With Melodrama and Memes, a Yakuza Game Series Charms America

It all started with a chicken named Nugget.

For about a decade, American audiences had largely overlooked the Yakuza role-playing games that follow the exploits of Kazuma Kiryu, a gangster with a heart of gold, and a sprawling cast of characters through facsimiles of Japanese cities.

When the first Yakuza came to the United States in 2006, it was marketed as something like a Japanese Grand Theft Auto, leaning heavily on a gritty crime story and a celebrity voice cast. But it took until 2015, when the prequel Yakuza 0 was released, for the franchise’s earnest goofiness — the games unexpectedly switch between simulation, melodrama, satire and parody — to break through in America.

One of the many side activities in Yakuza 0, which is set in the boom of ’80s Tokyo, is a real estate management simulator in which Kiryu assigns employees to businesses based on their skills. After a GIF of Nugget working as a business manager went viral, the game became a word-of-mouth hit in the United States, drawing in new players and spurring interest in previous titles.

Since then, Sega has remade or remastered several of the franchise’s games to run on modern hardware. The series dropped the Yakuza name last year, and new games are now released simultaneously worldwide. When its ninth main entry, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, is released on Friday, Kiryu will venture outside Japan for the first time on an adventure in Hawaii.

“I think that Sega is smelling blood here,” said Serkan Toto, a video game industry consultant in Tokyo.

The Like a Dragon series has now sold more than 21 million copies. Its glut of content, severe tonal shifts and aversion to subtlety — players fight a giant shark in Infinite Wealth — make it a potent source of memes in an online ecosystem that rewards video clips presented without context. Access to the games has also expanded beyond the Sony PlayStation, with most available on the PC and Xbox via the Microsoft subscription service Game Pass.

But the increased interest might also have something to do with a gaping hole in the video game industry.

It has been more than a decade since Grand Theft Auto V was released, and fans of open-world games with cinematic narratives — in which players find themselves ensnared in a criminal enterprise, exploring detailed cityscapes full of eccentric characters and engrossing minigames — have had to turn elsewhere. (Grand Theft Auto Online’s multiplayer shenanigans have kept many people invested in that franchise, whose next game is scheduled for 2025.)

Those who have discovered Like a Dragon can find its exaggerated portrayal of Japanese urban life an engrossing counterpoint to Grand Theft Auto’s jaded, pessimistic parody of America. Grand Theft Auto has an understandable gun fetish, but Like a Dragon’s fighting is through hand-to-hand combat, a reflection of Japan’s nearly gun-free society.

The aspects of real life that developers include add to the texture of a video game’s world. Some studios nab the likeness of global celebrities or reconstruct ancient cities. A trailer for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth featured an expertly rendered store sign for Dean & DeLuca, one of America’s upscale grocery chains.

The invocation of real brands and products, like BOSS Coffee, Yoshinoya ramen and arcade games by Sega, enhances the eccentricities of the long-running series developed by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio. (In Japan, the series has always been called Ryu Ga Gotoku, Japanese for “like a dragon.”)

A franchise that began in the barely fictional Tokyo district of Kamurocho, based on Kabukicho, has since expanded to reproductions of Osaka, Okinawa and Onomichi. For Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the studio considered visiting Guam before settling on Yokohama and Honolulu. It is a canny decision that allows the series to go abroad without losing its Japanese specificity.

“A lot of Japanese almost think of Hawaii as the 48th prefecture of Japan,” Toto said. “So it’s very, very clever of Sega.”

Hiroyuki Sakamoto, the producer of Infinite Wealth, said the team conducted interviews and research in Honolulu to build the virtual city, one that features Hawaii-specific retailers like ABC Stores, Hilo Hattie and 88 Tees. But anything that does not suit the team’s vision can be changed. The real Honolulu, as far as anyone is aware, does not feature a derelict “District 9”-like crime hub or an underground shopping mall for upscale black-market goods.

Players who have in recent years caught up with the Like a Dragon catalog have entered a universe where melodrama abounds as Kiryu navigates familial bonds, revenge plots and intricate political and financial schemes.

Consistently, to the point of comedy, Kiryu and his opponent dramatically throw off their shirts to reveal full back tattoos before a cinematic fistfight. When it is time for conflict in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, where Kiryu is forced to explore a city while toting around a baby, he gently passes the infant to a passerby before wailing on hoodlums. All of these flourishes are done with an admirable straight face.

The expansive roster of available side activities — running errands for store owners, practicing street photography, hunting in the wilderness, go-kart racing, exercising — can also lean into the bizarre. In one minigame, the player must stay awake during a movie to avoid offending a companion. Infinite Wealth features Sicko Snap, a parody of the video game Pokémon Snap in which the player must give hip-gyrating pests the paparazzi treatment.

The Yakuza 0 meme of Nugget “saved the series,” said a longtime fan who streams speedruns on Twitch under the name Froob. Social media was a large part of the gaming discourse at the time, helping to introduce the franchise to new fans. “They suddenly started thinking, ‘Oh, this series has a really funny side to it,’ which anyone who’s played the games already knew,” he said.

One perennial highlight for Like a Dragon fans is karaoke, where players tap along to songs during segments produced in the cheesy style of lyric videos. Even spinoffs set in feudal Japan or an alternate reality infested with zombies contain a version of the mode.

Another thrill is discovering gradual change to familiar places over time. Although the anchor hub of Kamurocho has remained present since the beginning of the series, its street layout unchanged, subsequent games offer fresh city districts to explore.

A derelict park used by the unhoused early in the series becomes a luxury development. The Millennium Tower — a skyscraper that serves as a Mount Doom-type finish line for the climax of nearly every game — is just a construction site in Yakuza 0. Phone booths that once served as save points have vanished; now an in-game smartphone lets players save their progress from anywhere.

Ryu Ga Gotoku experimented with enlarging Kamurocho’s land mass for Yakuza 4 but determined that “just making it bigger isn’t that interesting,” said Masayoshi Yokoyama, the studio head and longtime series producer. The games have instead expanded vertically, revealing rooftops or new underground areas like sewers, allowing the cityscape to be at once familiar and surprising. Doors that were once flat textures open to reveal new haunts.

As Kiryu’s story progresses, the list of names and faces to keep track of has also grown — there are grizzled detectives, corrupt politicians, sleazy thugs, scrappy hustlers and distressed hostesses. Yakuza 5, the most wide-ranging installment, features four other playable characters, including a bruiser who has recently escaped from prison and Kiryu’s adopted daughter, Haruka, an aspiring pop idol.

In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, the series demoted the stoic Kiryu to a supporting role and introduced a new protagonist, the annoyingly optimistic, puppylike Ichiban Kasuga. (The pair shares top billing in Infinite Wealth.)

It also switched from a real-time combat system to a turn-based one more likely to be found in a role-playing game, complete with homages to Square Enix’s Dragon Quest series. Instead of summoning mythical creatures for powerful attacks, the character known as Ichiban can use his smartphone to reach regular dudes for help. An adult baby in a diaper whom he befriends will cry when called, which lowers the defense stats of all enemies.

The tale of the Like a Dragon series is so expansive that much of Infinite Wealth is devoted to reminiscing on Kiryu’s past adventures. He has been diagnosed with cancer and is working on his bucket list, visiting the sites of pivotal scenes from the series.

For Yokoyama and Sakamoto, who have worked on the games for 19 years, this development also allowed them to look back on their own work.

“We really felt that Kiryu had a very, very good life,” they said.