I’m glad to see Kiryu again, but The Man Who Erased His Name isn’t one of the series’ greats

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SHOULD I PLAY LIKE A DRAGON GAIDEN: THE MAN WHO ERASED HIS NAME?

I’ll qualify this a bit by saying yes, play this game, but not as an entry point to developer Ryu Ga Gotoku’s long-running series of yakuza action-adventure games. Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name is a backward-looking side story to what is now the main storyline in the Like A Dragon series and stars Kazuma Kiryu, the protagonist of the preceding Yakuza series.

Once thought dead, Kiryu has been forced out of clandestine retirement to rescue a man who had protected his secret. On the way he’ll get to visit some of his old haunts while meeting a typically zany cast of new characters. There’s lots of classic Yakuza goodness here, but The Man Who Erased His Name feels less freeform than the best games in the series. Still, it serves as a nice intermezzo piece connecting the wonderful Yakuza: Like A Dragon and the upcoming Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth while linking them both to the original series.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played about six hours of Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, which has taken me through the first chapter and likely a fair way into the second. It’s hard to know for sure, though, because while the first chapter consists of clearly marked story missions, the game fans out and loses a bit of steam in chapter two, which is mostly about setting up an underground intelligence network in the Sotenbori entertainment district (a place where series fans will immediately feel right at home).

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT LIKE A DRAGON GAIDEN: THE MAN WHO ERASED HIS NAME?

• Kiryu’s back, kicking ass. It was great to slip back into the sharkskin suit of the Dragon of Dojima, splitting my time between being a downright neighborly fellow and savagely beating up the local population of mean guys. I could flip back and forth between “agent style” and “yakuza style” during fights, which was fun. In agent style, Kiryu had access to various James Bond-style gadgets like attack drones and a watch-mounted spider wire; in yakuza style, he could unleash high-damage fury attacks and pick up road signs and motor scooters off the street to pummel dudes with.

• Walking around Sotenbori brings back memories. The Yakuza series has made a few stops in Sotenbori, a densely-packed neighborhood of nightclubs, restaurants, and luxury shops that straddles the river it’s named after. Walking by the Cabaret Grand, I fondly remembered Goro Majima’s spectacular entrance in Yakuza 0 before heading across the river to sing Bakamitai at a karaoke bar.

• You can save anywhere. I’m honestly not sure when Ryu Ga Gotoku started allowing this, but it’s great. Having to find a phone booth to save my game was always a huge bummer, and I was very relieved to find that there’s no such restriction in The Man Who Erased His Name.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT LIKE A DRAGON GAIDEN: THE MAN WHO ERASED HIS NAMED?

• Not enough weirdos. I’m sure I’ll find more odd characters the more I play, but the initial hours of The Man Who Erased His Name didn’t have any of the standout eccentrics that I typically love in the Yakuza games. Seriously, where’s my gang of diaper-wearing adult babies? What about Mr. Shakedown, who used to prowl the streets and steal your money if you lost to him in a fight? Or that disgusting pervert, Mr. Libido? It’s not that I ever liked those guys as such, but I always enjoyed the fact that Kamurocho, Sotenbori, and the other places I’ve spent time in these games are populated with a bunch of normal people and a few complete freaks. Sadly, they were nowhere to be found in my first several hours.

• It feels unsure of its core identity. One of the things that made Yakuza games special to me was the fact that they turned me loose in unfamiliar places and just let me go find the fun. Stumbling across a Sega arcade, an underground gambling den, or some late-night batting cages wasn’t on my official list of things to do, I got to discover them for myself. Even when I didn’t care for a particular activity, I still liked knowing that Sotenbori, Kamurocho, and Injincho were filled with these diversions, because it breathed a certain carnival life into them.

In The Man Who Erased His Name, everything I did was plugged into Akame’s intel network. That meant all those freeform activities suddenly had a point value. Karaoke felt less like playing hooky and more like grinding, because I knew the game was paying attention to me while I did it.

• A lot of trivial tasks and side quests. Speaking of that intel network of Akame’s, a bunch of the tasks I had to do to advance this part of the game felt almost insultingly trivial. I’d meet a kid in the street whose soccer ball was stuck in a tree, and simply use my spider wire to yank it down. Same deal for a man on the bridge who had dropped his wedding ring in the river. There’s nothing interesting about these quests and many others: I simply looked at the thing they had lost and pressed a button to retrieve it, without even needing to move from the spot where we’d had our conversation. This kind of filler just felt tedious and ultimately pointless.

PLATFORM TESTED

PC, via Steam