Killing Time

The Like a Dragon series (previously known as Yakuza) has been running for more than 20 years. Over the course of that time, players gained an intimate familiarity with its primary protagonist, Kazuma Kiryu, as they played through more than 30 years of his life before he passed the hero baton to Ichiban Kasuga with Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

However, with Kiryu, those three decades of in-game time spanned eight mainline releases and various spin-offs. Stranger Than Heaven takes the idea of seeing a character through various eras of their life and presents it as one extremely ambitious title. It aims to let players learn who Makoto Daito is over the course of 50 in-game years and 5 distinct locations across Japan, showing the founding of the Tojo Clan prominently featured in the Like a Dragon series.

“We wanted to depict why would someone create such an organization, and from there, we started to realize that we will need a lot of time to tell this narrative,” director Mikinobu Abe says. “In our previous games, like Yakuza or Like a Dragon, the narrative only revolves somewhere around a week, but you won’t be able to tell a narrative of someone creating such a huge organization within a week or a day. Then, we settled on, ‘It would be cool if we could depict a man’s life and his journey on creating this place that he wants to call home.’”