Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii launched last week. When it released, 13 months had passed since its predecessor, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, hit store shelves. Infinite Wealth, in turn, arrived just three months after Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, which itself was less than nine months after the remake of Like a Dragon: Ishin. A new Yakuza game arrives with the regularity of a network sitcom, and that makes the series an oddity in the modern gaming landscape.
Two Years Off At Most
In its entire history, Ryu Ga Gotoku has never gone more than two calendar years without releasing a new game. This is pretty remarkable because the Like a Dragon games aren’t small. This month’s Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is one of the ‘small’ ones, yet our review has the spin-off’s campaign at 15 to 18 hours. The last spin-off, Like a Dragon Gaiden, was still a full-length release by most standards, with HowLongToBeat.com clocking its campaign at 12.5 hours and a completionist playthrough at 33 hours. That’s big! It’s only a smaller release because the comparison point is Infinite Wealth, which takes 114 hours for a 100 percent run.
The wildest part is that Ryu Ga Gotoku has never changed its pace. In the late ’90s and early ’00s, RGG (then known as Amusement Vision) was putting out anywhere between one and three games every year. When it started the Yakuza series in the mid ’00s, it kept to the same schedule, with the first Yakuza launching in 2005, the second in 2006, the third in 2009, and the fourth in 2010.
Note: It also launched Yakuza spin-offs in 2008, 2010, and 2011.
From 2012 through the present, the only years Ryu Ga Gotoku didn’t release a game were 2013 and 2022. In both cases, it released multiple the year before. This is a cadence that basically no one else in the industry is keeping to. But it has me wondering: what would the games industry look like if everyone else made the necessary changes to get games out on a regular schedule again? How would the industry change if RGG was the model, not the exception?
Incremental Change Is Your Friend
Well, to answer that, we need to take a look at what Ryu Ga Gotoku does differently than other companies. The most obvious answer is asset reuse. Most of the Like a Dragon games are set in Kamurochō, a fictional district in Tokyo. It changes depending on the time period, so the ’80s-set Yakuza 0 will look a little different than the contemporary Judgment. But Ryu Ga Gotoku is starting with a solid base. It has a setting, with all the level design and assets and art direction that entails. It can change aspects, but it doesn’t have to build something entirely new with every game. Even when its games include new settings, it can still reuse assets like buildings, furniture, and natural objects like trees and bushes.
FromSoftware is one of the only other studios on a similar release cadence, and it does the same thing.
RGG also embraces iterative change. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel with each game. Until Yakuza: Like a Dragon, the mainline games didn’t change combat much in a new entry. A game might up the pace or add new fighting forms, but RGG took an ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ approach to the series’ beat-’em-up brawling.
After introducing turn-based combat with LaD, RGG iterated on it for Infinite Wealth, but saved the big change for the setting, as it introduced Hawaii. Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is keeping the setting in place, while adding ship-based combat and another, smaller map. These games don’t change everything at once. Appropriately for Pirate Yakuza, they treat the series as a huge boat that turns slowly.
What if the rest of the industry tried that for a few years? What if Naughty Dog had followed The Last of Us Part 2 up with another Seattle-based entry in 2021? What if CD Projekt Red used Cyberpunk 2077 as a blueprint and put out a new RPG in Night City after two years? What if Rockstar had stayed in Los Santos and launched GTA 6 in 2014? These situations sound borderline impossible and, in some cases, might lead to worse games. But RGG shows that, with strategic thinking, you can continue to move at the pace developers moved at in the ’90s. It might not work for everyone, but it would work for more studios than just RGG.
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