Within my first ten minutes of Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, I was tending to a garden. After an hour, I’d learned to cook. While I’d eventually reach the title’s promised buccaneering, I had, by that point, played a pair of Sega Genesis games and learned enough “Intro to Small Business Management” to maintain high employee satisfaction amongst my company of swashbucklers.

Pirate Yakuza is (and I say this as a compliment) a game of distractions. Novel, idiosyncratic, heartfelt distractions.

Compare this approach with popular open-world series like Assassin’s Creed, Horizon, and Far Cry. Players with the slightest familiarity can skip through their tutorials and still........

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