Yakuza Like a Dragon Torrent is an action game developed by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and published by SEGA. Being a Yakuza game, Like a Dragon never face a scarcity of street ruffians ready to intimidate you out of your bento box money when you’re innocently strolling down to the arcade to engage in some OutRun. However, even though you might presume that a shift to turn-based combat would decelerate the pace of each brawl to a crawl, the combat still manages to feel smooth and lively despite the breaks between individual attacks.
While you don’t have direct control over the position of each member of your party in the skirmish, every character in the melee is in continual motion, contributing to the dynamic feel of each battle. Furthermore, the choice to diminish incoming damage by tapping the guard button in real-time and the ability to topple an adversary off their feet and promptly follow up with a more potent strike in the brief window before they recovered kept me engaged during every combat moment.
But what truly enhances the spectacle of each turn-based clash is the sheer diversity of enemy types, with approximately 250 distinct kinds of foes to confront as you explore every nook and cranny of Yakuza Like a Dragon Torrent Magnet. While some of these are mere ordinary thugs, the majority of villains are as eccentric as a bowl of soba noodles: you’ll face off against scissor-twirling hairdressers, mop-wielding custodians, and slicked-up deviants teaming up to form lethal squads that seem just as likely to crash a masquerade ball as they are to pummel your face in. Each one dishes out its own distinct sets of amusingly unconventional special moves that can inflict mostly traditional status effects.
Fortunately, your own fantastic four have an abundance of spectacular moves at their disposal, and the permutations in which you deploy them provide this new iteration of Yakuza combat with a decidedly more strategic edge than ever before. Confronted with a sizable group of adversaries, you might strike an endearing pose with Saeko to leave a number of them bewildered by her allure before unleashing a charging Koichi to scatter them like enamored bowling pins.
Encounter a lone formidable foe, and you might have Namba breathe his noxious homeless guy’s breath to diminish the defense of a stronger adversary before getting Kasuga to slap them fiercely across the face with wads of cash. Yakuza: Like a Dragon not only successfully revamps the street-fighting formula of its series predecessors but also offers a refreshingly quirky approach to turn-based combat unlike any other I’ve encountered before.
Yakuza Like a Dragon Torrent’s occupation system is also distinct from any other I’ve encountered, though not necessarily in a positive way. Occupations enable you to alter the class of each character to tailor their skill set to your preferred playstyle. However, the issue is that these occupations aren’t particularly well-defined at a glance. Instead of presenting more conventional RPG classes like warrior, mage, and cleric, Yakuza Like a Dragon instead features about a dozen or so different occupations with names like Host, Chef, and Dealer.
Although you can peruse their individual lists of special attacks, it’s challenging to gain a comprehensive understanding of how they function without selecting one and then investing the time to level it up sufficiently to unlock its full range of special attacks. If you make the wrong choice, that’s a considerable amount of time invested in a class you don’t particularly want to play.
Yakuza Like a Dragon Torrent System Requirements
- OS: Windows 7/8/10/11
- Processor: Intel Core i5-3470 | AMD FX-8350
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 660, 2 GB
- Storage: 40 GB available space
