Yakuza Is Nothing Without Its Bonkers Minigames and Side Quests

I don’t talk about it much, but during the summer, I have a little gaming ritual.

Every August for nearly the past decade, I have played through a new game in the Yakuza series (now known as Like A Dragon). I pick one up, I play through the main story, do as much side content as I want, and rinse the minigames dry. Then after I’m done, the series gets shelved for a year and I only come back to it the following summer.

I think I appreciate the series a lot more when spacing it apart like this. If you strive to see everything one of these games has to offer, you’re looking at 80, maybe 100 hours of playtime. Despite the relatively small map and reused assets, each game is surprisingly deep and can keep you occupied for a long time.

If I were to binge the entire Yakuza series, it’d be over within a year and I would certainly burn out before catching up to the end. However, spacing it out at a rate of one per-year means I’m always excited to return to Kamurocho and see what Kiryu and his friends get up to next. In a way, it feels like I’m returning home.

Well, it’s August at the moment and I’m currently playing Yakuza: Like A Dragon for the first time, which is pretty notable for the fact that it represents the series shifting completely in tone, setting, and even genre.

Yakuza: Like A Dragon swaps out series’ protagonist Kazuma Kiryu for Ichiban Kasuga, a former Yakuza who starts a new life in the city of Yokohama after being betrayed by his family. Kasuga is a very different character to Kiryu, and this translates to the gameplay. He’s a massive Dragon Quest fan, so he visualises every combat encounter like a turn-based RPG party system, ditching the series’ iconic brawler fighting in the process.

Although Yakuza: Like A Dragon represents the most dramatic shift for the series since its initial debut in 2005, even before this, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio was able to keep it fresh with every new entry thanks to one simple focus: the side content.

When discussing Yakuza’s side content - the substories, the minigames, the various different systems - it’s really difficult to link them by a common theme. They’re all pretty different in style, tone, and gameplay. Yakuza: Like A Dragon’s Dragon Kart turns the game into a Mario Kart-style racer (complete with powerups and rivals), while Yakuza 0’s Real Estate Royale turns it into a business management sim where you need to buy and invest in properties to make money.

There’s the Fishing minigame in Yakuza 3, the MOBA-style Clan Creator in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, and, of course, the ever-popular Cabaret Club side quest from Yakuza 0. These games all play out largely differently from each other, introducing new genres to a series that would otherwise just be a pretty straightforward action game. Once you add in the recurring minigames, like Golf, the Batting Center, Mahjong, Pocket Circuit, Poker, and Karaoke, you’ve suddenly got a huge deck of activities to break up the main story.

I could go on, but there are literally so many different minigames and mechanics in these games that we'd be here all day. It feels like the only thing stopping Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio from implementing new ideas is the studio's imagination. I haven't even got to Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth yet, but I know I'm going to lose so much time in that game's Animal Crossing-esque Dondoko Island minigame.

Then there are the substories, Yakuza’s answer to side quests. These missions usually have no plot relevance to any of the main cast, but are instead presented as you needing to help out random Kamurucho citizens right off the street. The tone of these stories range from a whole spectrum of moods, but many of them err on the side of silly.

Some of the more famous examples include Yakuza 2’s Be My Baby, which sees Kiryu face off against a dozen adult thugs dressed up as babies, Yakuza 6’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time that features a girl who may be a time traveller, and Yakuza 5’s Slip and Slide, where you need to deliver ramen to a customer without slipping on the ice. These quests often take on a more comical tone when compared to the main story, and often ends with the protagonist or quest giver learning some kind of moral lesson from the events that transpired during the substory.

Some of them even have narratives that take place across multiple entries. In the first Yakuza, we meet the Order of Munan Chohept Onast, a cult that basically wants to swindle as much cash out of their members as possible. Although Kiryu puts a stop to their antics, we later see the cult’s origins in Yakuza 0, as well as a much later iteration of it in Hokkaido in Yakuza 6. It helps to really flesh out the series’ worldbuilding, where we see unimportant and miscellaneous characters fleshed out during these side quests which can take place decades apart.

SEGA

It’s here that I’m also thinking of Yakuza 0’s Heir to the Family and Rise of the Dragon substories, which feature young versions of Daigo Dojima and Ryuji Goda respectively. Both characters go on to be important figures in the main plots of later Yakuza games, and it’s interesting to see their origins explored in the prequel.

It’s just really funny to have Kiryu be in the middle of stopping a country-wide conspiracy by the Yakuza to murder a whole load of people and take over the Japanese government, suddenly needing to dress up as a town’s local mascot and give humorous answers in a public interview, or have to suddenly record erotic voice lines for a Boys' Love video game. It makes absolutely no sense in the wider context of the narrative, and it doesn’t need to. The fact that you can just do this without any issues is part of the Yakuza series’ charm.

And to me at least, this is how the series has managed to stay fresh after all these years, no matter how many new entries Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio makes.

These are dramatic crime stories where the plots manage to hold themselves together quite well, but underneath the surface, you’ve got an absolutely ridiculous series of minigames and side quests that truly make the games shine. If the story is the main dish, the side content is the seasoning you add to make it spicy and worth sitting down for.

Despite the formula staying relatively the same after nearly 20 years, the focus on letting the player have fun even while dealing with pretty heavy narratives gives the series all this heart and soul. I don't think these games would be as enjoyable as they are without it.