In mid-September, Japanese developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, which makes the Yakuza games, shocked fans with a surprise announcement that a new game in the series was coming on Feb. 28, 2025, and that it would feature fan favorite Goro Majima in a pirate adventure. In a west Los Angeles office recently, I got a chance to play a brief slice of Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, and boy does it live up to the name.

When I say brief, I mean it: Staff from RGG gave me just half an hour to run through a handful of fights and minigames. There's no way I got a representative understanding of the gameplay nor its story in such a short window. But I did get a taste of what awaits players when Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii arrives early next year.

My demo began a short way into the game, when the one-eyed Majima makes it to the beaches of Honolulu, Hawaii (the setting of the previous spin-off, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth). As you'd expect from "Mad Dog" Majima, it doesn't take long for him to get in a brawl with some local tough guys, giving me hands-on time with the combat. 

Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii returns to the series' live-action fighting roots, and lets players roam around attacking in real time (sorry, fans of the turn-based RPG systems in Like a Dragon and Infinite Wealth). Majima can switch between two fighting styles on the fly: Mad Dog and Sea Dog. Mad Dog lets him dash around with quick punches, knife attacks and launchers that slide into airborne combos. Sea Dog style puts two cutlasses in Majima's hands for slashing and shooting his way through enemies.

No use pretending: The Sea Dog style was way more fun to use, especially since switching to that style automatically suits Majima up in his incredible pirate outfit. You can throw swords like boomerangs and toss a grappling hook (called "wire hook") at enemies to pull you into slashing range. But don't discount the Mad Dog style for its Madness Gauge. When it's fully built up after enough attacks, you can activate it to summon four doppelgangers that can take on enemies or combine for a spin attack. If you don't want a charmingly silly Yakuza game, look elsewhere.

After the beach bros, the demo nudged me back to Majima's pirate ship, the Goromaru, to check out the game's new area: Madlantis. Hidden inside an innocuous mountain island, the salvage-strewn pirate port is a lawless, neon-and-rust-covered wonderland filled with coliseums and casino tables. It's all overseen by a debonair queen ruling from atop a marooned tanker looming over the chaos below -- though I didn't get time to figure out any more Midlantis lore.

This is where I fought Keith, a boss pirate who had apparently wronged Majima earlier in the game and deserved a beating alongside his orbiting swarm of swarthy boys. Once taken down with a hurricane of slashes and special attacks, I was free to dash back to Honolulu and partake in a few minigames. I managed to grab the microphone and belt out one song at the karaoke parlor, 24-Hour Cinderella (scoring 86.6 out of 100, thank you very much), and try out a minigame delivering food to locals on a bike (think BMX Crazy Taxi) before my demo time ended.

With a bare 30 minutes of playtime, I can confirm that Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii does feel like a Yakuza game, that the combat I played was tight and delightful, and that zany Madlantis feels like it meets the wild tone set by the game's audaciously direct title. I want to play more, because the briefest tease was not nearly enough to say whether players should get hyped for this game. 

Yet RGG (arrrRGG?) has an outstanding reputation for producing great games that fulfill the promise of their premise. Moreover, the studio is disciplined and proven in getting expansive games out every year, an impressive cadence in an industry where AAA games typically take half a decade to develop and release. I'm sufficiently excited for Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, even if many of my questions about the game haven't yet been answered. After all, which other studio lets their beloved gangster characters take some time off from crime dynasty soap opera sagas to scour the seas like scurvy dogs?