Right Now Is the Perfect Time to Play the Quietly Best Yakuza Spinoff

When Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name was released in 2023, the Yakuza series was in a strange position. The team at Sega’s Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio was gearing up to give a heroic sendoff to longtime protagonist Kazuma Kiryu. They had big plans for 2024’s Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth to pass the torch to a new main character. But Yakuza had unexpectedly become bigger than ever outside Japan, thanks largely to the viral success of Yakuza 0 throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s. The fans demanded more Kiryu, not less. And developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio rose to the occasion with The Man Who Erased His Name, an interquel that depicts his lonely years in exile after the events of Yakuza 6.

“We could have just told of Kiryu’s past through a thirty-minute interlude as part of Like a Dragon 8 [Infinite Wealth], but we decided it would be a lot more interesting as a game of its own, which is how the project came to be,” series producer Masayoshi Yokoyama told Automaton in October 2023. “Though this meant having a whole extra game to make, it still uses the same engine, so we thought ‘It’s not like we have to make it from scratch,’ and decided to go with it. In the end, it took us about half a year to make it.”

While this doesn’t sound all that promising, The Man Who Erased His Name delivers some of the series’ all-time best storytelling and character work. With Japan’s criminal underworld forever changed after a decades-long government conspiracy comes to light inYakuza 6, Kiryu must work with the Daidoji Clan, a shadowy organization of spies and fixers. Our hero knows a bit too much about the connections between the government, police, and organized crime, so the Daidoji threaten his family to ensure he plays along. Armed with identity-concealing sunglasses and magic cigarettes, Kiryu assumes the identity of the secret agent Joryu after faking his own death.

While he’s on the clock, Joryu’s dishing out pain to dozens of goons at a time. When he’s not, Kiryu is adrift and miserable, isolated from everyone he’s ever cared about. Yakuza players will be accustomed to seeing Kiryu with the odds stacked against him, but this is a gloomy rock bottom like never before. He spends much of his time meditating in a buddhist temple or smoking countless cigarettes. It’s probably best enjoyed if you’ve played at least one other game in the series, but if you manage to make it through the ending of The Man Who Erased His Name without shedding a tear, you’re made of solid stone.

Compared to the mainline Yakuza games, The Man Who Erased His Name is a brief, compact experience — just 15-20 hours compared to the usual 60+. You’ll spend most of your time in the familiar Sotenbori district of Osaka, a staple location of the series, as well as the Isezaki Ijincho district of Yokohama from Like a Dragon and Infinite Wealth. The sidequel also adds a new location, the floating vice ship known as the Castle, which features a fighting arena, a cabaret club, Pocket Circuit racing, and the inevitable karaoke.

Best of all, The Man Who Erased His Name is significantly lowered-price on the PlayStation Store right now, discounted from $49.99 to $9.99. The sale runs through Nov. 21. The game is also available on Windows PC and Xbox Series X.