When Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name was released in 2023, the Yakuza series was in a strange position. The team at Sega’s Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio was gearing up to give a heroic sendoff to longtime protagonist Kazuma Kiryu. They had big plans for 2024’s Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth to pass the torch to a new main character. But Yakuza had unexpectedly become bigger than ever outside Japan, thanks largely to the viral success of Yakuza 0 throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s. The fans demanded more Kiryu, not less. And developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio rose to the occasion with The Man Who Erased His Name, an interquel that depicts his lonely years in exile after the events of Yakuza 6.
“We could have just told of Kiryu’s past through a thirty-minute interlude as part of Like a Dragon 8 [Infinite Wealth], but we decided it would be a lot more interesting as a game of its own, which is how the project came to be,” series producer Masayoshi Yokoyama told Automaton in October 2023. “Though this meant having a whole extra game to make, it still uses the same engine, so we thought ‘It’s not like we have to make it from scratch,’ and decided to go with it. In the end, it took us about half a year to make it.”
While this doesn’t sound all that promising, The Man Who Erased His Name delivers some of the series’ all-time best storytelling and character work. With Japan’s criminal underworld forever changed after a decades-long government conspiracy comes to light inYakuza 6, Kiryu must work with the Daidoji Clan, a shadowy organization of spies and fixers. Our hero knows a bit too much about the connections between the government, police, and organized crime, so the Daidoji threaten his family to ensure he plays along. Armed with identity-concealing sunglasses and magic cigarettes, Kiryu assumes the identity of the secret agent Joryu after faking his own death.
While he’s on the clock, Joryu’s dishing out pain to dozens of goons at a time. When he’s not, Kiryu is adrift and miserable, isolated from everyone he’s ever cared about. Yakuza players will be accustomed to seeing Kiryu with the odds stacked against him, but this is a gloomy rock bottom like never before. He spends much of his time meditating in a buddhist temple or smoking countless cigarettes. It’s probably best enjoyed if you’ve played at least one other game in the series, but if you manage to make it through the ending of The Man Who Erased His Name without shedding a tear, you’re made of solid stone.
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