Like a Dragon Stories Will Continue to Focus on “Middle-Aged Guy Things,” Developers Say
When it started out, the Yakuza series was focused on telling stories about Japan’s criminal underworld, and that was the series’ primary drive for a long time afterwards, though recent years have seen it reinvent itself. Yakuza: Like a Dragon shifted its focus to telling even more personal and everyday slice-of-life stories revolving around middle-aged leading characters, something that its successor, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, doubled down on. And it seems that’s the direction it’ll keep heading in.
That’s as per series director Ryosuke Horii and lead planner Hirotaka Chiba, who said in a recent interview with Automaton that the Like a Dragon series, as it’s now known, is going to continue telling stories focused on “middle-aged guy things”.
“We are middle-aged guys ourselves… so I guess that’s the kind of target audience we’re going for, probably,” they said.
Horii went on to talk about how it’s this very aspect that gives the series a unique identity. “I think that this is precisely one ofLike a Dragon’s selling points. In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, everything starts with three unemployed middle-aged guys being like ‘Let’s go to Hello Work.’ They have a different air about them than a group of young heroes would, complaining about back pain and the like. But this ‘humanity’ you feel from their age is what gives the game originality.”
Chiba chimed in with an example as well, pointing to a conversation in the game where a character mulls over whether or not to drink beer on account of being worried about his uric acid levels.
“For example, there’s a conversation where Adachi is conflicted about whether he should drink beer or not because he’s worried about his uric acid level,” he said. “We’re making the hearty talks of middle-aged dudes our identity, rather than youthfulness.”
Horii went on to add that though the Like a Dragon series has certainly seen an influx of new fans and demographics, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio doesn’t intend to change the way it makes its
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