Category: IGN

Tarkir is back, and that means dragons. A lot of dragons. Magic: The Gathering – Tarkir: Dragonstorm is diving headfirst into the plane where clans battle, and giant flying lizards rule the skies. If you played during Khans of Tarkir, this set is like a reunion with old friends (except now, those friends have even more firepower and zero chill). Expect three-color madness, absurdly powerful spells, and just enough nostalgia to make you forget how many Siege Rhinos you lost to back in the day.

Magic: The Gathering Tarkir: Preorders

There’s something for everyone this time around. Want to Play Boosters, hunt for Collector Booster treasures, or jump straight into Commander mayhem? This set has you covered. No matter your budget or how badly you want to pull that ridiculously rare serialized dragon.

Magic: The Gathering Tarkir: Dragonstorm – Play Booster Box

Tekken 8 veteran Anna Williams is returning to the roster, and while her redesign seems to be going down well with most fans, some aren’t so sure and are even comparing her new look to Santa Claus.

When one fan asked Tekken game director and chief producer Katsuhiro Harada if the development team could bring back the “old Anna design,” Harada slammed the criticism, saying: “If you prefer the old design, I am not taking those away from you.”

“While 98% of the fans are welcoming this, there will always be people like you,” Harada wrote. “I understand and sympathize that it may not suit your personal taste, but if you prefer the old design, past works already exist. I am not taking those away from you.

“Also, you refer to yourself as ‘Anna fans,’ as if you represent all Anna fans, but you should express your opinion as an individual.

“You threaten to quit if she isn’t brought back. You complain the moment she is brought back. You demand that she be reverted after she has been completely redesigned from scratch, including her model and framework,” he added. “And if she actually were reverted, you’d just say, ‘That’s recycling!’

“Either way, your method of expressing your opinion and the content of your argument are entirely unconstructive, utterly pointless, and, above all, disrespectful to the other Anna fans who are genuinely looking forward to her.”

When another commenter pointed out that Tekken “hasn’t rereleased one of [its] older games into modern systems with functional netcode” and summarized Harada’s response as “a joke,” the director said: “Thank you for POINTLESS reply. You yourself are the joke. MUTED.”

As mentioned, reaction to Anna’s new design is largely positive, although there are some complaints, mostly around her outfit. “Before she was announced I was hoping for an edgier, angry, violent Anna out for revenge for her fiance’s death and so I’m quit happy with this design!” said redditor AngryBreadRevolution.

“The hair is growing on me. It really suits the outfit and personality well. It wont look good on all her outfits naturally, but her original bob will still be available.

“Coat was ruined for me when it was pointed out the resemblance to Christmas. The leotard, tights, boots and gloves all look fantastic though so looking forward to being able to take off the coat.”

“Love everything but the white feathers,” said troonpins. “It’s giving Santa Clause.”

“Aside from looking like Santa Claus, she looks a lot younger than she did in Tekken 7 and before,” added Cheap_Ad4756. “She looks like less of a ‘woman’ now and more like a girl. I don’t get the dominatrix vibe from her at all anymore.”

“Horrible,” declared spiralqq. “It’s another overdesigned T8 look, feels like almost every costume in this game lacks a real focal point and everyone is just decked out in 100 bulky accessories from head to toe. I’d like it a lot more without the coat, or at the very least if the whole outfit didn’t look like Santa cosplay. You can’t have a bright red coat with white fur trims and a black belt and read as anything other than Santa.”

Tekken 8 has sold 3 million copies a year from release, achieving the sales milestone at a faster pace than Tekken 7, which took 10 years to sell 12 million copies worldwide.

“Tekken 8 is an amazing new entry in the long-running series,” we wrote in IGN’s Tekken 8 review, awarding it 9/10. “Interesting tweaks to its classic fighting systems, a full suite of fun offline modes, great new characters, incredible training tools, and a vastly improved online experience all add up to a fighting game I will be playing for many years to come. By honoring its legacy, but continuing to move forward, Tekken 8 manages to stand out as something special.”

Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Hot on the heels of the global success of Marvel Rivals and with other popular live-service games like Naraka: Bladepoint and Once Human under its belt, NetEase has turned its attention to the hero shooter genre with FragPunk. New internal development team Bad Guitar Studio is made up of young, hardcore FPS fans, and after joining them for a one-hour play session where we tried a new character and map revealed exclusively in this preview, the team’s eye for detail is clear to see.

FragPunk’s main game mode is the 5v5 Shard Clash mode. On its surface, this mode resembles your typical Overwatch-like hero shooter skirmish, but it also pulls from a variety of influences to mix up the gameplay. The rounds in this mode are closer to the bomb-defusal objectives of Counter Strike, with one team planting bombs at specified locations and the other defending, with relatively small arenas that keep rounds tight and focused.

As with any hero shooter, players can choose from a selection of characters – named Lancers – who each have a selection of unique skills, meaning plenty to learn in terms of individual character preferences and team makeup. For our session, we tried the newly unveiled character Chum, a stone robot who is accompanied by a mechanical pet angler fish named Chomper. In addition to using the game’s arsenal of satisfying guns, Chum can toss projectiles similar to sticky mines and smoke grenades, as well as sending Chomper out as support. Chomper can track and bite enemies for multiple low-damage attacks, essentially like a walking turret, or can be modified with pet treats that make it explode on contact or trail a thick smokescreen in its wake, adding several strategic layers that felt fun to mix up.

And being made of stone, Chum is also a strong defence character, making him a great all-round option for newcomers.

Many other Lancer abilities are not only offensive but defensive or tactical – walls for cover, traps, speed boosts, skills that highlight enemies on the map, and so on. We tried several Lancers, and found a varied effect on gameplay. Using Nitro, with her directly-controllable four-legged drone and gun turrets, we were able to rack up multiple assists; while Axon was another favourite thanks to his more aggressive selection of skills, including projectile bombs and a cool guitar-gun. In the Lancer selection screen, you can watch a short video clip for each ability to help you quickly grasp what they do.

But what really sets FragPunk apart is its Shard Cards system. At the start of each round, each team is randomly assigned a set of three cards, which they can swap in and out, each of which changes the rules of the round for your entire team. Some are simple stat percentage boosts or buffs, while others do things like increasing the size of your enemies’ heads, decreasing your own or equipping helmets, affecting the difficulty of headshots for that round. Others still are much more unusual, and completely change the gameplay.

For example, one Shard Card gave our team a kind of proximity detector so that we got an aural and visual signal whenever an enemy was nearby, while another slowly regenerated our health gauge, both of which gave us a welcome advantage. Some cards affect the environment, such as shrouding the map in fog that adds tension as enemies are harder to spot. Others have active effects – press the Z key to swap health bars with an enemy, or to swap gear with them, or to jump into a parallel world where you can essentially run unseen to a new location and then pop back into the fight to ambush your foes.

It’s a lot to take in. You only have around 30 seconds to finalise your hand for each round, and at first each of the 150+ cards will be new to you. “We deliberately made the rule for each card as simple as possible so that they can be quick to understand,” Creative Director Xin Chang told us. “We also made the description text for each card as short as possible, and used visual design to make its effects more obvious.”

After a few rounds, the Shard Cards system began to make sense, and really paid off in terms of making each round feel different. We were forced to engage differently with every round, rethinking strategies and responding not only to our team’s current hand but also the enemy team’s.

Interestingly, the ruleset-shuffling Shard Cards were inspired not only by other videogames, but also by sports. The development team’s building has a large gymnasium with facilities for activities such as basketball, table tennis and badminton, its walls adorned with photos of the developers in competition.

Chang explained, “I play soccer and basketball, so I like games with a two-team system. I also watch a lot of NBA, and they often make changes to the rules to keep the sport interesting. Based on that idea, I also wanted to have a system of tweaking the rules in our game.”

Sports also influenced the team’s approach to FragPunk’s maps. Level Designer An Yuan added, “In level design, we divide the map into areas that are good for attack or defence phases, so that the player has to keep moving. It’s kind of like basketball, where you have different spatial design around the court that suits the different roles of the players. We applied that concept in our game, and also in the Shard Cards, which can turn a good hiding place into a bad one.”

FragPunk also features a Duel mode. When a match ends in a tie, it changes to a one-on-one showdown, a little bit like the mano a mano face-offs in Call of Duty: Warzone’s Gulag, but inspired by soccer’s penalty shootouts. Each player takes their turn in the queue for a series of short and sharp winner-stays-on rounds in small but vertically layered arenas. With all our teammates spectating during our turn, we totally felt the pressure, making for a fun and different tie-breaker mini-game. It’s so cool, the devs even added it as a separate standalone mode called Duel Master.

Each map has interactive gimmicks that players can use strategically to gain the upper hand. First, we tried the newly unveiled map Dongtian. This is the Hangzhou, China-based dev team’s stab at an Asian-flavoured map, and its two bomb sites can be rotated by players for tactical advantage. When the switch in the middle of the map is activated by a player, the core cover at the bomb site rotates, altering strategies for both the offensive and defensive teams.

“We want to use these rotating walls to switch the edge between the attack team and the defence team,” explained Yuan. “So we encourage players to fight for that core area to maintain their edge or get the edge for themselves.”

Other maps have their own gimmicks – BlackMarket’s manually controlled bridge allows players to change the map’s layout and even pull the ground from under their opponents’ feet; Akhet has an underground river that allows sneaky players to move directly from the middle area to a bomb site; and Tundra has magic portals that instantly zap players between gates to outmanoeuvre the other team. It was fun to explore these maps, and clearly players who take the time to learn them properly will gain an advantage.

Dongtian is the home setting for the Lancer Kismet. Narrative Director Wenhe Fu explained, “The game has a multiverse concept, which allows us to have each character come from quite a different universe. We’ll take some time in future phases to introduce those background details to players.”

Built into a mountain and dotted with ancient wooden temple buildings, mystical statues and wizened trees with gracefully warped trunks, Dongtian’s Eastern aesthetic brings a smart visual twist to FragPunks’ colourful world.

Art Director Yiming Li told us, “We wanted to blend ancient buildings that look like they could come from China with near-future science and technology elements, as well as some religious elements. While each map will have its own distinctive cultural features, we want them all to fit into the game’s overall sci-fi feeling. It’s like in Star Wars: Each of the civilisations are very different, but when they are viewed as a whole, they also exist under a harmonious sci-fi setting.”

And that brings us to FragPunk’s visuals. This is a really gorgeous game. The punk-influenced and sci-fi-tinged fluorescent aesthetic is rich and appealing, and its kill animations are punctuated by dazzling bursts of colour. Its maps are extremely readable, and player characters pop, making it easy to follow the action. Even its menus are pretty to look at, with the flashy presentation you’d expect from a Persona game or Street Fighter 6, with bold layouts accented by graffiti scribbles. It really stands out in the hero shooter space.

FragPunk will be free to play, with a small selection of Lancers available at the start so that players can learn them gradually, unlocking more as they go through in-game currency accrued through play or paid microtransactions. Other optional purchases will be strictly cosmetic. We’ll have to wait until launch to see how the service side pans out – other NetEase games like Marvel Rivals and Naraka: Bladepoint have seen complaints about pricing, but that aside they have managed to keep players satisfied, so hopefully that’s a good sign.

In addition to the Shard Clash and Duel modes we tried, FragPunk will feature a mix of modes at or after launch that are targeted at both hardcore and casual players, including one where all players are forced to use the same Lancer, or melee weapons only, and so on. The development team is apparently largely made up of pro-level players, but it’s clear they have also taken steps to make the game accessible to newbies and even streamers and their viewers.

Warner Bros. is canceling its planned Wonder Woman game and shutting down three studios: Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and WB San Diego, according to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier.

Schreier broke the news on Bluesky today, followed by the release of a full report on Bloomberg. Shortly after Schreier’s post, WB confirmed the shut downs to Kotaku in a statement:

We have had to make some very difficult decisions to structure our development studios and investments around building the best games possible with our key franchises -– Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat, DC and Game of Thrones. After careful consideration, we are closing three of our development studios – Monolith Productions, Player First Games and Warner Bros. Games San Diego. This is a strategic change in direction and not a reflection of these teams or the talent that consists within them.

The development of Monolith’s Wonder Woman videogame will not move forward. Our hope was to give players and fans the highest quality experience possible for the iconic character, and unfortunately this is no longer possible within our strategic priorities. This is another tough decision, as we recognize Monolith’s storied history of delivering epic fan experiences through amazing games. We greatly admire the passion of the three teams and thank every employee for their contributions. As difficult as today is, we remain focused on and excited about getting back to producing high-quality games for our passionate fans and developed by our world class studios and getting our Games business back to profitability and growth in 2025 and beyond.

Earlier this year, another Bloomberg report suggested Wonder Woman was in trouble after rebooting and switching directors in early 2024. This came amid larger struggles at the company’s gaming division, including layoffs at Rocksteady, the lukewarm reception to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and the shutdown of MultiVersus.

And even more recently, WB Games has appeared to undergo a restructuring of sorts, as long-time games head David Haddad announced his departure from the company, and rumors circulated that the division might be sold off.

Specifically, this move represents a blow to WB’s DC universe-connected gaming efforts. Notably, just yesterday, James Gunn and Peter Safran said in a presentation that it would be “a couple of years” before the first DCU video game.

With this closure, the games industry loses three incredibly storied studios. Monolith Productions, which had been working on Wonder Woman, was founded in 1994 and acquired by WB in 2004. It’s best-known for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel, Shadow of War, the former of which pioneered the lauded Nemesis system that WB successfully patented in 2021.

Player First Games, a newer studio established in 2019, was responsible for MultiVersus. The game was well-received critically and saw launch success, but underperformed relative to WB’s expectations. WB San Diego, similarly, is a newer studio established in 2019 with a focus on mobile, free-to-play games.

These shutdowns continue a trend going back roughly three years of increasing games industry layoffs, project cancellations, and studio closures. In 2023 alone, it’s estimated that over 10,000 game developers were laid off. That number shot up to over 14,000 in 2024, and while 2025 has seen numerous closures, the exact number of impacted individuals is hazier due to fewer companies reporting these layoffs and shutdowns, or specific numbers affected.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Mecha Break recently launched into a new round of open beta play on Steam, and quickly dethroned some titans in the process. Even though it’s just a glimpse of the final experience, Mecha Break’s demo is bumping elbows with the likes of Marvel Rivals, Grand Theft Auto V, Apex Legends, and Naraka Bladepoint. So why’s it got such a bad rating on Steam?

The open beta launch pulled in over 300,000 players on Steam, deseating Marvel Rivals and hitting a top-four place in the most played games on Valve’s platform. Even right now, at the time of writing this, Amazing Seasun Games’ mecha battler has the fourth-highest concurrent players per SteamDB, though it falls behind Rivals’ 24-hour peak.

Popularity doesn’t naturally incur positivity; Apex Legends has a ‘Mixed’ overall rating on Steam, as does Delta Force, and both have substantially more recent players than many other games on the PC platform. Yet Mecha Break’s demo is sitting at ‘Mostly Negative’ right now, with over 6,500 reviews.

Taking a look through the reviews, there are a few discernible complaints. The most easily addressed are the server issues. With hundreds of thousands of players flocking to the open beta, which apparently overwhelmed the servers. Amazing Seasun responded, saying the studio has addressed the problem and is issuing several batches of “Ultimate Maintenance Boxes” to players as compensation.

Those boxes are a constant, and longer-term, point of concern among players though. Individual mechs are unlocked through the store or battle pass, as well as cosmetic purchases. There’s also a loot box mechanic for mods, which come with mild upsides and downsides, that has players worried about long-term balance and time investment.

It seems that while many aspects of Mecha Break can be unlocked for free, it will take at least some time to do so. “Outside of missions, the match to match reward of currency is very low. In order to unlock the entire roster you’ll likely have to play hundreds of games to get there,” one reviewer said.

Another repeat critique across several reviews is the anti-cheat measures. Mecha Break uses the kernel level anti-cheat Anti-Cheat Expert, or ACE. These often allow for greater access to users’ machines, in exchange for monitoring for more extensive cheating options. Usually, players aren’t too happy about anti-cheats like this. The anti-cheat is also apprently causing problems for Linux desktop users, per GamingOnLinux.

Tack on some extra customization woes, like spending currency to re-customize your in-game pilot, and the negative reviews paint a fairly stark picture of frustration over currencies and grinding for unlocks. Mecha Break is set to be a free-to-play game, so some of those do end up coming with the territory. And interestingly, there does seem to be a counter-movement of positive reviews, though it’s still lagging behind the negative ones by raw numbers.

At the very least, while there are some gameplay concerns, those sentiments seem to be broadly positive compared to the out-of-combat critiques. Most of the positive reviews and even many of the negative reviews praise the actual mecha battles, as well as the pilot and mecha customization options, which include a bunch of cosmetics and paints to create, say, your very own Evangelion Unit-02 or Gundam Heavyarms.

We’ll see if Amazing Seasun works to address the negative responses leading into the full release sometime later this year.

Eric is a freelance writer for IGN.

Tekken 8 has sold 3 million copies a year from release, Bandai Namco has announced.

The company said it had achieved the sales milestone at a faster pace than Tekken 7, which has so far sold 12 million copies worldwide 10 years after launch.

Tekken 8 had sold 2 million units a month after going on sale in January 2024, so it’s sold an additional 1 million units in the last 12 months.

“We hope that everyone will stick with us, as we have a lot of cool stuff planned to keep the franchise going,” Bandai Namco said during a live stream update.

For context in the fighting game world, NetherRealm’s Mortal Kombat 1 is now up to 5 million copies sold, having gone on sale in September 2023, and Capcom’s Street fighter 6 is on 4.4 million units, having gone on sale June 2023. Tekken 8 has a way to go before matching its competitors, then.

Meanwhile, Bandai Namco announced Anna Williams as the next Tekken 8 DLC character. She launches on March 31 for Character Year 2 Pass owners and April 3 for all.

As part of the roadmap of support for Tekken 8’s second year, summer 2025 will see a new stage and character, fall 2025 a new character, and winter 2025 / 2026 a new stage and character. That’s a total of four DLC characters for Season 2.

It’s not been all plain sailing for Tekken 8. In December, Tekken 8 boss Katsuhiro Harada stepped into a row over the sale of a premium DLC stage after fans accused Bandai Namco of “corporate greed.”

Alongside the release of DLC character Heihachi Mishima and the accompanying free story mode expansion, Bandai Namco sold the Genmaji Temple stage for $4.99, sparking a backlash from fans who had expected the stage to be made available for free — as the stage that accompanied the release of prior DLC character Lidia Sobieska was.

Harada ended up saying he needed to reorganize not only the Tekken business but his role within it to ensure community expectations were met in the future.

IGN’s Tekken 8 review returned a 9/10. We said: “Tekken 8 is an incredible evolution for the series, with tons of single player content, an excellent suite of training tools, a great online experience, and exciting new mechanics that make Tekken more dynamic than ever.”

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Microsoft’s latest ID@Xbox Showcase has been and gone, stuffed with updates and announcements from some of the best indie games around, including Balatro, which shadow-dropped onto Xbox Game Pass yesterday, February 24.

Another fan-favorite indie, Buckshot Roulette, is also making the jump to Xbox. Within a year of its release back in December 2023, the tabletop horror game was a hit, taking over four million of us through a fiendish – and terrifying – game of Russian roulette with a pump-action shotgun.

But those aren’t the only games jumping onto Microsoft’s subscription service. We’ve rounded up all the new indie games confirmed at last night’s show as coming to Xbox Game Pass later in 2025.

Xbox Game Pass 2025 lineup:

• Balatro (Cloud, Console, and PC) – out now
• 33 Immortals (Cloud, Console, and PC) – March 18
• Descenders Next (Console and PC) – April 9
• Blue Prince (Cloud, Console, and PC) – April 10
• Tempopo (Cloud, Console, and PC) – April 17
• Revenge of the Savage Planet (Consoles) – May 8
• Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault (Consoles and PC) – 2025
• Tanuki: Pon’s Summer (Consoles and PC) – late 2025
• Buckshot Roulette (Consoles and PC) – TBC
• Echo Weaver (Cloud, Console, and PC) – TBC
• Ultimate Sheep Raccoon (Consoles and PC) – TBC

This is of course on top of Watch Dogs: Legion (Cloud, Console, and PC), which launches into Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass, and Game Pass Standard today, February 25.

Check out IGN’s Fan Fest 2025 hub for more.

Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Originally released as a PlayStation 2 game in 2005, Yakuza (Ryu ga Gotoku in Japan) spawned a lengthy and beloved video game series that follows the many conflicts and schemes of yakuza families in the game’s fictional neighborhood of Kamurocho, Tokyo. (The series was renamed to Like a Dragon, the English translation of Ryu ga Gotoku, in 2022.)

The games are notably action packed, melodramatic, cinematic, and super goofy all at once. (If you skip the side quests, you’re missing out on an key part of the games’ sense of humor.) It took years for the franchise to start receiving the renown it’s finally achieved outside of Japan, and its reputation only grows thanks to a scarily consistent output of localized re-releases, spinoffs, and new games – including the most recent of the bunch, the Majima-led spin-off Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.

Which Yakuza Game Should You Play First?

With such a sprawling saga available to play, where should a curious newcomer jump in? We’d recommend starting chronologically with Yakuza 0 or jumping ahead to the clean slate of a new generation with Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

Yakuza/Like a Dragon Games in Chronological Order:

• Yakuza 0
• Yakuza / Yakuza Kiwami
• Yakuza 2 / Yakuza Kiwami 2
• Yakuza 3
• Yakuza 4
• Yakuza 5
• Yakuza 6: The Song of Life
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Beware: Mild spoilers for the plots, characters, and some major events of each game follow.

1. Yakuza 0 (2014)

The sixth game released is actually the first chronological Yakuza game. In Yakuza 0, we play as a two protagonists during the economic boom in the late 1980s. The first: a young Kazuma Kiryu, member of the Dojima family, who is being framed for a murder that took place at the Empty Lot, an undeveloped piece of land that will be a crucial asset for whoever owns it.

The second is former Shimano family member Goro Majima, who is working in a cabaret as a punishment for being part of an assassination years ago. He’s tasked by his ex-patriarch, Futoshi Shimano, to kill a blind woman named Makoto for unknown reasons. (It’s later revealed that she’s the legitimate owner of the Empty Lot.)

By the end of the game, Kiryu gets back to the Dojima family after defeating all the lieutenants, Majima leaves Makoto to live her life, and the Empty Lot is destroyed; the Millennium Tower, a key location in the series, is built on the land.

2. Yakuza (2005) / Yakuza Kiwami (2016)

The first Yakuza game stars Kazuma Kiryu after he goes to prison for taking the blame for a murder he didn’t commit in 1995. The victim was Sohei Dojima, Kiryu’s boss, who was murdered by Akira Nishikiyama, Kiryu’s best friend. The reason behind this crime was that Sohei tried to rape Yumi Sawamura, a friend of both Kiryu and Nishikiyama.

When Kiryu is released from jail after a 10-year sentence, he’s expelled from the Tojo Clan, someone has stolen ¥10 billion from the clan’s account, and Yumi is nowhere to be found. In the middle of this, Kiryu meets Haruka, the daughter of a woman named Mizuki. Haruka has a pendant that seems to be a key element related to the lost money. Also, Nishikiyama shoots Kiryu’s former captain and adoptive father, becoming an antagonistic force.

During the climax, Kiryu finds Yumi and the lost money, and fights Nishikiyama. Kiryu is asked to be the Fourth Chairman of the Tojo Clan, which he accepts. Moments later, however, he names Yukio Terada, a former Omi Alliance yakuza, as the new chairman, and he quits the yakuza to raise Haruka as his adopted daughter.

3. Yakuza 2 (2006) / Yakuza Kiwami 2 (2017)

Yakuza 2 starts with Terada, the Fifth Chairman of the Tojo Clan, asking Kiryu to help him prevent a war between his clan and the Omi Alliance, their eternal rivals. After being shot in an ambush, Terada seems to be dead and Kiryu looks for Daigo Dojima, son of Sohei Dojima, to appoint him as the new chairman of the clan.

While helping Daigo, Kiryu meets Ryuji Goda, the son of the Omi chairman, and they become enemies because Ryuji refuses a truce with the Tojo Clan. Another character, detective Kaoru Sayama, comes into play and tries to help Kiryu while learning about her parents, who disappeared when she was young.

4. Yakuza 3 (2009)

The first game in the series released on PlayStation 3, Yakuza 3 starts with Kiryu far away from the yakuza lifestyle. Instead, in 2007, he’s taking care of the Morning Glory Orphanage in Okinawa. He’s assisted by Haruka, and he looks after many new kids living there.

Unfortunately, peace doesn’t last for long. Our protagonist has to face multiple troubles with different characters, involving new yakuza families, multiple assassinations, shootings, betrayals, an arms smuggling group, and even the CIA.

5. Yakuza 4 (2010)

One year after the events of the previous game, Yakuza 4 raises the stakes in a tale of families, betrayals, and crime from the eyes of four protagonists.

Apart from Kiryu, three other new faces join the streets of Kamurocho. The first one, Shun Akiyama, is a loan shark who runs his own firm, Sky Finance, and finds himself in the middle of a conflict between the Tojo Clan and the Ueno Seiwa Clan. He’s also asked for a ¥100 million loan from a mysterious woman named Lily.

Taiga Saejima, Goro Majima’s blood brother, went to prison after performing a hit against the Ueno Seiwa Clan in 1985. Twenty years later, after successfully escaping, he looks for Majima, who abandoned him when they had to perform the hit.

Detective Masayoshi Tanimura, another new protagonist, is investigating one of the recent murders in the Tojo Clan. While doing so, he meets Lily, who is actually Saejima’s sister, and she’s being attacked by the Shibata family. Tanimura later finds out that the patriarch of that family was related to the hit Saejima participated all those years ago.

Ultimately, Kiryu meets his new partners and finds out what happened to all the characters involved in the ongoing conflicts.

6. Yakuza 5 (2012)

If Yakuza 4’s story got complicated with multiple protagonists’ points of view, Yakuza 5 went even further. This time, you play as five protagonists in different scenarios in 2012, making this one of the biggest and most ambitious games in the series.

First you follow Kiryu, who left Kamurocho and moved to Fukuoka without Haruka, leaving his orphanage behind. As usual, he won’t enjoy calm for long before he learns that Daigo is missing, and the peace between the Tojo Clan and the Omi Alliance is about to break.

Saejima is in prison once again, but he’s looking to escape with his cellmate Shigeki Baba when he hears that Majima is dead. (After they escape, they learn Majima had actually faked his death.) In the meantime, Haruka is already a teenager and she’s following her dream of becoming a J-pop idol. Things get complicated when the president of her talent agency, Mirei Park, is found dead in what seems like a staged suicide. Returning protagonist Akiyama appears to help Haruka learn who was really behind Park’s death.

The last piece of the puzzle is the brand-new character Tatsuo Shinada, a former professional baseball player who was banned after being framed for fixing an important match. A mysterious man, who’s actually Daigo, will meet Shinada and ask him to find out the truth of what happened.

7. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (2016)

Yakuza 6: The Song of Life is presented as the final beat in Kazuma Kiryu’s spotlight in the Yakuza series. Our protagonist spends three years in prison, but this time it’s for his past crimes he actually did. At the end of the previous game, Haruka revealed in a concert broadcast that Kiryu was her father and that he was an ex-yakuza member.

After getting out of prison in 2016, Kiryu returns to Kamurocho, but only for a little while. He learns that Haruka is in a coma after a car accident, and she has a child named Haruto. Haruka was in Onomichi, Hiroshima for a long time before the accident, so Kiryu goes there to investigate what happened and who Haruto’s father is.

While finding clues, important characters like Daigo, Saejima, and Majima are imprisoned, and rival groups, the Chinese Saio Triad and the Korean Jingweon Mafia, are looking to make their moves in Kamurocho.

8. Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2020)

A major turning point for the series, Yakuza: Like a Dragon begins the transition away from the Yakuza name. It also introduces a new turn-based combat system and a brand-new main character: Ichiban Kasuga, another Tojo Clan member who, like Kiryu, starts his journey by agreeing to take the hit on a criminal charge for his yakuza family and go to prison for a murder he did not commit. On his release 18 years later, Kasuga quickly learns that major changes have happened while he was away, chiefly that the Omi Alliance defeated the Tojo Clan.

Kasuga goes to confront Masumi Arakawa, his former patriarch and father-like figure who seemingly sold out the Tojo Clan, about what happened and is greeted by his former compatriats with hostility. Arakawa shoots Kasuga and dumps his body near a homeless encampment in Yohokama’s Isezaki Ijincho. (New city unlocked!)

Ichiban wakes up and finds himself in the care of Yu Nanba, a former nurse who treated his gunshot wound. This is the starting point for Kasuga, who will meet multiple new faces for the Yakuza series to round out his fighting party, including members from area criminal groups the Yokohama Liumang, the Geomijul Mafia, and the Seiryu Clan. Together, they dig around Yokohama, Sotenbori in Osaka, and Kamurocho to uncover the bigger picture behind Arakawa’s play.

9. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (2024)

The biggest Like a Dragon game to-date teams up the old and new guard – Kiryu and Kasuga – in a true two-protagonist saga that takes the crew from Japan to Hawaii and back. Jumping ahead to 2024 after the events of Yakuza: Like a Dragon (if you were curious, the pandemic also exists in the Like a Dragon universe), Kasuga and friends are trying to live above-board lives in Ijincho until a popular VTuber posts a viral video that upends their normalcy. Soon after, Kasuga learns that his mother, who he thought was dead, is alive and hops on a plane to Honolulu to find her.

After immediately getting into some trouble after landing (classic), Kasuga runs into Kiryu, who is also in Hawaii to find Kasuga’s mother on behalf of the Daidoji faction that agreed to give him sanctuary and keep him in hiding (play Like a Dragon: The Man Who Erased His Name for the full backstory there). Kiryu also reveals that he’s been diagnosed with cancer from exposure to nuclear waste (which is connected to the Big Bad of the game). That’s just the very tip of the setup to the massive story that embarks on new Hawaiian adventures, sentimentally reflects on Kiryu’s past, and builds a dramatic arc that involves multiple international mob groups, a religious cult, live streamers, a national conglomerate, and world governments, just to name a few players in this soap opera.

How to Play the Yakuza/Like a Dragon Games by Release Date

• Yakuza (2005) / Yakuza Kiwami (2016)
• Yakuza 2 (2006) / Yakuza Kiwami 2 (2017)
• Yakuza 3 (2009)
• Yakuza 4 (2010)
• Yakuza 5 (2012)
• Yakuza 0 (2015)
• Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (2016)
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon (2020)
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (2024)

How Many Yakuza/Like a Dragon Games Are There?

Sega and Ryu Ga Gotoku studio have released nine main Yakuza/Like a Dragon games, two remakes – Yakuza Kiwami (2016) and Yakuza Kiwami 2 (2017), with a third promised down the road – and 11 spin-offs since the series’ debut in 2005. They were originally PlayStation exclusives, but later ported to Xbox and PC, with every new game since Yakuza: Like a Dragon releasing simultaneously for every system with the exception of Nintendo Switch. However, as announced in the Nintendo Direct from August 2024, Yakuza Kiwami was the first of the Like a Dragon games to get a Switch port in October 2024.

In addition to the mainline games, Like a Dragon has tons of wildly different spinoffs. Kurohyō: Ryu ga Gotoku Shinsho (2010) and its sequel Kurohyō 2: Ryu ga Gotoku Ashura Hen (2012) are two games exclusive to the PlayStation Portable featuring Tatsuya Ukyo, a completely new character. Judgment (2018) and Lost Judgment (2021) star another new face, lawyer-turned-detective Takayuki Yagami, who’s investigating strange murders in Kamurocho, and has a peripheral crossover with Kiryu and the others in that he brushes up against Tojo Clan subsidiary families.

Then there’s the zombie-infested spinoff Yakuza: Dead Souls (2011), which features the classic cast of characters in a dystopian setting. Yakuza Online (2018) is a free-to-play TCG available on mobile and PC which soft-launched Ichiban Kasuga, the protagonist of Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The popular Japanese series Fist of the North Star received the Yakuza treatment with Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise (2018), which shares Kiryu’s games’ structure and gameplay elements.

Two spinoff games are set in older Japanese eras and feature historic figures as their main protagonists: Ryu ga Gotoku Kenzan! (2008) and Ryu ga Gotoku Ishin! (2014). The latter has been released in the west as Like a Dragon: Ishin! in 2023.

In 2023, RGG released Like a Dragon: The Man Who Erased His Name, which takes place at the same time as Yakuza: Like a Dragon and explains what happened to Kiryu following the dramatic ending of Yakuza 6: The Song of Life. The most recent spin-off is Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii starring fan-favorite Goro Majima as an amnesiatic protagonist in and around Honolulu six months after the events of Infinite Wealth.

What’s Next for Yakuza/Like a Dragon?

The Like a Dragon story is far from over. Though Infinite Wealth, which quickly became the fastest-selling game in the franchise, closed the loop on its own story, it still ended on what felt like a big cliffhanger that leaves the door wide open for the next installment. Just TBD when that might happen: At the 2024 Game Awards in December, RGG revealed it was reviving Virtua Fighter but dropped nothing about what we can expect from the next Like a Dragon mainline or spin-off game.

Leanne Butkovic is an Editorial Project Manager at IGN who wishes they could befriend Seonhee.