Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is this year’s entry into the well-pedigreed, slightly insane Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise, throwing series mainstay and fan favourite character Goro Majima into an extraordinarily wacky piratical adventure, complete with treasure islands, naval combat, and cutlasses. As a lifelong fan of the series, I am more than aware of how off the wall they can get – but is this next tie-in just a little bit too far?
That’s not to say Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is bad – seeing Majima strut around in pirate garb whilst unleashing his trademark unhinged combat style on his opponents is quite amusing. As the game starts, he’s lost his memory and washed up on a remote Hawaiian island. When his life is saved by a local island dweller, Majima does Majima stuff and… embarks on a quest to become the greatest pirate that’s ever lived? Granted, there are a few more steps between those plot points, but perhaps not as many as you might expect.
I was enjoying the ‘new’ elements of Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii that have been bolted on for the pirate theme. It wasn’t particularly absorbing stuff – the naval combat is fun but very basic, adding in turbo-boosts, drifts and frontal machine guns for that extra dimension of chaos. The ‘treasure hunts’ mostly involve just sailing up to an island, beating up a varied procession of mooks, and grabbing a chest at the end of a linear path. It wasn’t until I beat the first couple of chapters that Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii (God, that name is monstrous) really opened up and drew me in.
How does it open up at that point, you might ask? Well… strangely enough, it’s when you have to ditch your new pirate ship for a little while and get back to some good old-fashioned city-crawling, returning to the streets of Honolulu to recruit a bigger crew and earn some money. Naturally, it’s not quite as fleshed out as Infinite Wealth – the last mainline entry – but there is still plenty of that classic Yakuza gameplay.
The side-stories are, of course, back in force, along with many of the fan-favourite minigames from the previous entry. The difference in Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is that most of them now reward you with a new crew member, and these vary in the skills and perks they bring to the ship.
Try as I might – and try I did – I just could not get as invested in the sailing/naval combat as I did the more familiar Like a Dragon segments. There’s nothing like roaming the streets and getting drawn off on random tangents whilst beating up an endless procession of thugs. The sailing sections, while initially entertaining, are extraordinarily simplistic and quickly boil down to repetition.
This feeling persists even with the advent of ship upgrades, different crew configurations, and all the typical bells and whistles these games tend to tack on to secondary mechanics to fill them out. Upon the seas around Hawaii, your adventures take just one of two routes. You either fight enemy ships on the open seas – some just fodder for your cannons, some slightly spicier – or land on a treasure island to cut red swathes through enemy pirates and steal their loot. Even these treasure raids rarely divert from the tried and tested mechanic of just killing everything in a linear path.
When the crew does make land – or gather for a friendly chat in the ship’s bar – Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii comes back to full strength, delivering the same quality of narrative and outright silliness it always does. It makes me wonder – did this story really need to be a pirate game? Would a spin-off about an amnesiac Goro Majima chasing a lost treasure in Hawaii not have worked all by itself?
I think it would have worked just fine. He’s a series mainstay, a fan favourite character that people would have flocked to play. But not, perhaps, the audience that has only picked the series up since Like a Dragon – they’ve had the bare minimum of exposure to Majima and his historic place in the franchise.
Which is, presumably, why we have amnesiac pirate Majima roaming Hawaii. Much like Geralt’s memory loss in the Witcher games, we have a convenient way to show off a character with a ton of backstory and teach the players about it at the same time. Without the weight of his considerable existence thus far to hold him back with the necessary exposition, Majima can just… be himself, and players can learn just who that is along the way.
Final thoughts on Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
I’m not averse to pirates – in fact, it’s one of my favourite themes – but I’m not sure that it’s been implemented with particular strength here. Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is mildly entertaining and does lead to some funny moments. But what we’ve been presented here is ultimately a very average pirate game tacked onto an excellent, as usual, Yakuza game. It’s definitely worth playing, but you should prepare to grit your teeth through those salty sea winds until you get to the real booty.
Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is available on Xbox, PlayStation and Steam. You can read more game reviews here.
