Pirate Yakuza Is Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag For Sickos
A pirate’s life for me.
In 1997 the TV show Happy Days helped coin the term “Jump the shark,” when Fonzie literally jet skied over a shark. It feels like that term no longer holds any meaning for the Yakuza series, as Pirate Yakuza doesn’t just jump the shark, it turns it into sashimi.
I knew a Yakuza game where you play an amnesiac Goro Majima would be one heck of a time, but I was sold the moment I realized I could stop piloting my ship in the middle of a huge naval battle, grapple hook up to the crow’s nest, and simply blow ships apart with a rocket launcher.
This is a game that revels in all the most absurd aspects that fans have come to love about the series, grafting a pirate experience onto the bones of the Yakuza formula. And you know what, it works. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii (yes that’s the actual name) doesn’t just feel like another strong spinoff, it’s a glimpse at what the series could achieve by leaning into its most off-the-wall strengths.
At a hands-on event, Inverse had the chance to play roughly four hours of Pirate Yakuza, and while it has the same tried-and-true formula, there’s enough to there to make this game feel vibrantly fresh.
Pirate Yakuza marks only the second time Majima has been the main character of a Yakuza game.
Pirate Yakuza takes place shortly after the events of Infinite Wealth, with notoriously crazed Yakuza Goro Majima waking up on a beach in Hawaii with no memory of who he is, or how he got there. After meeting a young boy named Noah, and his adorable tiger companion, Majima creates his own pirate crew to battle the devilish pirates wreaking havoc across Hawaii. This is an interesting comeback for Majima, especially in how we get to see alternate aspects of his character.
“At the very beginning of the game Majima loses his memory, and he’s just a very normal dude,” says producer Hiroyuki Sakamoto in a roundtable interview, “But slowly, bit by bit, Majima remembers who he is and you get glimpses of that Mad Dog personality everyone know. So you can see both sides to his personality.”
Most of our time was spent roaming around Hawaii and the open seas, and getting a feel for the game’s dynamic combat, ship battles, and health dose of minigames. All the ingredients of Yakuza are here, whipped up in a delightful mixture with an extra cherry on top. That cherry, of course, is the ship combat and Majima’s pirate antics.
Pirate Yakuza gives you an adorable furry companion that you can dress up, and they’ll even give you a few helpful swipes in battle.
Pirate Yakuza reuses the setting of Honolulu, Hawaii from Infinite Wealth, but this time lets you explore the seas around the island. You can explore dozens of islands for hidden treasure, blast apart enemy ships, and even travel to a criminal paradise known as Madlantis. It’s honestly a bit shocking how much of Pirate Yakuza feels completely new, despite using elements of Infinite Wealth. The pirate theme is front and center with everything in this game, from the way you collect crew members like Pokémon as you travel, to the way you can dress up Majima in dozens of different dazzling fits.
The seas and islands you can visit feel expansive, all bolstered by some fantastic gameplay elements. Chief among those is your beloved pirate ship, which like Majima you can deck out in a variety of different weapon loadouts and visual designs. I personally adorned my fearsome ship with a theme that put giant ice cream scoops on the side and a brilliant pink mast to intimidate my enemies. Then I put laser guns on one side, a flamethrower on the other, and a coconut machinegun at the head of my ship. My destructive power couldn’t be matched.
If you’ve played Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag you know exactly what ship combat feels like in Pirate Yakuza, and that’s not a bad thing. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio clearly took inspiration from that style of gameplay, as you need to angle your ship and get the right angle to blast enemies with your side cannons, or can fire straight ahead with the machinegun. Ship combat is simple but it has a satisfying feel to it, and battles play out incredibly quickly on the open seas. If you want a bigger challenge, though, you can take on a series of extra challenging ship battles at the Colosseum in Madlantis.
Ship battles feel fittingly destructive, with a lot of variation based on how you build your floating armada.
But the naval combat also has incredible depth to it with how you build your crew, which then comes into play when you board ships and duke it out in massive brawls. There are dozens of different characters you can recruit, plenty of which are cameo experiences from across the series. You need to assign your crewmates to positions on your ship, either on the cannon squad or boarding party — and there are various different classes and abilities that each character has. This provides a ton of variety and options for how you build your crew, with a clear sense of progression as everyone levels up independently as they join you in battle.
That sense of crew becomes even more important when you storm ships or engage in land battles on islands — massive conflicts with over a hundred characters that almost border on the size of a Dynasty Warriors game. This is where Pirate Yakuza’s action combat shines ever more, as Majima can swap between two highly different styles, Mad Dog and Sea Dog. The first is a style directly inspired by past Yakuza games, while Sea Dog is a rollickingly hilarious style that lets you throw your swords like boomerangs, blow enemies away with a massive pistol shot, juggle enemies in the air like its Devil May Cry, and more. The combat in Pirate Yakuza is visceral, and it’s clear there’s a lot of depth that’s going to grow across the experience.
Pirate Yakuza’s combat feels like a real evolution of the series’ action, easy to pick up but packed with depth.
Aside from all the battling, Pirate Yakuza has all the bells and whistles you could want out of a Yakuza game. A new minigame lets Majima cook pirate meals for his crew, having to do things like skim the scum off the top of a soup pot. Substories are littered around Honolulu, like one where I found a retired pirate captain aiming to become the strongest woman in the world as she terrorized local thugs. Then I put my fellow racers to shame in the revamped Mario Kart-inspired minigame, Dragon Kart.
There’s already so much variety crammed into every corner of Pirate Yakuza, but everything is given that little twinge of swashbuckling flair. With this game, it feels like Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio isn’t holding anything back — taking big swings and chances to be experimental. Yes, it’s all built on that same Yakuza formula, but the explorable sea, ship battles, and pirate aesthetic make this game feel markedly different than anything that has come before.
According to Sakamoto, the idea for Pirate Yakuza was already in the works when the studio revealed Infinite Wealth in September 2023, so this isn’t just a random idea to capitalize on the series’ popularity, but a vital part of how the setting of Hawaii was created.
There are still plenty of leisurely activities to fill your time in Hawaii.
It honestly makes me wonder how much weirder this series can get with a similar idea — we’ve now seen Kiryu play a spy and Majima a pirate. The possibilities seem endless now.
“We were thinking this idea is really ridiculous, but it’s Majima so it might work. Out of all the different spinoff games, this is the most, in a lot of ways, off the normal track. When we decided to do a pirate Majima game, nothing was off the table” Sakamoto says, “But in our games we also make hard-boiled character drama stories. So if you actually play the story you’ll find the same thing that defines our games in this one.”
Ryu Ga Gotoku has taken off the training wheels, and if you can buy into the absurdity, it looks like you’re bound for a wild ride.
