In May last year, an anonymous forum poster 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, violent villain, Goro “Mad Dog” Majima, as a pirate with amnesia, and it was called Project Madlantis. This leak went under the radar, quite possibly because it sounded so silly that nobody would believe it. But then, at 2024’s Tokyo Game Show in September, Sega surprised everyone by announcing exactly this. It is called Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. That’s it. That’s the game.
Related: Found in translation: how Like a Dragon brings Japan to the rest of the world
Madlantis sounds like a theme night at a noughties student bar, but is in fact the game’s pirate hub, a nautical Vegas where captains battle and bet on each other in coliseum face-offs. Ships are outfitted with cannon and pistols, but also machine guns and rocket launchers. Sailing the seas around Hawaii, avoiding lightning strikes during storms, Captain Majima can let go of the wheel of the ship and heft an RPG on to his shoulder to blow up an enemy craft. Boarding another vessel results in a fight between crews, which, given all the tricorn hats and outlandish costumes, looks like a punch-up between a bunch of extras from an 80s music video.
When you get sick of swashbuckling you can put into port in Hawaii, where Majima slips on a colourful short-sleeved shirt and runs around getting into scraps with street thugs or nosing around in people’s lives. (He can also glide serenely around on a Segway.) Here, I accompanied a Japanese pop star and a group of her superfans on a guided bus tour, helped a buff woman beat up some creeps on the beach, bought a cow, and fought a polar bear named Stephanie in hand-to-hand combat. Majima is followed around everywhere by a small boy called Noah, and a tiger cub who once offered me a butterfly from its tiny jaws.
“We have fans who have been playing our games for decades at this point,” says Hiroyuki Sakamoto, the series’ chief producer. “Their speculation has 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] not everything is as over the top as we possibly could make it. In the end, there are still a lot of character drama stories.”
The Like a Dragon series has become known for its lifelike virtual versions of real-world places in Japan and farther 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, which means that the studio was able to reuse a lot of what they’d already painstakingly built. This has allowed for a quick production schedule: development began around September 2023, and the game will be released this February.
But Sakamoto feels these games are as much about their characters as their settings. “Like a Dragon tells stories about people with strong beliefs, strong feelings, creeds and ways of life, and how these people connect with each other,” he says. Even when they are connecting over bottles of rum below deck on their gangster pirate ship.