Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii Review

The folks at Ryu ga Gotoku studio have seemingly established something of a release schedule for modern Like a Dragon games, with the last two mainline entries followed up by smaller spin-off titles. 2024 saw the return of the iconic Kazuma Kiryu, series leading man on a new journey to tie off franchise story threads, while the year prior The Man Who Erased His Name introduced the idea of new roles for Kiryu, refreshing mechanical foundations with game-specific conceits.  

This time around, we’ve got another series mainstay making a comeback in Goro Majima, a fan-favourite character but one whose playable appearances across the franchise have been few and limited. And because Majima is who he is, his debut as a sole leading man amounts to more than just a fresh wrinkle on combat. Instead, this spin-off does exactly what its title implies and turns Majima into a bonafide pirate – complete with his very own ship and open seas to sail.

I wanted this to be the first screenshot. You’re welcome

It goes down like this. After an incident at sea leaves him washed up on a mysterious island near Hawaii, our Majima comes to realise that he’s suffered a bout of everyone’s favourite video game plot device – amnesia. With no clue who he is or why he’s out island-hopping in the Pacific, Majima turns to some locals for guidance and comes to the conclusion that he was bound for Nele Island, which anyone coming off of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth will recognise as the place that shit went down about six months prior to events here.

But on finding out that the young boy, Noah, who rescued him is suffering from an illness, and hearing rumours of a hidden treasure trove somewhere around the Hawaiian islands containing a fabled elixir of life, Majima’s attention is quickly turned to something altogether more exciting than his now-forgotten, original mission. Piracy! It’s not long before the Mad Dog of Shimano becomes the Mad Dog of the High Seas, commandeering a ship and setting course to find the mysterious Esperanza treasure with Noah, the boy’s father, and the ship’s cook, Masaru, in tow.

The lads

Of course, being a Like a Dragon game, you can count on a heap of criminal gangs, conspiracies and other nonsense to colour what is otherwise a classical pirate tale. Majima’s amnesia is effectively used to spin this as a completely standalone chapter, unmoored from the larger narrative of the mainline games, which is mostly a blessing. Pirate Yakuza struggles a little to establish any of its new faces as overly memorable, but it’s also very free to go wild with its piratical adventure, taking the growing crew of the ship Goromaru to uncharted seas and lands, the secret pirate city of Madlantis, and the familiar streets of Honolulu. 

What genuinely thrilled me, by the end, is how the amnesia foil is also used to separate Majima from his criminal past and see the world he’s helped cultivate over decades for what it is, as well as drop an astonishing moment of post-credits clarity. Like a Dragon games usually nail the payoff and, without giving too much away, this one ends with a corker of a loop back to reality.

Structurally, this ends up being a game of two distinct halves, with time spent both sailing (and assailing) across a bunch of small-ish ocean maps, as well as poking (and provoking) around key locations in more traditional Like a Dragon fashion. Expectations should be checked in regards to the naval aspect – RGG Studio hasn’t suddenly built an enormous open world to boat around freely a la Black Flag, instead offering up a number of compact oceans separated by fast travel points. There are islands to discover, but these are similarly siloed off by loading screens and never amount to more than a few minutes of running around and combat with a reward of treasure at the end.

Aloha, indeed

The core naval experience here, then, is in the ship-to-ship combat that you’ll engage in with rival pirate crews out on the ocean. If you’ve played any of the relevant Assassin’s Creed games you’ll have a good idea of what to expect here, albeit even more arcade-ish given the nature of the game as a whole. Your ship’s cannons auto-aim when in range, you’ve got machine guns in front, a turbo boost to ram other ships with little risk, and if all else fails Majima can simply pop up to the crow’s nest and take his foes out with a rocket launcher. 

The keys to success on the water are consistently upgrading your ship’s stats and keeping it well-equipped with weapons, as well as selecting and training a full crew, including a raiding party for some good ol’ fashioned fighting on board the enemy ships you disable. The naval combat tutorials do overpromise a little with lessons on crew management and morale, status effects, on-deck maintenance and more, none of which are too necessary in the game proper because – at least on the standard difficulty setting – just sailing up to a ship and battering it with cannon fire is typically more than enough to get you through any encounter.

Ship to… Sure?

The ship stuff is far from the bulk of the game though. Honolulu returns as this game’s major explorable location, letting Majima retread the same ground as Kasuga in Infinite Wealth. This is where the game switches back to the familiar Like a Dragon experience with a plethora of side content and minigames to find, shopping to do and Assholes to beat up. This series has always done well leveraging repeated locales to build ongoing stories and relationships, so Majima’s tourist-amnesiac combo shifts the paradigm slightly, but there’s some decent content to be found here, even if we’ve done Dragon Kart, Crazy Delivery and Sicko Snap before.

It’s nice to see plenty of old friends in Honolulu, some of whom are there to be recruited to your crew, and many who are involved in new Side Stories. The quality of these is solid throughout, carried largely by Majima himself. This new Majima, free of the weight of his status and expectation in Japan, is able to express empathy but not without the unhinged swagger that’s earned him his audience favourite status. He remains incredibly charming and suits the pirate captain role to a T.

Cooking Majima

Majima’s a lot of fun to take into a fight, too. He has access to two fighting styles, with Mad Dog Style occupying the default slot while in Honolulu and Sea Dog Style being the go-to for the pirate-y bits, though these can be switched between at will. Both are fun and effective in their own right, but Sea Dog is the one that most breaks the mould, giving Majima a cutlass, flintlock pistols and a chain-hook that allows for more reach than the usual Like a Dragon brawling. Sea Dog Majima also has access to the Dark Instruments, a series of mythical musical instruments that summon giant creatures to deliver devastating attacks. It’s odd that nobody around Majima really questions why that’s possible, but it’s gloriously goofy.

Fully leaning into the pirate crew fantasy, this entry also features some ludicrously big fights with often dozens of allies and enemies all clashing at the same time. Melee combat is definitely a little less considered or complex than in some of the pre-RPG era systems, but that helps a lot when you’ve got to swash and buckle your way through swathes of salty sailors.

Like a Dynasty Warrior

The last piece of the pirate puzzle is Madlantis, a brand-new location that parallels Like a Dragon Gaiden’s Castle as a hidden den of sin, swapping casinos for coliseums. Your introduction to Madlantis is via a cutscene that also introduces one of the game’s main antagonists and one of the only women in the cast. Queen is a ruthless criminal monarch, presiding over violent bloodsport between prisoners and giant sharks, she’s also one of the only women given any dimensions in the game. It’s a promising tease of things to come, but those things don’t really ever eventuate in Madlantis, which hasn’t managed to dream up a pirate paradise as anything beyond a bunch of neon-and-trash-covered walkways populated by sex workers and thugs.

You do get access to a coliseum designed entirely to house a giant pool for hulking ships to do war in, which is delightfully ridiculous, as is a remixed batting cage minigame with far more explosions than usual, but it’s a little disappointing that there’s not more to Madlantis than another red light district with a new theme. It is visually very cool, at least, built on top of a ship graveyard inside a watery cavern and decorated like a seaside carnival from hell.

This is the vibe, basically

These disparate parts are held together by pursuits typical of a pirate adventure, like the hunt for treasure and bounties, which can be found all across the game’s locations and contribute to your crew’s coffers and renown as a fearsome union. Even when sailing across sparse ocean maps or fighting in simplistic ship battles threatens to get old, there’s an inherent joy in charting a course for a Treasure Island, pressing play on an in-game playlist packed with Persona, Sonic the Hedgehog and even Angry Birds tunes, and turbo boosting across the waves.

Pirate Yakuza carries the same basic DNA as its predecessors when it comes to presentation. Cutscenes tend to look fantastic, rendering characters in stunning detail and with lush lighting that shows them in a fantastic, well, light. Lower-tier scenes and gameplay though are much more of a mixed bag with a clashing of high and low-quality assets. That’s pretty typical of the series, which has always put a point of pride on its model work and meticulous environment craft above all else, but the unfortunate sin here is something else entirely – a tendency for every bright spot in-game to be completely blown out. The 2010s called, and they want their bloom effects back.

Final Thoughts

I feel like we’re at a point now where “that’s just how the series goes” is wearing thin as an excuse for the more disappointing parts of a Like a Dragon release. And yet, I can’t help but lap it up every time. Slapping a pirate hat on the Best Boy, dropping him in the waters of the last game and calling it a day might not be moving the needle forward in any meaningful way, but god damn does it work. I think that if there’s a future in LaD, the next entry is going to have to really turn a corner, but for now, you can peg my leg and call me cap’n because I’m headed back out to sea.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher.

Click here for more information on WellPlayed’s review policy and ethics.