Home Tech Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is an early contender for dumbest game of 2025

Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is an early contender for dumbest game of 2025

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Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is an early contender for dumbest game of 2025

In May of last year, an anonymous forum user shared details of what they claimed would be the next game in the Like a Dragon series, the Japanese gangster drama with a unique spirit of melodrama and ridiculousness. It would star the series’ most theatrical and violent villain, Goro “Mad Dog” Majima, as a pirate with amnesia, and was called Project Madlantis. This leak went unnoticed, possibly because it sounded so silly that no one would believe it. But then at the 2024 Tokyo Game Show in September, Sega surprised everyone by announcing exactly this. It’s called Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. That’s all. That’s the game.

Madlantis sounds like a theme night at a 2000s student bar, but it’s actually the game’s pirate hub, a nautical Vegas where captains fight and bet against each other in coliseum showdowns. The ships are equipped with cannons and guns, but also machine guns and rocket launchers. Sailing the seas around Hawaii, avoiding lightning during storms, Captain Majima is able to let go of the ship’s helm and carry an RPG over his shoulder to blow up an enemy ship. Boarding another ship results in a fight between crews that, given all the tricorn hats and outlandish costumes, looks like a fight between a group of extras from an ’80s music video.

When you get tired of the swashbuckling, you can head to Hawaii Harbor, where Majima puts on a colorful short-sleeved shirt and runs around getting into fights with street thugs or snooping into people’s lives. (You can also glide serenely on a Segway.) Here, I accompanied a Japanese pop star and a group of her superfans on a guided bus tour, helped a muscular woman beat up some guys on the beach, bought a cow, and got into a fight. a polar bear named Stephanie in hand-to-hand combat. Majima is followed everywhere by a little boy named Noah and a tiger cub who once offered me a butterfly from his tiny jaws.

They didn’t have them in the golden age of piracy…targeting enemies with an RPG. Photography: Sega

“We have fans who have been playing our games for decades,” says Hiroyuki Sakamoto, the series’ chief producer. “Their speculations have become more and more accurate. Because they’re getting so good at figuring out what we’re probably going to do next, we have to think of ways to come from a different direction, so we can still surprise them… (but) it’s not all so far-fetched. how we could do it. In the end, there are still a lot of dramatic character stories.”

The Like a Dragon series has become known for its realistic virtual versions of real-world locations in Japan and further afield, from its version of Tokyo’s Kabukicho, Kamurocho, to tropical Okinawa. Hawaii was also the setting for 2024’s Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, meaning the studio was able to reuse much of what they had already painstakingly built. This has allowed for a rapid production schedule: development began around September 2023 and the game will be released in February of this year.

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But Sakamoto feels that these games are as much about their characters as they are about their settings. “Like a Dragon tells stories about people with strong beliefs, strong feelings, creeds and lifestyles, and how these people connect with each other,” he says. Even when they hook up over bottles of rum below the deck of their mafia pirate ship.

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