Kiryu’s new ‘Agent’ fighting stance allows him to pull tricks like calling in a horde of drones to distract enemies so that they’re too busy swatting away the buzzing nuisances to notice the flurry of his incoming fists, or lassoing multiple foes with glowing webs fired from his wrist and whipping them off their feet like he’s a street-fighting Spider-Man. Like a Dragon’s poster boy pugilist has long been a master of various forms of mixed martial arts, but in Gaiden his repertoire has been augmented by an ingenious arsenal of tech toys that grows across Gaiden’s first half. Personally I prefer to play with the original Japanese audio and English subtitles anyway for the sake of authenticity, but if you’re an English speaker who’s not a fan of reading dialogue you might want to hold off playing Gaiden until the updated audio arrives.

An English language audio option will apparently be patched in later, but Sega hasn’t confirmed exactly when that might be. Mind Your LanguageĪlthough English language audio dubs have become a consistent feature of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s games since 2018’s Judgment (with the exception of this year’s Like a Dragon: Ishin! remake), Like a Dragon Gaiden will only feature Japanese language audio at launch. I’m thankful that developer Ryo Ga Gotoku Studio seems just as reluctant to let Kiryu go as I do. Although he may appear to be a one-dimensional brute to the untrained eye, Kiryu spends just as much time cracking street punk skulls in Gaiden as he does beating himself up for the mistakes he’s made in the past, and as a longterm fan of the series I’ve never felt more endeared to him.

Amidst all the bloodletting, it also presents a deeper insight into Kiryu’s character and his very personal motivations for heading to Hawaii for next year’s turn-based RPG, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Admittedly, with just five chapters that took me around 12 hours to complete, Gaiden’s story is a little on the short side compared to previous Yakuza games, but I actually appreciated the more focussed framing of its plot.

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