My mother taught me to get as many meals as possible from my food. If she made chicken, she'd turn leftover meat into sandwiches, boil the bones for stock, and render the fat for schmaltz. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio approaches game development in much the same way: The studio refreshes, remixes, and repurposes everything it makes, enabling it to release a new Like a Dragon title at least once per year. It's also why the $59.99 Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii is great. It uses the charming character models, animations, and Hawaiian locations made for the previous mainline game, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and, despite being a side game that replaces RPG gameplay with brawler action, it's a huge story of piracy, intrigue, and wackiness. Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is greater than the sum of its parts and an incredibly fun title for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox that earns our Editors’ Choice award.

(Credit: Sega/PCMag)

Plot

The game takes place a few months after the events of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and starts with legendary gangster Goro Majima, the Mad Dog of Shimano, waking up on the beach of a tiny Hawaiian island. He has amnesia and doesn't know who he is or how he got there, so naturally, the first thing he does is saves a 10-year-old child from pirates, takes their ship, and forms a crew.

The pirates aren't contemporary marauders who use small vessels and automatic weapons to disrupt shipping. They're classic pirates on galleons, with cutlasses, flintlocks, and triangular hats. What follows is a swashbuckling adventure that includes enough pirate ships to support an entire industry of cannon manufacturers, a cult, the Yakuza, a mysterious financier, a casino coliseum city called Madlantis built out of a ship graveyard, and, of course, lots of treasure. It's a gloriously silly narrative and one of the reasons I love the series.

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Gameplay

Yakuza/Like a Dragon was a brawler before it became a turn-based RPG in its main titles, but the side games like Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii remain action-packed beat 'em ups. It's all about punching, kicking, shooting, and slashing.

Fights are fast and active, with an emphasis on dodging and parrying. You can switch between Majima's classic Mad Dog style (which lets him hit single enemies with powerful blows and enables air juggling) and his new Sea Dog style (which gives him two cutlasses, a pistol, and a grappling hook for crowd control and zipping across the battlefield). In a nice touch, the style switch alters Majima's outfit between his familiar, stylish street clothes and full pirate captain's drag, complete with a long coat and big hat. 

(Credit: Sega/PCMag)

Besides the challenging rhythm of striking, blocking, and dodging, you leverage wild moves fueled by the Heat and Madness meters that fill as you fight. Heat moves are especially brutal situational attacks, such as slamming an enemy's head into a nearby car. Madness moves go from brutal to outright crazy, with the Mad Dog style letting you summon a squad of Majima clones and the Sea Dog style letting you summon the ghosts of sea creatures.

A rare, thematic exception to hand-to-hand combat requires Majima to face off against pirates on a ship's mast in sword-based combat. This type of fight switches to a 2D plane with much more limited controls, where you move Majima forward or backward and have to time parries to get through. I can count the number of times I saw this on one hand, and each time felt jarring because the timing and controls were very different from the combat I had become used to. It's visually fun, but mechanically the weakest part of the action.

(Credit: Sega/PCMag)

Ship Battles

Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii also takes the action to the waters. It isn't a huge open-world sea; the game splits the ship navigation sections into several modestly large zones. Each has at least one landmark to visit (like Honolulu), several islands to explore, and pirates to fight. Lighthouses that serve as fast-travel locations are scattered across the zones, letting you zip anywhere without needing to sail. Of course, those extra islands and pirates are worth looting, since they give you in-game money and Pirate's Reputation for customizing Majima.

(Credit: Sega/PCMag)

You battle in ship-to-ship combat, too. Like most pirate-themed naval games, Pirate Yakuza focuses on jockeying for position to fire weapons while minimizing the enemy’s ability to hit you. You can also briefly boost the Goromaru's speed, drift to pull 180-degree turns, fix its damaged hull using limited repair charges, and even throw up a smoke screen to run. It's simple and fun in ways that recall Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag's combat.

After you defeat certain pirate bosses, you board enemy vessels with up to 20 of your crew to fight hand-to-hand. These are huge, exciting brawls with a counter at the bottom of the screen showing how many people on each side are still standing.

(Credit: Sega/PCMag)

Building a Pirate Crew

The Goromaru needs a crew, and Majima can recruit dozens from across Hawaii. They can range from total nobodies to outrageous, high-level characters you must jump through hoops to find. Those hoops are part of what makes the entire series fun, and include lengthy, wacky side quests and many, many mini-games (more on those in a bit).

Crew can be assigned to the deck or boarding teams, with multiple slots for cannoneers, gunners, and boarders. Each crew member has different stats and proficiencies for gunnery, ship repair, melee attack, and melee defense. Although Majima doesn't gain RPG-style experience like Ichiban in Infinite Wealth, his crew does, and each gains levels to become better at their jobs. Some even have role-based perks like additional fuel points for boosting the Goromaru or making their subordinates do more damage in combat. You can spend in-game money to improve Majima's stats and unlock new moves or equip rings for even more stat improvements.

(Credit: Sega/PCMag)

Mini-Games

It wouldn’t be a Yakuza/Like a Dragon game without an absurd amount of side quests and mini-games, and Pirate Yakuza satisfies in that regard. Infinite Wealth's Crazy Taxi-like Crazy Eats and Pokemon Snap-like Sicko Snap return, along with Yakuza: Like a Dragon's Mario Kart-like Dragon Kart.

There's also golf, a pirate-themed puzzle batting cage where you hit cannon balls at exploding barrels, pool, blackjack, poker, mahjong, shogi (Japanese chess), koi-koi, and ochi-kabu (Japanese card games). Oh, and you can also play other Sega video games, including Fighting Vipers 2, The Ocean Hunter, Sega Racing Classic 2: Power Edition, SpikeOut FE, Virtual Fighter 3, and Virtual Fighter 3tb, plus over a dozen Master System and SG-1000 games. There's a lot to get distracted by, which is a big part of the fun.

(Credit: Sega/PCMag)

There’s plenty to collect just wandering around, too. The Alola Links feature from Infinite Wealth is back to let Majima make friends around Honolulu (and earn rewards) by waving at people. There are dozens of bounties to collect by fighting specific people, and dozens more treasures to collect by finding hidden locations.

If you like the ship combat, the pirate colosseum in Madlantis has entire tournaments of pure cannon firing and swashbuckling, and there's an optional pirate hunting quest line that has you sailing into fresh waters. 

(Credit: Sega/PCMag)

The bounties and extra pirate content cause uneven difficulty jumps. You can pursue them fairly early in the game, and use them to upgrade Majima and the Goromaru. However, it makes the main story too easy if you do this too early. After clearing out my bounty list, I jumped back into the main story around the end of chapter 3 and found myself destroying everyone except bosses (which weren't particularly challenging, either). It wasn't dull, though. As I plowed through hordes of weak pirates, the action resembled a Dynasty Warriors title for a few moments.

However, there isn't a huge, complex tentpole secondary game with an extensive campaign like Infinite Wealth's Animal Crossing-like Dondoko Island or Pokemon-like Sujimon. Even without entire extra games to play, Pirate Yakuza is packed with activities, and it’s still technically a side story that's $10 cheaper than a main, numbered series chapter. You can sink more than 20 hours into it without rushing.

(Credit: Sega/PCMag)

Graphics and Performance

Pirate Yakuza looks like any modern Like a Dragon game, for good and bad. It's built on the same engine as the last several games and recycles assets. This means the Hawaii setting looks as nice in this game as in Infinite Wealth. The brawler won't wow you with ray-traced realism, but it's colorful and sharp, and the environment is surprisingly detailed.

It also performs well at a fairly consistent 30-something frames per second. It occasionally froze for a few moments after large battles, and I had an odd moment of extensive texture flicker and warping on the beach that required reloading my save. However, these are minor complaints.

Verdict: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii Doesn't Walk the Plank

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is a big, incredibly fun game that hits all the goofy notes that make the series terrific. It's a testament to how good RGG Studio is at its obsessively economical approach to game development, making almost the same Honolulu as Infinite Wealth feel fresh in Majima’s shoes. Its $60 price might seem high for a "side game," but it's a massive experience with lengthy quests and a mind-boggling number of activities that only seem slightly smaller than the main games in the series. Overall, it's a wildly entertaining and satisfyingly lengthy romp that's worthy of our Editors' Choice award.