Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii Review: A Yo Ho Home Run for Swarthy Adventurers

Games with uniquely bombastic titles don’t often live up to their names. Thankfully, Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii delivers on the promise of its wild title, merging stylish action with an outlandish story and a hefty slew of mini-games, side stories and activities.

While I’ve only played around 20 hours of the game, due to a busy February, the (skull and) bones of the adventure are laid out in that span. Sega’s Ryu Ga Gotoku studio has built an operatic saga in its eight mainline Yakuza games and handful of spinoffs, telling stories of crime and found family, betrayal and brotherhood. From my two previews with the game ahead of its release on Feb. 21, I knew it was going to be different.

Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii might be the most radical departure from the main plot of prior games, which makes it a perfect starting point for new players while rewarding series veterans with cameos — and, of course, the pleasure of playing fan-favorite Goro Majima in his swashbuckling era.

The Mad Dog of Shimano is the most fitting of the series’ cast to take a turn flying the Jolly Roger. The eyepatch-wearing goateed yakuza starts the game waking up on a beach with no memory. He’s quickly brought up to speed about the small island he’s on and the pirates who sail the waters on wooden warships between it and nearby Honolulu, Hawaii. And he decides, correctly, that he must have a ship and crew of his own to hunt down legendary treasure. A perfect premise. 

Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii is a fun, light jaunt that benefits from the idiosyncrasies of its specific setup. Rather than telling a story about modern piracy, the game brings cannon-firing pirate ships, crew-on-crew deck melees and buried treasure hunts into modernity without any pesky logical explanation. The game’s bizarre mashup energy is its strength, amplified by RGG’s signature blend of sincere character moments and wacky hijinks. 

Majima himself is the core of much of this energy. Though he’s co-headlined several Yakuza games, he comes into his own in Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Metaphorically and literally unshackled from the game series’ weighty past, the amnesiac Captain Majima sails the seas with a gleeful thirst for treasure, which proves infectious to everyone he meets — and to the player. This makes the game ideally suited for newcomers to the Yakuza series: even if they’ll miss a few of the deeper references and cameos later in the game, the plot is essentially a standalone adventure.

New story aside, in typical fashion for the Yakuza games, RGG has carried over a lot of the gameplay from the main series: Running around fighting street goons in real-time combat, shopping at stores and helping locals in amusing side quests. While the new game abandons the turn-based combat of its immediate predecessor, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, it inherits the city of Honolulu — the biggest area in Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii — and most of its colorful denizens. It also retains Yakuza’s signature range of minigames, both new and returning. Yes, that includes karaoke.

Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii layers over that familiarity with everything needed for a pirate adventure: a new dual-cutlass fighting style for Majima, a ragtag pirate crew to gather, ships to fight in naval combat, several island archipelagos to explore and the bombastic Madlantis area to walk around. The game effectively bounces between these two worlds of thrilling pirate adventure and zany city life; often just as I was wearying from playing too long in one half of the game’s setting, its story shrewdly flung me back into the other. 

How long that sustains you depends largely on your appetite for side adventures. While the main story is fun enough — a sprawling yarn filled with conspiracies, religious zealots, pirate kings and queens and yakuza sniffing a big score — the game’s soul is in all its side content. You’ve gotta want to be a citizen of Honolulu nosing into everyone’s business to love this game, but RGG’s tried-and-true formula of slice-of-life stories makes it easy. 

The side stories are where the Yakuza universe shines, and Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii proudly upholds the tradition. In a few hours’ time, the memory-less madman Goro Majima went on a pop idol bus tour, attended corporate compliance for pirates, went to a beach zoo, nearly fell for a pet mind reading scam and helped a foul-mouthed American lady pirate dress in a kimono to woo a weeb. I won’t spoil what seems to be the game’s most involved side story where Majima tries to do his first mate a favor, and it breaks into extended live-action footage like a mock reality TV show. 

In sticking to its strengths of bite-sized storytelling, RGG shows off how unique its games are, with novel narratives toeing the line between absurdity and ridiculousness. The more you play, however, the clearer it is that the story elements are stronger than the pirate ones. 

Swashbuckling adventure for the casual pirate

Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii gleefully indulges in plenty of pirate imagery and action, with a charm that extends for most of the game. While it never overstays its welcome, it doesn’t feel particularly deep, either.

Consider Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii as more of the arcade experience for piracy and all it entails. There’s none of the sailing and navigating complexity of Sea of Thieves, nor the precise aiming of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag nor the intense resource and exploration of Skull and Bones. There are half a dozen areas to sail, each with a handful of beaches you can land on to dig up treasure, and you get around the seas by moving through boost rings (perhaps simulating water currents, if I’m being generous). You can also speed up with the jet engines at the bottom of your ship, because why not.

Nautical combat is similarly fun but uncomplicated, with just enough variety in cannons to keep fights interesting, especially as enemy ships get beefier as the game goes on. When taking on notable flagships, defeating them at sea leads to boarding them with your crew of ruffians — it’s always a hoot to be in the middle of a fight Even without grinding for resources, I still only had trouble with a couple fights, and I ran out of useful upgrades by 20 hours in. Customizing my handsome vessel with outlandish decorations (including adorning your ship’s prow with many wooden figureheads like, uh, a Hitachi massage wand) was the only way I switched up my vessel later in the game.

This cavalier approach runs through the melee combat, too: it’s easy to wade into low-level enemies, cutting them down with your cutlasses like wheat in a gleeful Dynasty Warriors-esque power fantasy of a pirate captain among his prey. But hand-to-hand fighting can feel too loose, with the lack of lock-on leaving you swinging through an extensive sword combo in the wrong direction or shooting your pistol at nobody. You can get buried under masses of enemies and blinded by flashy effects. Your special moves, powered by a Heat Gauge that slowly fills below your health bar, have situational triggers that can be difficult to pull off as the prompt appears on the screen for a fraction of a second.

The game’s action favors novel experiences over difficulty — I mean, the game made me swordfight bears and tigers on multiple occasions, which were enjoyably chaotic rather than technical challenges. Likewise with another of the game’s hallmark experiences, the Pirates Coliseum. Nestled in the neon-splattered ship graveyard turned city of Madlantis, the Coliseum offers escalating combat scenarios of differing formats, from ship-to-ship combat to 100-enemy melees. It feels like if Walt Disney built a Las Vegas casino for one of the scarier Roman emperors. 

While the game may not have depth in many of its aspects and features, it dares you to be bored. From a minigame roster bigger than anything outside of last year’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, activities like photo scavenger hunts and lawbreaker bounties to hunt and a substantial string of side stories to experience, Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii will keep you entertained — and frequently surprised by the sincerity of its myriad vignettes. 

While the broader narrative covers the freedom of the high seas when your past isn’t a problem, the game’s side stories touch on many, many aspects of the human spectrum. Odds are you’ll find some storyline or another that resonates with you, though Majima remains a manic clown who ends up in ridiculous situations as often as he’s drawing emotional truths from strangers. So long as you’re up for his adventure on the streets and the seas, Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii will keep surprising you — and, unlike many games, living up to its bombastic title.

Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii is coming out for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One  and PC on Feb. 21.