Kazuma Kiryu, a legendary ex-gangster in the Japanese underworld, stops before a bridge, a café, a nightclub, or an office building, suddenly awash in memories of bygone times. Scenes flash before his eyes of lost loves—of old rivals and friends from his past. He thinks back on bare-knuckled fights with enemies or more peaceful encounters with the eccentric citizens of the Tokyo district he’s lived in for so many years. Nearly every landmark seems to trigger another memory. Kazuma Kiryu is getting older. He’s fallen ill. And, unsurprisingly, he’s grown wistful in his later years.
After starring in seven games (and several spin-offs) over the past two decades, Kiryu deserves a break. All the same, the latest entry to the long-running series, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, sees him enlisted yet again to sort out the many injustices in his corner of the world. Through a typically labyrinthine plot involving, briefly, Japanese intelligence services, a Hawaiian cult, and the search for a long-lost mother, Kiryu ends up working alongside former Like a Dragon protagonist Ichiban Kasuga to thwart a conspiracy that takes him from his familiar haunts in Yokohama and Tokyo to Honolulu, Hawaii, and back again.
His reappearance in Infinite Wealth comes as something of a surprise. Back in 2016, with the release of Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, Kiryu’s story arc concluded with him faking his own death and retiring from public view in order to protect those he loved. In 2020’s Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon, Kasuga was introduced as a new protagonist, alongside a command-based fighting system that turned the series from a direct-action brawler into a role-playing game more akin to classic Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy entries. Audiences believed that Kiryu’s long tenure was complete—that it was time for the series and its creator, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, to bid farewell to the man and let him rest with his memories.
Kiryu’s return as a primary character in a new, mainline entry to the series (he previously reappeared in a spin-off released late last year) might seem like a strange creative decision, then. Yakuza 7’s change to both a different protagonist and style of combat design was a fairly bold step away from convention, especially in the risk-averse, sequel-friendly world of mainstream video games. With Infinite Wealth splitting its attention almost equally between plotlines devoted to Kasuga and Kiryu, the question of whether its creators are willing to truly leave the series’ past behind is hard to avoid.
Hiroyuki Sakamoto, Infinite Wealth’s and the Like a Dragon series’ chief producer, has worked with these characters since the first Yakuza was released back in 2005 on the PlayStation 2. In an email interview with WIRED, he explains that the entire series is built iteratively, with each of its many entries working to “build new layers to the story laid by previous ones.”
“In some ways, the most recent [game] is a culmination of all previous entries,” he adds.
While every new entry stands on its own to a certain extent, the Like a Dragon series has always worked, too, as an ever-growing exploration of a cast of surprisingly pure-hearted gangsters and the elaborate conspiracies in which they’re involved. Sakamoto says this is intentional. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio makes a continual effort to provide stories that are “fulfilling to those familiar and unfamiliar with the characters and previous arcs” both. In this sense, the previous break from series tradition established by Yakuza 7 and its new protagonist might represent, as Sakamoto puts it, “a fresh start for Kasuga,” but it “still contains many high-context character appearances” that draw from the years and years of entries prior to its release.
Kiryu’s return as one of Infinite Wealth’s main characters isn’t as much of a departure from how Like a Dragon has always been written when looked at in this light. Rather, it’s a belated (and, at dozens of hours long, grand) final chapter in one character’s story previously thought concluded.
The last main game to star Kiryu didn’t end with the character’s death. Instead, it shifted the series’ focus away from him and onto a new cast. Sakamoto sees that era of the series as the completion of a larger story arc followed, with Yakuza 7, by the beginning of a new one. Infinite Wealth continues to star Kasuga as well, but the newer character’s journey doesn’t necessarily have to be divorced from what came before. “Kiryu is a necessary part of this story in many ways,” Sakamoto explains.
“For instance,” he continues, “Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth follows a theme about the question of what is to come for former yakuza members looking to start a new life as civilians, which reflects Kiryu’s own life [and the] history behind it.”
Though Kiryu first appeared onscreen in 2005 and seemed to have retired in 2016, “over the course of the series, [he], like the rest of us, has aged, encountered many problems, and met many people along the way that have changed him greatly.” That growth and its impact on those around him leaves room to continue exploring the character.
Sakamoto says that his team wasn’t worried that Kiryu’s character arc would take away from Kasuga’s own. “Kiryu has a big personality backed by a big legacy, but the same is true for Kasuga,” he writes. By bringing these two characters together, contrasting their personalities and goals, Infinite Wealth is able to further explore these figures and their status in the series’ version of the Japanese underworld.
As Sakamoto mentions, one of Infinite Wealth’s major plotlines involves the voluntary break-up of the yakuza—Japan’s organized criminal groups—and the difficulty of finding a viable future for those who have spent their lives on the fringes of mainstream society. The past reemerges and echoes into the present day throughout the game, manifesting in ways such as various characters’ relationship with their estranged parents to the aging, ailing Kiryu’s reflections on his youth. As in many plotlines from past Like a Dragon games, the fading yakuza depicted in Infinite Wealth are inspired by real-world events. Beyond this, though, and placed beside other plot elements like the ones described above, the game forms a strong, often dramatically potent message about finding meaning—and purpose—in our histories, personal and collective.
If the success of that message validates the creative decision that led to Kiryu’s return, it also lends greater context to what Sakamoto means when he calls Infinite Wealth a kind of bridge to “the beginning of a new age” for Like a Dragon—the kind of step “necessary in order to continue the series in the future.”
Though Infinite Wealth has as much of a reason to look back over its legacy as Kiryu does, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is also interested in what comes next. As Sakamoto puts it: “There are many more stories for us to tell, beyond the lives of Kiryu and Kasuga.” It’s hard to predict what those stories might be, and whether they’ll involve the cast of characters introduced over the past 19 years of Like a Dragon games. What Sakamoto will say is that he’d like his team “to continue to tell stories of the human experience, its struggles and triumphs, that resonate with the everyday person.”