Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii asks the very important question: 'How do you top a series as silly and zany as Yakuza?' The answer was found at sea by putting fan favorite Majima in command of a pirate ship, duh, but the game's chief director and producer Ryosuke Horii thought it was important to avoid outside influences.
In an interview with Automaton, Horii jokes that Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's pivot from urban maps to naval ones "was as if a construction company suddenly decided to build a ship." You might think the game's lead would want to familiarize himself with some other games set on the high seas, but as Horii explains, he didn't want to be unconsciously influenced.
In fact, he actively avoided playing games focused on ship-to-ship combat like Sea of Thieves, Skull and Bones, or any of the Assassin's Creed games where you can command a ship – AC 3, Black Flag, and Odyssey, for example.
"I think it's fine for other members of the team to play [other games with similar themes] and use them as inspiration, but as the person making the final decisions, if I were to get used to how naval combat works in other games, my sense of what feels right for Yakuza players – who might have never played those types of games before – could get distorted," he explains.
"We set our goals very clearly, so while we may struggle with how to get there, we rarely lose sight of our direction," he adds.
For Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, the producer says he focused on the "uniqueness and realism that is typical of the franchise" – this is a series that'll have you go from laughing at nappy-wearing gangsters to crying at an old couple's final goodbye within seconds, after all. So Horii simply applied that to naval battles. "I tried to think of something uniquely Yakuza-like that would satisfy these requirements."
