It’s safe to say that most gamers have played a Grand Theft Auto title at some point in their lives. It’s a gamer canon event, a rite of passage, and there’s no escaping it. Growing up with two older brothers meant I played the original top-down classic at a young age, and despite not fully grasping or understanding it, I would still drive around trying to mow down as many pedestrians as possible.
Over the years, I’ve dabbled with other games in the series too because they’re always the biggest, hottest titles around, so I justhadto get a taste. But they’re neverreallymy thing, and I don’t play them for long. Heck, I haven’t touched GTA 5 or its online component since the Xbox 360 days.
So, despite not being overly fussed about GTA, it recently came to mind while playingYakuza 0: Director’s Cutfor Nintendo Switch 2, helping to plant an idea in my head that I now just can’t shake. What if we had a Like a Dragon game just like GTA Online?
The Like A Dragon Setting Is Prime GTA Online Real Estate
Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut features a new multiplayer mode known as Red Light Raid, where you can select your favourite character from a roster of over 60 and team up with up to three other players to defeat waves of enemies in classic Yakuza action combat. Going shoulder to shoulder with other players in a Yakuza setting to unleash brutal beatdowns is what sparked the idea in me: imagine this, but on a much larger and more nuanced scale.
Just picture it. You could lift the GTA Online template and plop it right into well-known Like a Dragon locales like Kamurocho, Yokohama, or Dotonbori, then even expand upon them by adding new areas where players could craft their own thriving criminal underworld, complete with all the quirkiness LAD is known for.
Imagine custom characters where you could create or join yakuza families with other players, make alliances or start feuds, and have full-blown turf wars. You’re walking the street, swaggering around like you own the place with your crew and then you see some bozo players from another family trying to muscle in. you may give them a classic Yakuza beatdown, grabbing nearby bikes or trash cans to smash down on their heads or perhaps play it cool and test your negotiation skills.
Just don’t give the yakuza flying hover-bikes with mounted rocket launchers, please.
Would you channel your inner Ichiban Kasuga or Kazuma Kiryu and try and live a more honest life with legit businesses, or embrace the very worst that the yakuza life has to offer and show no mercy while using everyone around you to make as much money as possible, like Akira Nishikiyama? Me personally? I want to embody the lovable yet mischievous Goro Majima. Get me a baseball bat.
Looking back at the series’ tenured history, imagine the kind of businesses you could have. Maybe you’d be running host bars, soaplands, a construction site, or growing a confectionery store into a booming enterprise. You could create scams that maybe both NPCs and other online players could fall for, or maybe just charge the local businesses in your area protection money and beat the hell out of them if they don’t.
The same calibre of substory that we know and love would easily slide right into this sort of game too, maintaining that LaD humour and quality storytelling while offering additional ways to unlock features, assets, or earn money. The more I think about it, the more I can’t help thinking of how perfectly Like A Dragon could transition into an online world.
Will We Ever See This Happen?
As much as the idea seems like it would work on paper from a technical and gameplay point of view, would it actually fit the series? Nearly every Like a Dragon game is canon, even Yakuza: Dead Souls. The exceptions are Yakuza: Ishin and Yakuza: Kenzan, both of which are historical spin-offs, which have only ever been acknowledged as ‘dreams’ that Kiryu had in canon entries.
The series already has an online game, Ryu Ga Gotoku Online, that’s only available in Japan for PC and mobile devices. However, it’s a free-to-play collectible card game spin-off rather than what you might expect from the name.
It would be incredibly difficult to make a player-focused online game canon, as every player would be making their character how they want and living their life how they want, rather than channelling the morals and mantra we usually see of the LaD protagonists.
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios chief producerHiroyuki Sakamoto recently told TheGamerthat the team aims for a “strong focus on human drama” for the series, so a GTA Online-inspired version wouldn’t fit the bill as easily as it’s hard to craft an emotional drama for a blank canvas character that players create and shape as they play.
Losing such emotional storytelling and allowing players to embrace a darker side rather than the usual LaD heroes we play, letting them just run around and cause havoc as a yakuza member would also bring criticism for glorifying the yakuza.
There’s also the issue of timing. The series reflects the real world in that yakuza groups are declining, especially in the face of stricter anti-gang laws in Japan, so a modern-day setting wouldn’t work as well as it would mean less yakuza and more generic thugs and gangs. The ideal setting for a spin-off like this would be when the yakuza were in their prime.
However, it wouldn’t be the first time the series has given us a throwback, as Yakuza 0 took us back to the ‘80s. Another time hop would open up the possibility to have a large number of Yakuza alumni feature in cameos, popping up for limited-time events or in specific substories, regardless of whether canonically they are dead in the series as this could be before they met their demise (just like in GTA Online). Or you know, throw the canon timeline out of the window and have whoever you want appear regardless of whether they should be dead, but I don’t think that would go down as well with fans.
We probably won’t ever see a GTA Online-style Like a Dragon game, or even an accompanying mode, but I can live in hope. While GTA might not be enough to tempt me, it turns out all you need to do is throw some Yakuza paint at it, and I’ll eat it right up. I’ll start taking applications for my yakuza family that is entirely modelled on Majima, just in case.
