However, there is a Digital Deluxe Edition, which costs $74.99. It includes the base game and the Legendary Pirate Crew Pack, with Kazuma Kiryu, Daigo Dojima and other iconic characters able to join Majima’s crew. You also get the Legendary Outfit Pack with the iconic outfits worn by Kiryu and Taiga Saejima.

There’s also a Ship Customization Pack for customizing Goromaru, Majima’s ship, with designs based on Kiryu and Ichiban Kasuga. If that weren’t enough, you get an Extra Karaoke and CD Pack, which adds the Majima Construction Song to Karaoke and allows playing Karaoke songs while traversing locations.

Those who pre-purchase any edition will receive the Ichiban Pirate Crew Set, containing Ichiban as a crewmate and Nancy as backup crew, and the Ichiban Special Outfit Set, providing outfits based on Kasuga’s appearance in Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Infinite Wealth.

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii launches on February 28th, 2025, for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, and PC. Check out all the different locations and playspots available here.

Majima, the protagonist, utilizes the Mad Dog Style from previous games and allows for quick attacks with a tanto. He can even summon shadow clones to fight alongside him and mirror attacks. However, there’s also the Sea Dog Style, with Majima equipping dual cutlasses for exceptional area attacks. There’s even a flintlock pistol for ranged attacks and a chain hook to pull towards enemies.

While you explore locations like Hawaii from Infinite Wealth, the new Rich Island and Madlantis, there’s also sailing on open waters. The developer also confirmed a Colosseum in Madlantis, presumably where you’ll tackle numerous pirate foes. Notable playspots include Crazy Delivery, the return of Dragon Kart and Karaoke, and a live-action scenario with the Minato Girls.

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii launches on February 28th, 2025, for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, and PC. Stay tuned for more details in the coming months.

Washing up on Rich Island, not far from Hawaii, Majima suffers from amnesia. After help from a boy, Rich Noah, he battles with pirates before becoming the captain of a sea-faring vessel. Things only escalate as Majima encounters an organization known as Madlantis and its leader, Queen Michelle.

There’s also something about the Lost Treasures of Esperanza, another island where nuclear waste is stored, and, most shockingly, Samoa Joe. Hawaii looks to still be a location (though Ichiban Kasuga is not in the game), with Majima battling enemies and even taking on biking jobs.

Unlike Infinite Wealth, this is an action-adventure game with the goal of players enjoying being a pirate. The combat looks especially tight, with Majima wielding dual sabers.

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is coming to Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, and PC. Stay tuned for more details shortly.

As a press release (translation via Gematsu) notes, the ultimate goal is to take on the Discreet Four and Sujimon Master. Sujimon can be recruited after battles in Hawaii by providing a Suji Gift. There are also time-limited Raids, where defeating a Sujimon means guaranteed recruitment. Of course, there are also Sujimon Gacha spots where you can spend money or tickets on summoning Sujimon.

The battles see Ichiban giving commands to Sujimon to prevail over the opposing team. There are five different types with unique affinities, allowing for specialized teams or more balanced compositions. You can also use “strategic commands” for unleashing special attacks. Sujimon are trained by providing Sujimunch and awakened by feeding them the same species. There are also evolutions.

If that wasn’t enough, Sujimon can be brought to Dondoko Island. Using the farm, you can raise Sujimon levels, and they also help grow crops and earn money on the island. Increasing their faith lets Ichiban have a more “active role” in battles. Finally, there’s an Ichiban-exclusive Job, Sujimancer, allowing Kasuga to summon Sujimon in battle. With each Sujimon trained, the job becomes even stronger.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth launches on January 26th, 2024, for PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. It’s the longest game in the series, with RGG Studio director Masayoshi Yokoyama saying it takes “’never-ending’ to a whole new level.”

Like a Dragon Gaiden, meanwhile, occupies the second and third spots, with its PS5 and PS4 versions selling over 63,000 and over 60,000 units respectively, for a total of over 123,000 physical units sold upon launch, which is an impressive number for a smaller spinoff release. For context, when Yakuza 7 launched in Japan in 2020, it sold over 157,000 units.

Meanwhile, another new release, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, also occupies two places in the top 10, with its PS5 version (over 22,000 units sold) coming in at No. 4, and its PS4 version (over 8,000 units sold) slotting in at No. 6, for a total of over 31,000 physical copies sold upon release. For comparison, last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold over 42,000 units in Japan upon release.

On the hardware front, thanks to the PS5 Slim’s launch, Sony’s console has enjoyed a significant sales boost, and with over 107,000 units sold, it’s the best-selling console in Japan for the week. It’s followed by the Nintendo Switch in second place, which sold over 79,000 units.

You can check out the full hardware and physical software sales charts for the week ending November 12 below.

Software sales (followed by lifetime sales):

1. [NSW] Super Mario Bros. Wonder – 65,017 (975,276)
2. [PS5] Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name – 63,319 (New)
3. [PS4] Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name – 60,134 (New)
4. [PS5] Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – 22,132 (New)
5. [NSW] WarioWare: Move It! – 13,340 (42,924)
6. [PS4] Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – 8,962 (New)
7. [NSW] Fashion Dreamer – 8,166 (39,050)
8. [NSW] Pikmin 4 – 7,511 (948,207)
9. [NSW] Animal Crossing: New Horizons – 7,186 (7,573,156)
10. [NSW] The Game of Life for Nintendo Switch – 5,913 (77,301)

Hardware sales:

• PS5 – 107,953
• Nintendo Switch – 79,147
• Xbox Series X/S – 2,578

The minimum requirements include an Intel Core i5-3470 3.2 GHz or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 3.1 GHz, 8 GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 4 GB, AMD Radeon RX 460 4 GB or Intel Arc A380 6 GB. This is enough to play the game at Low settings at 1080p/30 FPS with AMD FSR 1.0 set to Balanced.

The recommended requirements are a Core i7-4790 3.6 GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 1600 3.2 GHz, 16 GB RAM and an RTX 2060 6 GB, Radeon RX 5700 8 GB or Intel Arc A750 8 GB. It allows playing at 1080p/60 FPS at High settings without FSR, though DirectX 12 is mandatory in both configurations.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth launches on January 26th, 2024, for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5 and PC.

Speaking in a recent interview with Game Watch, series producer Masayoshi Yokoyama called Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth a “monster-class” game that will be longer than anything Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has made in the past, to the point where if try to marathon it, “you’ll get sick”. According to Yokayama, though the development team is aware that that might turn some players off, it’s solution to that seems to be to “get everyone hyped up enough to play it” regardless of its length.

“The games take a long time to clear, don’t they?” Yokoyama said (translation via Automaton Media). “Gaiden not so much, but Infinite Wealth is a monster-class game longer than anything we’ve made so far. If you go at it continuously, you’ll get sick, and it won’t end with just one or two all-nighters. This means that a lot of people are going to hesitate to play the game or will end up having it wait on their shelves. I found the possibility of that kind of outcome sad, so I thought, we have to get everyone hyped up enough to play it.”

“We have to get people to play the game in about a week or a month, even at the cost of their health, which is why it’s our duty as creators to generate enough to be excited about,” he added. “I’ve thought this way for the past year or two – for a game like Infinite Wealth, we have to get a festival going on. It would feel kind of rude to just drop such a long game and be done with it (laughs).”

Of course, this series has had no shortage of unusually large games in the past. For instance, Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Yakuza 5 are probably among the lengthiest games in the franchise, and both can take up to 80-100 hours depending on your play style (if not significantly longer in the latter’s case). Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth being an even longer game than those two is certainly an intriguing prospect.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is due out on January 26 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

"If you play these games for their stories and characters, and the insane ways those interact and escalate and tend to subvert player expectations at their best, then Gaiden fails to truly deliver on that front."

A big issue is the story. Look, before we proceed with this review, it’s very important that you understand, discussing Gaiden without at least referencing the stories of Yakuza 6, 7, and the upcoming Infinite Wealth, as well as the rest of the Kiryu games that led up to 6, is very difficult. While every effort will be made to not share details from other games more than necessary, Gaiden assumes familiarity with the stories of Yakuza 6 and 7 as a bare minimum – and so this review will as well.

That actually touches upon what might be the biggest issue with Gaiden. It’s basically backed into a corner in terms of the writing. Spoilers are coming up for Yakuza 6 and 7 – see, Yakuza 6 goes out of its way to build up contrivances to get a very specific kind of ending for itself, and for Kiryu. It wants the stakes to be higher, it wants them to be more personal, it wants there to be a sense of finality for Kiryu and his story, it wants his journey in this story to be conclusively finished, but it wants to do all of this without actually killing Kiryu.

To 6’s credit, it mostly pulls off all of this, at the cost of having a story that would hold up to scrutiny. But the emotional beats land, and that’s the important thing. Then 7 ends up with Kiryu showing up in what was at the time assumed to be a fan service cameo, a kind of passing the torch moment – but to contextualize that appearance, it further adds to Kiryu’s narrative after the events of Yakuza 6.

"See, this game is set between 6 and 7, and it’s supposed to fill in the story of what happened with Kiryu in that period. The issue is a) there isn’t a lot of the intervening period left to begin with and b) what happens right before and right after that period is defined very explicitly, and in very specific terms. This means that the story of Gaiden has almost no wiggle room."

If you managed to follow all of that, then you can probably understand the big issue with Like A Dragon Gaiden. See, this game is set between 6 and 7, and it’s supposed to fill in the story of what happened with Kiryu in that period. The issue is a) there isn’t a lot of the intervening period left to begin with and b) what happens right before and right after that period is defined very explicitly, and in very specific terms. This means that the story of Gaiden has almost no wiggle room. It has to hit the beats it needs to hit to not violate the canon of 6 or 7 – regardless of what that means for its own story. Even if it leads to a story that can often feel incoherent (which Gaiden often does) as it tries to juggle various plot beats, or a story that sort of doesn’t feel as interesting because of the constrained and hemmed in nature of the plot, there’s not much choice here. Gaiden is written into a corner, and the only way out is to follow the very specific and signposted path already laid down for it.

If you play these games for their stories and characters, and the insane ways those interact and escalate and tend to subvert player expectations at their best, then Gaiden fails to truly deliver on that front. I’m not saying it has none of that, but what is here is, to me, lacking compared to the best the series has to offer, as well as to the recent outings the franchise has had (such as Yakuza 7, or the excellent remake of Ishin that launched earlier this year). Also given that Gaiden is situated where it is in the series’ overall broader timeline, it means that a lot of fan favorite characters in the series either do not appear in Gaiden, or if they do, it’s only in passing, and certainly without any meaningful interaction with Kiryu.

But let’s assume you are fine with the story being what it is, you just want some new Yakuza goodness to play. Does Gaiden deliver? More or less. It’s a fun game, and a good enough iteration on the Yakuza template. The brawler combat here delivers two fighting styles, a “Yakuza style” which is closer to Kiryu’s traditional fighting style, and an Agent style, which is snazzy and cool and slick and sees Kiryu fighting like a character out of a spy flick, The new fighting style is good, and allows for some great new combat opportunities, though it is a shame that the game only delivers two combat styles (which is still a step down from the peak of the series, when it would have 3-6 fighting styles within a single game). The issue is there’s a general lack of polish in the game. It manifests in small and subtle ways – the controls feel slippery when moving, the hits and attacks seem to lack the punch that the series is typically known for, animations can seem janky.

This lack of polish extends to outside of the combat too, as does the general curiously muted nature of the gameplay. Gaiden, to its credit, is pretty much a full-fledged Yakuza experience – you get multiple city maps (though they’re fairly compact and truncated), and there’s a whole host of side activities including a brand new battle arena. There’s a lot to keep you busy here, enough to take you through to Infinite Wealth’s release a few months down the line – but it feels less polished, more hastily thrown together than any Yakuza/Like A Dragon game has so far. 

"Is it still worth playing? Absolutely, if nothing else it’s a good way to get back in the RGG Studio universe and mood ahead of the upcoming launch of Infinite Wealth early next year. What’s here is still good (not great), and fans of Kiryu or the overall story will at least want this missing piece of narrative, warts and all, to have the full picture. "

The game feels like it was developed on a pretty rapid and truncated timeline – the lack of polish obviously adds to that sense, as do things such as it simply launching without the promised English dub (while I cannot personally fathom playing these games in any way except with the original Japanese dub, a huge part of their newfound popularity in the west has been the excellent localizations these games have seen; taking away an English dub at launch only adds to the “thrown together at the last moment” sentiment the game goes nothing to dispel elsewhere either).

Is it still worth playing? Absolutely, if nothing else it’s a good way to get back in the RGG Studio universe and mood ahead of the upcoming launch of Infinite Wealth early next year. What’s here is still good (not great), and fans of Kiryu or the overall story will at least want this missing piece of narrative, warts and all, to have the full picture. It’s just… for the first time in a very, very long time, a new Like A Dragon release feels a little underwhelming. It’s a funny feeling, that’s all.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.

Speaking in a recent interview with Automaton, studio director Masayoshi Yokoyama revealed that the upcoming Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name was developed in the space of just half a year. He said that after the development team decided to dedicate a whole game to telling the story of what happened to protagonist Kiryua between the events of Yakuza 6 and 7, the fact that the game was derived from fellow upcoming release Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth allowed it to be a fairly quick production.

“There isn’t a huge difference between Like a Dragon Gaiden and Like a Dragon 8,” Yokoyama said. “By this I mean that, in a sense, Like a Dragon Gaiden was derived from Like a Dragon 8. We could have just told of Kiryu’s past through a thirty-minute interlude as part of Like a Dragon 8, but we decided it would be a lot more interesting as a game of its own, which is how the project came to be. Though this meant having a whole extra game to make, it still uses the same engine, so we thought, ‘It’s not like we have to make it from scratch,’ and decided to go with it. In the end, it took us about half a year to make it.”

Yokoyama went on to add that though the studio considered releasing Like a Dragon Gaiden as DLC, ultimately the decision was made to pivot in a different direction.

“I’m the one who first went, ‘Let’s make it.’ I said, ‘If you’re going to make an episode about Kiryu’s past, it’s going to be much quicker to make a game about it.’ From there on, we first considered making it as DLC, but then decided it was engaging enough for a physical edition. But, for a physical edition, we needed more content, so we decided to add some. This is how things escalated.”

It’s worth pointing out that though the game will have a physical release in Japan, in Western markets, it will be an exclusively digital release.

Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name launches on November 9 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

Football Manager 2024, for instance, will be available to subscribers on PC, cloud, and console on November 6, which is the day of its release, while another upcoming game, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, will also be available on the service on the day of its release, November 9.

EA and Koei Tecmo’s Monster Hunter-like Wild Hearts will also be available to PC Game Pass and Game Pass Ultimate subscribers via EA Play on console, cloud, and PC on the same day. Meanwhile, Thirsty Suitors arrives on November 2 (console, cloud, and PC), Dungeons 4 on November 9 (console, cloud, and PC), Spirittea on November 13 (console, cloud, and PC), and Coral Island on November 14 (Xbox Series X/S and cloud).

Additionally, three titles have also been added to the service’s catalog today, with Jusant, Wartales, and Headbangers: Rhythm Royale.