All Yakuza / Like a Dragon Games Ranked: Which Yakuza Games to Play and Where to Start | Push Square

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SEGA's Yakuza or Like a Dragon series has been around since the days of the PlayStation 2, but only over the last half a decade or so has it really started to seep into the consciousness of a wider Western audience. This is largely thanks to 2017's Yakuza 0, which sparked a whole new wave of interest on PlayStation 4. It helped, of course, that Yakuza 0 ended up being one of the very best games in the franchise to date.

Now, you may be sitting there wondering what Yakuza is all about, and whether you'd like to give the series a try. Perhaps more importantly, you're questioning where you should actually start.

Well, with the help of the Push Square community, we've managed to rank every Yakuza / Like a Dragon game released so far.

But before we begin...

Yakuza has, in the past, been referred to as «Grand Theft Auto set in Japan», but that's not the case at all. The Yakuza games are not open world, and the only thing they really have in common with Rockstar's blockbuster franchise is that they have a core theme of crime.

Yakuza games are very story-based, with a lot of cutscenes and dialogue. Almost every game in the main series (barring Yakuza: Like a Dragon) features Kazuma Kiryu — a beast of a man who always manages to find himself wrapped up in the latest drama of the Japanese criminal underworld. In some games, however, Kiryu isn't the only playable character.

The series primarily takes place in a fictional red light district known as Kamurocho, although other settings do pop up in a number of games. Kamurocho and other environments are generally quite open, but again, they're not typically what we'd call open world. You can freely explore the streets of Kamurocho, but you can't hop into the nearest car and take a