Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza is a minigame collection disguised as an open-world game

Within my first ten minutes of Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, I was tending to a garden. After an hour, I’d learned to cook. While I’d eventually reach the title’s promised buccaneering, I had, by that point, played a pair of Sega Genesis games and learned enough “Intro to Small Business Management” to maintain high employee satisfaction amongst my company of swashbucklers.

Pirate Yakuza is (and I say this as a compliment) a game of distractions. Novel, idiosyncratic, heartfelt distractions.

Compare this approach with popular open-world series like Assassin’s Creed, Horizon, and Far Cry. Players with the slightest familiarity can skip through their tutorials and still comfortably zip through the same old fetch quests, tower climbs, and monster closets. At best, they provide cinematic and immersive trips to fantastic alternate realities. But at their worst, they’re to-do lists, a near-endless series of short, easy, samey chores that feed the compulsive urge of many gamers (myself included) to check boxes and be rewarded little treats.

Pirate Yakuza can drift into these waters — it’s not so inspired as to float divinely above all others in its genre — but just as often as the developers add an item to the quest list, they also create room for the player to wander into bauble of game design for no greater reason than it’s enjoyable. 

That comes at a narrative cost that players who prefer consistency might find confounding or even repellent. Why is an amnesiac reformed criminal caring for a pet tiger, planting vegetables across the Pacific, and go-karting through the streets of Honolulu? Place your ear against the screen, listen closely, and you can hear the game whisper, “Because it’s cool, you clown.”

The Like a Dragon née Yakuza series has long fiddled with the genre’s ratio of gameplay and story, while spiking each new release with a few familiar minigames (karaoke, batting cage, shogi) and new novelties (RC car racing, real estate development, pervert photography). But most Like a Dragon/Yakuza games span dozens of hours, the minigames serving as a diversion from the game’s core RPG.

But Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii has swung so high on the swingset as to go over the bar and turn itself inside out. This time, it’s first and foremost a collection of distractions, and it’s the open world action-RPG that serves as the irregular reprieve.

Should this be the future of open-world games? Nah. Hell, every Like a Dragon game shouldn’t even go this far. But this is a special treat, a taste of what would happen if open-world games had gone the opposite direction and of the Like a Dragon series at its most unrestrained.

Pirate Yakuza is Oops, All Berries — and I’m going to eat the entire box.