In recent years, fans of Sega’s Like A Dragon games — the series previously known as Yakuza in the West — have pestered the developers to allow their characters like Kiryu Kazuma and Majima Goro to appear in fighting games like Tekken or Street Fighter. The series’ former producer, Toshihiro Nagoshi, had frequently dismissed the idea, saying, “I don’t really want to see Kiryu hitting women.”
Like A Dragon series producer and writer Masayoshi Yokoyama, who took over for Nagoshi in 2021, has a different take: Please think bigger.
In an interview with Yokoyama around the upcoming Prime Video series based on the games, Like A Dragon: Yakuza, I asked him how he’d feel about characters like Kiryu, Majima, or Ichiban making the jump over to a fighting game like Tekken 8.
“I think it’s better to say that going across mediums like how we did with [the Like A Dragon: Yakuza TV] series is better, rather than just going to another game,” Yokoyama said. “We receive all kind of invitations to appear in other games, but we never actually went over to their doorstep and said ‘let us in.’ I think going cross-medium is the better way to go about it.”
That’s certainly a more flexible and more ambitious answer than the one Nagoshi gave Red Bull in 2020. So maybe we’ll see Kiryu battling Kazuya Mishima outside of a Waffle House someday.
Like A Dragon’s Kiryu has appeared in games outside of the core franchise, of course. He was a guest golfer in 2011’s Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational, and he’s appeared alongside other Sega characters in games like Project X Zone 2, Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania.
I suppose what we really need is for Sega to finally make Fighters Megamix 2, so we can all live out the fantasy of playing as the Dragon of Dojima in fistfights against the car from Daytona USA, Bean the Dynamite from Sonic Fighters, and any other dude that Kiryu feels comfortable punching.
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