Yakuza producer says he wants more than just Kiryu as a guest character in fighting games

In recent years, fans of Sega’s Like A Dragon games — the series previously known in the West as Yakuza — have pestered the developers to have their characters Kiryu Kazuma and Majima Goro appear in fighting games like Tekken or Street Fighter. The series’ former producer, Toshihiro Nagoshi, has often rejected the idea, saying, “I don’t really want Kiryu to hit women.”

Masayoshi Yokoyama, producer and writer of the Like A Dragon series and Nagoshi’s successor since 2021, has a different take on the matter: please think bigger.

In an interview with Yokoyama about the upcoming Prime Video series based on the games, Like a Dragon: YakuzaI asked him what he would think if characters like Kiryu, Majima or Ichiban made the transition to a fighting game as Tekken 8.

“I think it’s better to say that, as we do with (the Like a Dragon: Yakuza “TV) series is better than just going to another game,” Yokoyama said. “We get all kinds of invitations to appear in other games, but we’ve never really gone to their door and said, ‘Let us in.’ I think cross-medium is the better way to go about it.”

That is certainly a more flexible and ambitious answer than the one Nagoshi gave to Red Bull in 2020. So maybe we’ll see Kiryu fighting Kazuya Mishima outside a Waffle House ever.

Kiryu from Like A Dragon has of course appeared in games outside of the core franchise. He was a guest golfer in 2011’s Hot Shots Golf: World Championshipand he appeared alongside other Sega characters in games such as Project X-Zone 2, Persona 5: Dancing in StarlightAnd Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania.

I think we should actually expect Sega to finally… Fighters Megamix 2so that we can all live the fantasy of playing as the Dragon of Dojima in fist fights against the car of Daytona USABean the Dynamite of Sonic fightersand any other guy who likes to punch Kiryu.