Like a Dragon Gaiden Interview: Kiryu's New Identity, the Coliseum, and More | gamescom 2023

ign.com:

We're just a few short months away from the next installment in the Like a Dragon series, entitled Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name. While technically a spinoff game, it stars long-time series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu in a new adventure bridging the events of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

Naturally, we have a lot of unanswered questions about this. What's Kiryu doing here? Why is he back and starring in a game again? Will we see more of orange-headed mascot Ono Michio?

We sat down with Like a Dragon series producer Hiroyuki Sakamoto at gamescom 2023 to get some answers to our questions on Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, including new details about the game's setting, fighting styles, battle arena, Kiryu's fashion sense, and more. Here's the full Q&A:

IGN: I have a burning question about when this game takes place? Because we thought we'd seen the last of Kiryu in Song of Life, and then he showed up in Like a Dragon in seven, and this is going to be setting up the next one. I guess, what kind of time period does this span and less, where does it end off? More, where does it start out?

Hiroyuki Sakamoto, Series Producer: So, actually, initially when we said goodbye to him, we were still planning to have him appear as a double protagonist for Eight. So, this has been kind of a long time something that we've been thinking about.

So, also in Seven, Kazuma kind of appeared as a sort of backup character, and a lot of people who played Seven but weren't familiar with the previous games in the series are probably still wondering, "Who is this character and what's his role?" within the series.

So, this game was kind of invented as a spinoff, a Gaiden, but what we really