Ahead of the “Like a Dragon: The Four Ceremonies of Life Exhibition” opening its doors in Tokyo on November 28, RGG Studio director and executive producer Yokoyama Masayoshi gave an interview to GameWatch. He talked about the future of the Yakuza series and reminisced about what he considers the biggest turning point in its 20-year-long history.
In February, RGG Studio will release Yakuza Kiwami 3 and Dark Ties, a bundle title containing a full remake of Yakuza 3 and an original spin-off game featuring Yoshitaka Mine as a playable character. According to Yokoyama, this release is important for Like a Dragon’s future. “It contains some major hints about the future direction of the series. We haven’t officially announced anything related to that yet. But once you play it, I think you’ll get an idea, or rather, a pretty solid sense of what we intend to do with the series going forward.”
While Yokoyama doesn’t offer any more hints about what RGG Studio has snuck into the new title, he remarks that “if you think Yakuza Kiwami 3 is just a remake, you’d be hugely mistaken.” Additionally, he says that the events of Dark Ties will be “extremely shocking,” something the game’s director Ryosuke Horii and Hiroyuki Sakamoto have also expressed, calling it the “darkest story in the series’ history.”
Interestingly, Yokoyama considers Like a Dragon’s biggest turning point in the past 20 years to be the introduction of Ichiban Kasuga. Although the genre shift from action games to RPGs (for mainline Yakuza games) was major too, the change in protagonist was an even bigger hurdle to overcome from his perspective. “It’s because players accepted [Ichiban] that we’ve been able to continue the series.”
Apart from the Like a Dragon series, RGG Studio is currently also working on the brand-new IP Stranger than Heaven, and the sixth mainline entry of the Virtua Fighter series. Yakuza Kiwami 3 and Dark Ties is set to launch on February 12, 2026 for PC (Steam), PS5/PS4, Nintendo Switch 2 and and Xbox Series X|S.
