtua Fighter 2.1.
- An RC Racing circuit, with the ability to fully customise your car with dozens of parts and colour combinations.
- There are even claw machines with soft toy prizes… If you can successfully grab and hold on to it that is.
The most developed and entertaining game is easily the Fighting Coliseum. Mask up and jump into the ring solo, brawling with a variety of hardened enemies; or form your own faction to take on large scale battles. There’s an element of team management too, in deciding which of the many bizarre fighters will make up your squad. You can even give gifts to have your teammates level up, or send them to boot camp to boost their stats.
The coliseum is also the best way to earn money fast… So fast that I regret wasting so much time gambling, when the arena was so much more profitable.
There is a downside to packing in so many mini-games however, the majority are quite barebones and feel shoehorned in. Karaoke in particular has a terrible user interface and might just be the worst version of a rhythm game I’ve ever played.
The Man Who Erased His Name
Kazuma Kiryu is the main strength of this game. The legendary underworld figure’s hard-boiled attitude matches his ‘tough as nails’ exterior; anyone who underestimates him is left lying in the dirt.
It’s this characterisation that lets you suspend disbelief when Kiryu is brawling with 20 thugs at once; all armed with knives, bats, swords, tasers. Though, the arcadey nature of the game can clash with this; watching him get hit with 20 to 30 bullets and keep fighting is a bit harder to reconcile.
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There are many other facets to Kiryu that make him such a loveable protagonist. He’s fiercely loyal, willing to die to protect his loved ones. He sticks to his own moral code, no matter the consequences. And is a bit of a goofball, whether it be his love for RC car racing, his nerdy victory poses, or belting out a love ballad at karaoke.
Playing The Man Who Erased His Name feels like a throwback to action games of old, for better or worse. This DLC, turned stand-alone title, oozes cool. The city, the combat, the characters. It has style in spades.
While there are obvious areas where the short six month development period is evident, overall it’s an exciting addition to the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series that will keep fans happy until the next mainline entry early next year.
Ultimately I just want more of Kazama Kiryu! Luckily I have half-a-dozen other games I can dive into to fill that void. This entry has well and truly sold me on the series.
Quest Daily score Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
8/10
Quest Daily was supplied with a review copy of The Man Who Erased His Name by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
