Yakuza: Like A Dragon has finally been released from its next-gen console exclusivity, coming to the PS5. The game is largely identical to its last-gen version, and that comes with its own issues. If you want to read about the game overall, make sure to check out our review here.
The main thing that you’ll notice playing Yakuza: Like A Dragon on the PS5 is that the loading’s a lot faster. Unlike in the last-gen version, the PS5’s SSD blazes you through the loading screens, meaning you have no time to read any tool tips or even the story summaries. This is a really good feature, since I feel like that was the only real bottleneck the last-gen version of Yakuza suffered from.
Nothing Particularly New
While the improved loading times is great, it’s not worth the tradeoff- despite the PS5 version being a free upgrade for the game, for whatever reason you can’t transfer your save over. As someone still nipping away at Like A Dragon’s story, the idea of starting over just isn’t worth it when the PS4 version also gets boosted by the PS5’s SSD.
Technically, you could also praise it for improving the quality of the cutscenes, I guess. The thing is the base version of Like A Dragon’s cutscenes already looked amazing- you couldn’t tell the upgrade at a glance. The Yakuza games strength has always been that while the characters don’t always look realistic, they’re familiar enough that you see them as ordinary people, not anime characters.
It does make some use of the PS5, I guess. Every now and again, you get some use of the PS5’s haptic feedback- the occasional bump in a cutscene triggering a bump in the controller. I really wish they’d made a little more use of this, because there’s a lot of great moments that could have been taken up to 11 with the PS5’s features. For one, things like the quick time events when you do special attacks would have been great if it had the vibrations ramp up closer to the window to press the button.
One other feature that’s unique to certain regions is that the attack button is now X, since the PS5 has that set as a universal standard. If you’ve recently jumped between the two this can be a little jarring since the run button will also be mapped to X, but you’ll get over it soon enough.
Closing Thoughts
I’m gonna be real with you, reader, technological reasons are probably the last thing you should care about when deciding to buy Yakuza: Like A Dragon. The PS5 and PS4 versions are near-identical, and yet somehow you still can’t transfer saves between them. At the end of the day you’re probably just better off playing the PS4 version if you’d already started there.
In the game’s defense, it’s not like the game had any reason to look different in the PS5 version. The Japanese release, Yakuza 7, was very much a PS4 game, being announced and released when the PS5 was just a rumor people whispered about on the back of the bus. Giving the game a huge graphical overhaul would have made zero sense, so it’s understandable that the game is largely unchanged.
That being said, Yakuza: Like A Dragon is still one of my favorite JRPGs to come out last year, feeling like Persona but if everyone was burned out middle-aged men instead of hot anime boys. It’s got a gripping story about betrayal and intrigue, yet somehow still squeezes things in like a business minigame, karaoke and literally a straight-up port of Virtua Fighter.
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