Yakuza | Ryu Ga Gotoku | Like a Dragon

Spoilers bc I don’t know how to do spoiler tags here

Imo 6s ending was terrible bc they kept him alive and as a result I’m not super enthusiastic.

Kiryu could’ve died for haruka but he ended up faking his death in this ham fisted “I did it to save her from having to deal with this again”. So in actuality this group of orphans deals with the sudden loss of a parental figure (presumably again given they’re orphans).

This would be somewhat defensible if he actually fucked off and disappeared but he doesn’t, he just goes back to the Tojo clan (or what remains of it) to run defense yet again. So from where I’m sitting it looks an awful lot like he shed the baggage of having 9 kids so he can do yakuza stuff all the time and then give ichiban sob stories about how he misses his family. But it’s like you could’ve easily had them if you had just told the literal mafia people that kept knocking on your orphanage’s door to fuck off. And now instead of letting the heat die down and maybe going back someday you’re continuing to keep a high profile which makes sense for milking an iconic game franchise main character but not for a dude that supposedly cared about these orphans above all else

Like if I was haruka or taichi and I found out kiryu was still alive and was one of the bodyguards at that Tojo clan dissolution meeting in y7 I would be like “what the FUCK dude are you serious??”. Those kids would be destroyed by that betrayal and abandonment. His “noble motive” won’t mean much. Although leave it to the yakuza writers to have haruka be like “I’m so happy you’re okay uncle kaz!” And leave it at that if they ever broach it at all (tbh those characters are almost certainly done forever aside from maybe a passing reference)

That said I’ll still play it bc I’ve never played an RGG game that wasn’t a good time. I’ve played a few where the story was pretty dumb (y6 got pretty absurd towards the end) but it was still fun to run around beating people up, doing karaoke, and going fishing or whatever.