Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza Was Almost A Fishing Game With Kiryu

The concept for Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is already pretty buck wild, even for a spin-off. According to Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio director Masayoshi Yokoyama, the result could have been even stranger: For a while, he wanted to make a fishing game called like a Dragon: Tuna.

In an interview with the PlayStation Blog (via PCGamer), Yokoyama shared details about another potential idea for a spin-off. Brainstorming began around mid-2023, months prior to the release of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth on January 25, 2024. Before the team decided to have Goro Majima go on a pirate adventure, the plan was to feature Kazuma Kiryu as a tuna fisherman, who would set off to sea to fight against fishing boats.

“Long story short, it never came to fruition, but keywords like ‘ship,’ ‘sea,’ and ‘fighting,’ which had since then been engraved in my head, evolved into the concept of pirates,” Yokoyama said. It was always the intention to create a spin-off starring characters who weren’t Ichiban Kasuga, one of the protagonists of Infinite Wealth, but Majima ended up as the frontrunner.

Amnesia was a paramount narrative peg for the character to work, as he’s known for being unpredictable. While that attitude is what sets him apart, the team wanted to avoid the emotional discrepancy of the player being frustrated in a scene while Majima is unbothered about the events unfolding.

“To avoid that, we would need a neutral character who could act the way players anticipate from a protagonist,” Yokoyama said. “But the downside is that we’d end up with a boring protagonist. We gave Kiryu and Kasuga additional personalities to build them into protagonists, but if we did that to Majima, he’d turn out to be a boring guy. To make him a protagonist, we only had two options: amnesia or travel back in time. Without amnesia, Majima wouldn’t have worked as a protagonist.”

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is releasing on February 28, 2025 on PC and both old- and current-gen consoles. Preorders are now live, featuring some discounts as well as a pricier Collector’s Edition with a few physical goodies.