I’ve been slowly making my way through Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, thoroughly enjoying my return to Hawaii’s sandy shores. The follow up to my 2024 Game of the Year, Pirate Yakuza is a cannonball of explosive, eccentric fun, where the zany sensibilities of Like a Dragon perfectly mesh with the chaos of being a pirate. But, as ever, there’s a message behind the madness.
The game would tell you I’m not very far through. I’m still in Chapter 2, or 20 percent of the way to completion as the PS5’s tracker will tell you. But that tracker has not moved for the last seven of my 12 total hours in the game – that’s because I’ve put the story firmly on hold to run around Hawaii recruiting sailors, collecting bounties, and rattling off substories instead of progressing. Is this the most sensible way to play the game? No. Am I going to stop? Also no.
There is one substory in particular that interests me here. In our rapidly revolving news cycle, I feel a little late to the party on this one. But at the same time, I haven’t seen anyone discuss it, which is odd when it seems to make such a bold statement against the state of the industry. It’s the sort of thing that more established developers tend to save for tweets with plausible deniability rather than shove front and centre into their games, but then RGG has always been a positive outlier amongst development trends.
The substory in question is Goro’s Heart. Ostensibly, it revolves around a scientist who offers you a headset that lets you talk to the animals. Grunting, squeaking, and squawking cost extra, which is sort of the whole point. I’ll get to that. Anyway, you talk to your pet tiger, Goro, and get the chance to buy it a drink. Options in the helmet flash up, ranging from cheap water to expensive champagne, but I plumbed for affordable but still more special organic milk. By that point, I’d already been taken for a sucker and didn’t know it.
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In the midst of the conversation, the battery died. The $100 needed to instantly recharge it felt steep, but since I had been collecting bounties all around the map, it was chump change – only I was the chump. Goro then tells me it loves me, not as a pet loves its owner, but as a woman loves a man. The battery dies again in the middle of this conversation, and the price has now gone up to $10,000 to keep going.
Since in-character, Majima is desperate to see what happens next, I’m forced to pay it, although thankfully I had just heavily renovated my ship and did not have the money on hand. While this is happening, your companion Noah spots the scientist whispering into his walkie-talkie. Turns out, Goro isn’t talking to me at all – the scientist is, and is scamming me into buying items via the headset, where all the money goes to him. He specifically refers to these as “microtransactions”.
Developers Are Getting Bored Of Modern Game Design Penny Pinching
Majima is quickly informed of this shakedown, but (as always in Like a Dragon substories), they work it out in the end, and the scientist is recruited to your crew. He says he started out with noble intentions, and agrees to stop scamming people, putting the helmet back on to fine-tune it, which promptly blows up in his face. While he writhes on the floor in agony, he splutters, “I guess putting a half-baked microtransaction system in caused it to explode”.
This is a pretty clear condemnation of modern video game design philosophy, where money grabbing opportunities are shoved into either fresh ideas or long-established series in the hopes of milking profits from fans. Video games are incredibly expensive to make, although RGG’s regular cadence shows that quality on a budget is possible with sensible planning and clever use of maps and assets. Majima even tells him to “spend your effort on actual research next time”. To see a game so openly bang the drum players have been beating for years is heartening, even if it also means microtransactions are so normalised now that a gag like this can land without sticking to any game in particular.
The face of gaming is changing, and I understand there is a call for online forever games that many people love, even if nothing for me will ever beat the charm of a well made single-player adventure. If nothing else, I’m glad studios like RGG are out there telling it like it is, and making games right.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
81/100
Critics Recommend:
86%
- Released
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February 21, 2025
- Developer(s)
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Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio