Our intro battle involved my team taking out a trio of yakuza in green, red and blue suits, a clear nod to the original starter pocket monsters. I met a mad scientist clearly inspired by PokГ©monвЂ™s Professor Oak, who provided me with a smartphone app that categorized all of the unique neвЂ™r-do-wells IвЂ™d meet over my travels. While the Yakuza franchise is a powerhouse in its own right, this particular game reads like a love letter to Japanese games writ large. I was enamored with both the atmosphere and characters of the game almost as soon as I picked up my controller. The combat mechanics have been reimagined as well, trading the active fighting game style of the previous games for a turn-based combat system that will be familiar to Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest players. Yakuza: Like a Dragon debuts an all-new protagonist to the series, Ichiban Kasuga. While I would probably be safe saying that they have carved out their own genre at this point,В the title would be best described to a newcomer as a Japanese-inspired Grand Theft Auto-style adventure game. This battle arena was becoming more and more metal by the minute.ДЄs bizarre as that sequence sounds, itвЂ™s par for the course for Yakuza: Like a Dragon, a soft reboot of the beloved Yakuza franchise. A few floors after that, my team of four needed to defeat a 60-ton excavator. A few floors later, I was greeted by a tiger as the floor boss.

Here, however, I found myself dealing with a top-hat-wearing man juggling purple flaming bowling pins, a lost surfer looking like a fish out of water, and a nine-foot-tall Captain Blackbeard lookalike with a massive trident. Most of the enemies thus far had been standard yakuza thugs.

My team entered the Sotenbori Battle Arena, and successfully reached the 6th floor.

Yakuza like a dragon battle arena