Nintendo Switch fans can finally check out the Yakuza series with the impending release of Yakuza Kiwami, which was announced on Tuesday during the August Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase.
The remake of the original 2005 PlayStation 2 game Yakuza is releasing on Switch on October 24 and going back to where the action RPG series began: Kazuma Kiryu getting out of prison after 10 years for a murder he didn’t commit. The game isn’t available for preorder just yet.
Interestingly, developer Ryu Ga Gotoku studio head Masayoshi Yokoyama had previously been skeptical about the series’ prospects for Switch, citing the possibility that the games wouldn’t run well on the platform and that they wouldn’t fit in well with the Switch’s relatively younger audience.
“We still kind of think of ourselves as people of the night world, right? We don’t want to be like walking around the day with everybody else,” Yokoyama said in 2022, although he admitted later in the interview that the Switch’s catalog was changing. “Like for us, it’s kind of showing this kind of underground feeling. I think the underground kind of feeling is what we want to do.”
The Switch release also marks the first time a Yakuza game has released on a Nintendo console since the first two got ported to the Wii U in 2013.
There are a lot of Yakuza/Like a Dragon games, with many spinoffs, as well as mainline titles that follow Kiryu’s story, along with other protagonists like Ichiban Kasuga and Takayuki Yagami. It can be confusing figuring out the best order to play these games, but since Yakuza Kiwami is a remake of the first game, it’s a great place to start for almost any player.
But what’s fun about the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series is that while there is an overarching story and gameplay style, later games go off on their own and experiment with extensive minigames and turn-based RPG combat. Future entries will focus on collecting party members and falling into more turn-based gameplay. I’s another great reason to start with Yakuza Kiwami, so you can see where the series truly began.
