Yakuza: Like a Dragon Features New Bonds System

Bond With Characters to Further Your Bond in Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Sega recently revealed Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s bond system which is similar to the Social Link systems from the Persona franchise. To increase your bond with characters, spend time with your various party members throughout the day, doing various activities such as eating or going out for a drink. As your bond with the character increases, they can learn more skills they can learn, change jobs, have follow up attacks and you’ll also gradually know more about their backstory. Yakuza: Like A Dragon releases exclusively for the PS4.

Yakuza Like a Dragon

The addition of the bonding system to the Yakuza series is new, turning the series heavily in the RPG direction. The game plays drastically differently from previous Yakuza titles and this is one of many ways Sega are changing it up. Previously we discovered the series was abandoning the action-heavy combat system in favor of a slower, more methodical combat system. Characters involved in a battle scenario move in real time (same goes for the game world) and mechanics such as turn order depend on a character’s stats. This turn-based system replaces the familiar brawling mechanics with an RPG command system.

According to developers, the story follows Ichiban Kasuga who willingly goes to prison for a gang murder that he didn’t commit and then getting released in 2019 after serving an 18-year sentence. Ichiban deliberately took the fall for the murder out of loyalty to his yakuza clan but when he tries to reunite with his former clan in Kamurocho, he gets betrayed, shot, and left for dead by his old yakuza boss, Masumi Arakawa. When he awakens, he’s in a completely different city: Yokohama.

What’s your favorite change to the Yakuza franchise coming with Yakuza: Like a Dragon? What’s another RPG staple you’d like Sega to adapt into the game? Let us know in the comments below!

Source: Gaming Bolt