Our countdown of my 10 favorite games of 2020 begins with a somewhat last-minute entry, and a different take on the popular Yakuza franchise.
#10 Yakuza Like a Dragon
The Yakuza franchise has been one of the strangest series published by Sega in terms of popularity. It wasn’t until a prequel and reboots of the first two games that it began to find success here in the US. Following the retirement of the series’ main star, Yakuza Like a Dragon is a reboot in a lot of ways. The biggest is shifting the action-based combat into a turn-based jrpg.
After six main game entries (not counting the kiwami updates or 0) to make a switch this grand to a franchise is immense. While I don’t think it works 100% (and I’ll discuss that more in my review), the game hits more than it misses.
One comment from my review is that it would have been so easy for the developers to write this game off as just a weird experiment and leave it at that. Instead, we get a massive JRPG filled with all the crazy content that Yakuza fans have come to expect. At this point, I honestly don’t know where the team is going to go from here — will they return to action combat for a proper Yakuza 8? Continue this design with a sequel? Or maybe they’ll try their hands at soulslike combat and completely rebuild things again.
Up next for #9, a modern retro game sequel that strikes the right notes in terms of classic and modern design.
