Like a Dragon Gaiden Review: ‘Kiryu is Back, but Now He’s Wearing Glasses’ Is an Apt Metaphor

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has always wanted to make a serious crime drama, but this clashed with the need to balance it with a large action world with stuff to do. Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name is seemingly the team’s opportunity to lean harder into cinema. There are some distractions here and there, but the game mostly focuses on Kiryu’s core tale.

Gaiden plays around with its narrative timing, crossing paths with Ichiban’s story since this story takes place at roughly the same time. These connections are oblique nods rather than crucial crossovers. Still: it would be wild for this to be your first game in the franchise, so references likely have a large audience.

Kiryu’s “Joryu” disguise is sub-Superman levels of flimsy, like people wouldn’t recognize the most famous yakuza in the world just because he’s wearing glasses. We’ve already seen from trailers and previews that the upcoming full game does a better job of this, but… seriously, if you’re trying to be undercover, maybe get a haircut sooner rather than later?

Regardless, welcome back to the same areas again! Like a Dragon and Yakuza as a franchise has long specialized in asset recycling, from locations to character models to entire minigames. Gaiden is the king of this! Revisiting old ideas and people is the point of a Kiryu side game, for better or worse. This is an old-school Yakuza experience, and it’s hard to fault it for that. It feels like the team regretted sidelining Kiryu for Ichiban, so Gaiden aligns the timelines for next year’s Infinite Wealth.

To be fair to Like a Dragon Gaiden, it’s honest about its limitations. It retails at a semi-reasonable $49.99, and is a digital release shortly preceding its counterpart. Heck, it’s literally named Gaiden, or side story, so its lesser status is literally the first thing it presents. But your expectations are best somewhere around Kiwami level.

The one area that feels genuinely new is The Castle, a container ship converted into a gambling and fighting destination. It’s very bright and flashy, and it focuses on adding to Gaiden’s activities rather than building out a believable environment. It’s here that the game pads its hour count the most with gladiatorial combat. There’s single-player fights, which are… fine? But the main attraction here is “Hell Team Rumble.” You collect team members through doing the rest of the game, and can fight with up to ten of them at once in some challenges. As usual, there’s a minigame that lets you easily grind for cash or upgrade currency, and Hell Team Rumble is the one in this game for sure.

It’s clear that the development team played Spider-Man and decided it would be cool for Kiryu to have a web-shooter. And that’s not wrong! It’s especially useful for disarming foes, as they’ll drop what they’re holding when you fling them across the game’s makeshift arenas. You also get drones to distract and lightly damage enemies, as well as rocket shoes to dash and an exploding cigarette. That last one’s not quite as useful as it sounds, since it has a long animation and delay in damage, but the rest? We liked ‘em.

Of course, disarming moves don’t work on anyone you actually need to disarm, like bosses with guns and unlimited bullets. Generally, this has been true of the franchise as a whole: almost every story beat or side event ends with a boss fight, and bosses can’t be taken down with all the cool tricks and gadgets you’ve collected. A better combat system would present you with foes that challenge you to cleverly use all your techniques; Like a Dragon Gaiden takes the much more common route and just says “nah.”

In addition to the “Agent” gadget fighting style, there’s also a “Yakuza” scheme that focuses more on traditional hand-to-hand play. In practice, we had a lot more fun with the variety of drones and tech, so we didn’t use that style often. Especially because you’d have to be splitting your hard-earned currency to upgrade both.

We’ve been dancing around it, but to discuss it head-on: Ryu Ga Gotoku has a huge branding problem. Just as the franchise finally gains traction in the West, Sega is attempting to pivot from Yakuza, a name people know, to Like a Dragon, which is a bit more of a mouthful. But in this context? Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name is too long, we hate typing it, and it’s going to run into the same confusion that Ishin did earlier this year. It’s a similar problem as Story of Seasons in the West, but without the trademark issues that prompted it.

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has insisted that the franchise isn’t just about yakuza, and the translated Japanese name they’re now using worldwide is more representative. That may be true! But Resident Evil isn’t just about mansions anymore either, and after similarly naming a game with both regions’ titles, it didn’t pivot to the name Biohazard. And with good reason! This may feel like a digression, and in some ways it is, but this name change is going to have a fundamental impact on this game’s global reception, and it’s a weird game to try to advance this effort with how much it wants to remind players of the past.

It’s hard to evaluate Gaiden as a standalone game. And that’s because it isn’t? Sega took what could have been a flashback chapter in Infinite Wealth and tacked on some extras. Remembering this context while you play is to the game’s benefit, too. A brief vacation into the old battle style, with some minigames along the way? Yeah, it’s fun for that. It’s not a destination to itself, and it genuinely couldn’t be with all its stale re-treads. But hey, it’s nice to see Kiryu again.

Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name will launch November 9, 2023 on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series, Xbox One and PC. It’s also launching on Xbox Game Pass. For more Siliconera reviews, check out our archive.