Like A Dragon dev’s Stranger Than Heaven is LA Noire, but make it Yakuza

Following the reveal of Project Century during The Game Awards 2024, Sega and Like A Dragon developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio showed up to Summer Game Fest 2025 with a new trailer, a new era, and a new name: Stranger Than Heaven. Where the initial trailer looked like early-20th century Judgment, where a detective wandered around a rain-soaked, 1914’s Japanese city, Stranger Than Heaven‘s latest trailer is more like RGG Studio’s take on L.A. Noire. 

A detective named Mako Daito moodily searches for clues to an unknown mystery in a glitzy city filled with people lost in their pursuit of excess, glamorous nightclubs, rowdy street fights, seedy tenements, and neon-soaked high streets. It looks like RGG Studio is digging more into survival and simulation elements than usual as well. In one brief shot, Mako holds a cigarette as an on-screen tooltip pops up that reads “Draws immense hostility when smoking.” He has hunger and thirst meters, a first for the studio, and makes split-second decisions about what to do in fraught situations, like whether to show a dangerous opponent mercy.

The trailer ends as Mako meets up with an American who’s surprised to find that Mako is Japanese and ends with a dramatic declaration from the detective about how he’s lost sight of himself. The action and setting might be unusual for RGG Studio, but the Yakuza-like melodrama remains the same.

Given the Project Century codename and the fact that the new trailer jumped forward in time by three decades, it seems like a safe bet to assume the story unfolds across, well, the century. RGG had little else to say about Stranger Than Heaven and previously recommended that no one even try to figure out what the game is about.

Stranger Than Heaven is planned for launch in 2026.