Now Playing: Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Like the other Yakuza games I’ve played, Like a Dragon gets off to a very slow start. But I’d say LaD is by far the slowest. It’s painfully slow. It wasn’t until I’d played 10 or so hours that I felt like the game was finally opening up and letting me loose, and it probably took another 10 before the remainder of the side content became available. Be warned: Like a Dragon isn’t a bad game but I’m probably going to spend most of this review complaining about it.

Taking a break from Kazuma Kiryu, LaD focuses on the likeable Ichiban Kasuga. It’s Ichiban and his friends that are the highlight of LaD – their relationships, interactions and little conversations as you traverse the city. The story may be slow paced and predictable but it’s enjoyable enough to see you through to the end.

The big change in LaD is the combat, with a new turn based party system. I’ll talk a lot more about the combat later but for now, let’s focus on the more familiar elements of a Yakuza game. The optional sub-stories are largely lacklustre and forgettable but there are a few good ones sprinkled throughout.

The main mini-game is Dragon Kart racing which could have been pretty fun if it wasn’t so damn easy – I won every race with ease just using the default kart. The only race I lost and that required a kart upgrade was the very last ‘boss’ race. Even then, I cleared it on the second try. Mechanically, it’s not a bad game within a game, but it’s just so easy that it’s also incredibly dull.

 

And that criticism also applies to the business management in LaD. The idea is that you buy and invest in various businesses, assigning staff and increasing your profits to raise your share ranking. The problem is, it’s a very passive system. ‘Opening for business’ just means it’s time to hold down the right trigger to speed through your earnings. You don’t actually interact in any way with your customers or employees.

Every four turns you have to attend a meeting to win the support of your shareholders and push your company higher up the rankings. This is the only real ‘gameplay’ part of the management experience and it’s basically just a colour coded game of rock, paper, scissors. You don’t keep any profits from your business to spend in the world, only the ‘bonus’ you get from each meeting which, even when you’re Rank 1, still only amounts to 3 million yen when your company may have 10 billion in the bank.

In short, business management isn’t hard at all – like Dragon Kart it’s just a tedious grind to the finish line. There’s no real need for strategy, skill or planning. It doesn’t really matter how much money you make or what kind of employees you hire and assign. All you need to do is grind through each sales turn and then ‘win’ the meeting to progress.

Speaking of grind, let’s talk about the level and class system. Every character has a base level and a separate job (class) level. Their base level determines what character skills they have access to, and their job level determines what class skills they can use. The job system is very flexible – every character can switch between multiple job types whenever you please giving you a massive range of ways to build your party.

The problem is, levelling up jobs takes f**king forever which rather discourages you from switching. You’re better off finding a job you like for each character and sticking with it to the end. Even then, you might not hit their max job level by the end of the game. Even using in-game xp boosters, it’s a real grind to level up your character classes.

But the more you do level up, the more messy your list of skills become. Because LaD doesn’t replace or remove redundant skills, every attack turn you’ll be scrolling through an extensive list of largely useless abilities. Ichiban, for example, will learn an AoE bat swing when playing as the Hero class. And as you level up, you’ll learn more powerful variations of this skill. But the game doesn’t remove the old ones.

I guess you could argue that it’s not a big deal, that you can just ignore them and that actually, there may be times when you want to use the weaker variation with the lower MP cost. But this feeds into the other major problem with LaD – each character has way too many skills.

Actually – scratch that – it’s not really the number of skills that’s the issue, but how obtuse the turn based combat system is in relation to these skills. LaD features a variety of attack types – blunt, sharp, elemental (fire, water, electrical) and status effects such as bleeding, poison, stun, sleep and silence. And many of these skills are categorised by damage – Light, Medium, Heavy and Extreme.

But even after completing LaD I’m still not sure why I should pick one particular skill over another in a fight. Some enemies do have a marked ‘weakness’ to particular damage, but the majority either don’t, or the attacks that they are supposed to be weak to don’t seem to do any more damage to them than those that they aren’t.

In fact, sometimes a ‘Light’ attack does more damage than a ‘Heavy’ but there’s no real logical reason why. And this connects to the issue of each character having too many skills – you have this big list of potential attacks, but you don’t have any real indication as to why you should choose one skill over another. You can never predict what kind of damage you’re going to do so you end up just picking and choosing skills at random until you find the few that are the most regularly successful.

The combat system in LaD isn’t very good. It’s bloated with useless skills and relies heavily on damage sponge boss fights which – like Dragon Kart and the business management – aren’t hard to beat, but are a tedious grind to get through. Seriously, there’s a couple of boss fights in this game where the boss is resistant to pretty much every attack type so you just have to slowly whittle down their health over 20 minutes or so. It’s boring as f**k.

Oh, and then there’s the penultimate boss fight in which your opponent can one shot Ichiban forcing you to restart from scratch. There is a skill that allows Ichiban to survive a ‘one shot’ attack, but it only works once and this boss can queue up 2-3 attacks in a row. If you’re unlucky, he’ll target Ichiban more than once and there’s f**k all you can do about it.

Although battles are turn based, enemies can and do move about as you select your next attack. This means that the timing of various AoE skills is vital to maximise damage. Unfortunately, your characters often get stuck on scenery as they move to attack, causing a small but significant delay which frequently renders your attack completely worthless.

And although the game has a wide range of elemental attacks and character debuffs, the majority of them rarely come into play due to enemy resistances. Bleed and poison are the most useful against certain boss characters – if you can get them them to stick. Charm and stun are the most useful against groups. But lower evasion or accuracy? It seems like a waste of MP. Silence might be great . . . if I could ever get it to work. And with no indication of how long a debuff may last you can’t really be sure how valuable they’ll be or when to line up another attack to reapply.

I don’t think switching to a turn based combat system was a bad move for LaD, but switching to a bad turn based combat system was. Okay, to be fair, the combat in LaD does have its moments. The classes are all fun with lots of themed special attacks. The ‘poundmates’ system is kind of useless but it’s always fun to attack people with a lobster.

It’s kind of frustrating because if the damage and skills system wasn’t so bloody obtuse and if the enemies – and the bosses in particular – were better designed, it would actually be really good. But it’s not. It’s only ‘okay’ at the best of times, mediocre at the most, and just plain bad on more occasions than I’d like. I don’t hate it. It didn’t piss me off. I just think it could have been a lot better.

Okay, I guess I should wrap this up. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is easily the weakest of the Yakuza games I’ve played. As much as I like Ichiban, the story isn’t that great, the side content is fairly lacklustre and the combat is poorly designed. I wouldn’t say any of it is bad as such. Just mediocre, disappointing and forgettable.

5/10