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In a talk at San Francisco’s Game Developer’s Conference on Friday, Like a Dragon series director Ryosuke Horii said something simple out loud that I wish more big RPGs truly took to heart: the balance between the “main” narrative and its side stories is what it’s all about.
Ask a dozen Like a Dragon fans what they love most about the games and you’ll likely get a dozen answers: Suplexing bad guys in brawler combat, deploying weirdo human Pokémon in turn-based battles, karaoke, gambling, running your own resort island… but if there is a single most common answer, it’s almost certainly going to be the sidequests. Each Like a Dragon entry has a lengthy and dramatic main quest, but it’s often the smaller, quirkier stories around the margins that prove to be surprisingly touching or memorable. “One minute you’re fighting for your life, and the next you’re teaching a rookie dominatrix how to successfully humiliate perverts,” praised PC Gamer editor-in-chief Phil Savage in his review of Yakuza 0. “This clash of realism, drama and comedy might sound like a disparate grab bag of styles, but substories are a key part of why Yakuza 0 works so well.”
This balance is obviously no accident—it’s a core part of the series, and as the games have grown bigger and more ambitious they’ve incorporated more and more minigames and side activities. That’s also standard for RPGs and open world adventures, but Horii laid out Like a Dragon’s priorities so clearly that you have to wonder why so few other games seem to attempt the same balance.
“The story being good does not automatically guarantee that the game as a whole will be enjoyable,” said Horii. “The story is important, and for narrative games it is the main dish of a course meal. But a good main dish alone will not earn you a Michelin star. It is the combination of the restaurant’s service, atmosphere, appetizers, etc. that allows the quality of the main dish to truly stand out.”
My mind immediately jumped to Square Enix’s recent RPGs, like Final Fantasy 7 Remake, a game with seemingly opposite priorities to Like a Dragon. Final Fantasy 7 Remake is set in a lavishly detailed rendition of the city of Midgar, but fails to deliver a single sidequest with notable narrative heft: they’re completely forgettable fetch quests and “beat up 20 robots” time-wasters. Not only are they boring and trite, but they do nothing to enrich the setting or your characters. The Like a Dragon games, meanwhile, often reuse the same environments many times over and don’t feature any setting as stunning as Midgar—but they’re always filled with funny and charming human stories that differ from game to game.
Just this week, Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed Shadows with essentially the same failing. “I roamed Japan by horse looking to make connections and found only throats to stab,” PC Gamer’s Morgan Park wrote in his review. “In dozens of hours I can recall exactly one memorable character in a sidequest: a mysterious ‘yokai’ who’s actually just a dude who dresses up as a melon every spring and fights his friend. That guy rocked. Melon man aside, Shadows is just one huge bounty board.”
Different games can and should have different priorities, of course—Shadows obviously leaned into its combat and stealth systems, prioritizing those two things over more story-driven sidequests. But Assassin’s Creed has spent years now dipping its toes into RPG storytelling—longer, even, than the Like a Dragon series has. And I’d argue that even if Shadows has different goals, it could enhance how exciting and memorable its world and assassination targets are by practicing more of Like a Dragon’s thinking. As Horii laid out, the structure of their games is a direct result of how the Ryu Ga Gotoku developers collaborate.
“The stronger a team is in the scenario department, the more likely it is to place too much emphasis on the scenario in the overall game design,” he said. “[But] if we’re prioritizing the needs of gameplay, we’ll create more restrictions, reducing story quality. If too much of the game is decided in advance, and the story is filled by back-calculating from the gameplay, the story tends to become uninteresting and lack surprises. It’s important to consider the needs of the gameplay, but going too far will result in a story with no emotional impact.”
When he dug more deeply into sidequests, Horii listed a number of priorities:
- “Designing side content that links to the main story”
- “Build substories to balance out the emotions that players feel”
- “Deep dive into characters to enhance enjoyment of the main storyline”
- “Freedom: Ensure players enjoy linearity at their own pace”
These seem like incredibly simple tenets, yet I feel like many games with the same goals as Like a Dragon fail at them. Every one is key to making us more deeply invested in what we’re playing, but I think the second point—that “clash of realism, drama and comedy” that Phil mentioned in his review of Yakuza 0—stands out in particular.
“Players maybe spend more of their time with the substories. These stories not only complement the main storyline, but are also ideal for balancing the player’s emotions and satisfaction. When the main story gets serious, we include more lighthearted substories. And when the main story is lighter, we include more serious substories. Doing this allows us to adjust the balance of emotions that can be experienced in the game and ensures that the experience as a whole is ultimately satisfying. The Like a Dragon series, filled with both laughter and tears, is made possible through these efforts.”
One sidequest in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth hits both at once, seeing you fulfill a dying woman’s final wish to see snow in Hawaii thanks to the help of several ripped men in adult diapers. Committing to stories with such a range of emotions is also why The Witcher 3 is an all-timer. It’s why this year’s Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 impressed us so much. But both of those are RPGs that spent years in development to establish a huge array of sidestories to complement their already-gigantic main quests. Like a Dragon—which sees a new game nearly every year—is living proof that games can accomplish the same thing without the same massive budgets and timescales.
I know the secret to making a great narrative-focused game isn’t quite so simple as copying Like a Dragon’s playbook… but maybe it kinda is?
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Kurt Indovina
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