There has long been discourse over how the series treats women, or more accurately, how it doesn’t seem to recognise women all that much at all. For its entire histor🍬y, while jumping🦋 occasionally to characters other than our main man Kazuma Kiryu, the series has been shown to us through a man’s eyes. These men typically fly in the face of stereotypical masculinity, but they’re men nonetheless, and while they treat the women around them with care and respect, Like a Dragon’s world is still very much a man’s one.
Like a Dragon games have plenty of women in them, don’t get me wrong. You won’t find them in the yakuza, but Kiryu makes friends with the women who run his favourite bars, work in his favourite cabaret clubs, and help 💝take down the organised crime syndicate he’s part of (one of his love interests was a cop). Women are everywhere, giving our protagonists advice and a reason to try to be better men.
The problem﷽ is that these women don’t have agency. By and large, the🍎y’re interesting characters with distinct emotional depth. They have impressive resilience without turning into the trope of the ‘strong woman’ whose primary personality trait is being able to endure hardship.
Infinite Wealth Has The Perfect Ending F𒅌or Kiryu
RGG Studios couldn't have ended Kiryu's st🧜ory arc any bet🎃ter.
They’ll speak their truth, whether it’s about the sexism they face, how they’re exploited by men, or how the men in their lives are acting like idiots. They want things for themselves. They feel real. And to their credit, our male protagonists take them entirely seriously and do their best to make these women’s lives materially better, an♏d these women leave their marks on them as much as they do.
B♑ut it’s not very often we see women taking the reins and making decisions for themselves – while they’re never just a tool to propel a man’s story forward, they often still need our protagonists’ interjection to get them to where they want or need to be. They even recognise this: Makotoꦇ Makimura, a character in Yakuza 0, even says so to Kiryu and Majima, expressing that she hates that her blindness makes her so vulnerable that she has to rely on them for protection.
introduced us to new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga, but it also gave us Saeko Mukoda, a woman who breaks this pattern. Saeko, f⭕rom the very start, makes it clear that she has her own strong opinions and beliefs. She shows up to her sister’s boss’ funeral and starts telling all the men in the party that they were way too eager to forgive a man who exploits women for profit, verbalising my thoughts almost word for word. Throughout the game, she’s assertive about her feelings and she has plenty to do in her own life – eventually she works her way up from hostess to mama and owner of the hostess bar, and that’s because of her own work ethic. Even when she was in high school, she out🌳-earned her own father through working part-time.
I would be remiss not to mention that Saeko is far from the only well-written, strong woman in the series: Kaoru Sayama from Kiwami 2 and Yayoi Dojima are pretty formidable in their o💛wn rights.
Mechanically, since Yakuza: Like a Dragon is the first game that uses a party-based system, this is also the first time we get to play as a woman who throws hands, instead of merely busting a move like Haruka in Yakuza 5. Saeko is entirely capable of kicking butt, and does so to defend not just herself, but other people. The fact is that Saeko doesn’t need a man, and she can do it all herself. That’s a huge step for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ryu Ga Gotoku.
This is never clearer than when we see Ichiban propose to Saeko on their first date, at the beginning of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. He tells her he has a steady job, he’s strong and can hold his own in a fight, he doesn’t have any particularly bad vices, and he would give everything he 💧has to make her happy. He swears he’ll always be there for her, that knows it’s hard to do so much as a woman on her own, and that he wants to share that burden with her. “I’m serious, you won’t even have to work,” he says. “You can just hang at home and leave the rest to me.” He won’t even push all the housework to her, he tells her. He’ll do all the chores and take care of their kids.
Himbo representation abound.
Saeko thanks him for the date and leaves, and really, who can blame her? It was a jaw-dropping display of rizzlessness. Ichiban has woefully misunderstood her whole deal, having projected his daydreams about their future onto her without once telling her he loved her. Saeko doesn’t want a man to take care of her at all, and she doesn’t want to lounge at home while someone else does all the work. She’s built a life that works for her, one that she actually likes. She can, and does, fight her own battles. Ichiban might love her, and she might even love him, but that’s nꦺot the life she wants. When a different man proposes to her with a similar speech, she tells hiওm to buzz off as well. Later, she tells Kiryu, “They all try to weigh marriage with pros and cons, but I don’t see a single goddamn pro from my end!”
Saeko determines her own fate, and more than that, she chooses to pursue what she really wants even when her desires are in opposition to our male protagonist’s. Saeko isn’t afraid to walk away from men when they don’t give her what they want because she knows she can give herself everything she needs, and this evolving treatment of female characters shows that Ryu Ga Gotoku recognises its flawed portrayal of women and is moving forward with the times. Like a Dragon has always been progressive in its portrayal of men, but it’s obviously making a concerted effort to do that with its portrayal of women, toౠo. It’s a great ste🦩p forward, and I’m hoping to see far more.
- Dates
- March 25-31,🍎 2024 ♕
- Genre
- 🍰 Action-Adventure
- Developer
- Ryu Ga Gotoku 𝓀Studios
- Publisher
- Sega
- Franchise
- Yakuza
- Games
- ܫ Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 2, Yakuza 3, Yakuza 4, Yakuza 5, Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Like a Dragon: Ishin, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, Judgment, Lost Judgment
Like a Dragon Week is TheGamer's celebration of all things Yakuza/Like a Dragon, with features, interviews, and opinions on Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's massively popular series of action-adventue brawlers.
