For years, I've been on a quest to catch up on the Yakuza franchise. In high school, I played through Yakuza 0 for the first time and absolutely loved it. To this day, I would consider it to be one of my favorite games of all time. Since then, I've been making an effort to catch up so I could play these games on release alongside everyone else. It's taken an exceptionally long time, but my quest is finally over, I've finished Yakuza: Like A Dragon and despite some issues, I'd consider it one of the best entries in the series so far.

I've been looking forward to playing Yakuza: Like a Dragon for a long time. The new protagonist, Ichiban, seemed interesting and I was excited to see the series move on from Kiryu. I'm a huge fan of JRPGs so the series completely changing into that style of game never seemed like a complete negative to me, but I was very skeptical on whether or not it would be able to pull it off well without detracting from the series' strongest areas.

Unfortunately, I did think the turn-based combat was a bit more half-baked than I was hoping, but it was still fun to play around with. For those that have played RPGs like this, nothing here is too surprising or out there. I'd honestly say the biggest negatives to result from this change is the rearranging of the game's structure to accommodate this gameplay style. I felt like the progression was not exceptionally smooth, with many points of forced grinding, making completing side content almost necessary to get through the main story. I also didn't love the emphasized importance of constantly needing to upgrade armor and weapons, not because that wouldn't be a fun thing to do, but because of how limited it can be at times. Despite this, I still had a decent time with the new JRPG systems, and I think with some improvements they can become something really enjoyable. Where Yakuza: Like a Dragon really shines is with its main narrative and side content.

For me, the main draw of this series has always been its stories. They've always been super exciting crime dramas with elevated action and great characters. Yakuza can be very tropey with its stories, there's always characters that know more than they're letting on, there's always moments of treachery from characters that you thought were good and bad guys that are secretly not so bad and there is always people getting killed from an offscreen gunshot (seriously I'm almost always expecting them in cutscenes at this point) and yes, Yakuza: Like a Dragon has all of these, but it also has something that the other games do not, and that is Ichiban.

Ichiban is probably my favorite protagonist in the entire franchise. His story in this game had me locked in and I really wanted to see him succeed in his goals. Without spoiling, his relationship with his yakuza family was really compelling to me and by the end of this game I was straight up in tears from Ichiban's display of optimism. I also feel like he is the perfect protagonist for the type of series Yakuza has become. He can be very serious when the time calls for it, but also very silly and light-hearted, which while Kiryu could very much match the same notes, he was often more of a straight man with a heart of gold that always knew when to be serious than a brash but loveable goofy guy that Ichiban can be. It really comes through in the side stories, where the events that happen in them can often be absurd and comedic.

I had a great time playing through Yakuza: Like a Dragon. While I do think there is much room for improvement in the RPG systems, everything else that people love about this series are at some of its strongest here. If you've never played any of the other games and just want to jump into this one, I'd say you could. The story doesn't really require past knowledge of events and while there are many returning characters, you don't really need to know their stories to understand what is happening (although still play those old games because many of them are so good). I'm looking forward to playing Infinite Wealth at launch and seeing how they advance with the new direction for the series.