Look, it’s not my fault I like video games where you run around like a mischievous little Grinch ruining the Christmas that is people going about their everyday lives, by running them down with cars, slamming a bike over their head so hard they don’t get up, or firing an RPG directly at the pavement in front of them.
2025’s shaping up to be a bumper year for sick freaks like me too, with two very different crime titles currently set to arrive at opposite ends of the calendar, and offer us the chance to unzip both our ego and superego, put them away on nice coat hangers, and spend hundreds of hours really unleashing the id.
First of all, it’s not long until Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii – a game with a title so wonderfully ridiculous I can still scarcely believe it’s an actual thing – drops in February. It’s a month that, thanks to Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Avowed both getting the boot from 2024’s autumn slate, is basically going to be some kind of video game release armageddon.
But, if there’s anything I trust to cut through despite that and still find a way to be memorable, it’s this game. For someone that likes taking the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series far too seriously, the idea of a game that really embraces its sillier side by letting you run around as an amnesiac pirate Mad Dog of Shimano is something I’m really into. With just enough ship sailing to be a bit Assassin’s Creed Black Flag and just enough Yakuza stuff to still look like a Yakuza thing, it’s hit that sweet spot where it just looks like it’ll be such a laugh that no one’ll really care about the s**t we usually get bogged down in with games.
How does this fit into the timeline, without being explained away as several hardened Japanese gangsters spending a weekend at the beach snorting and smoking every hallucinogenic drug imaginable? It’s a Goro Majima pirate adventure, man. Nobody cares. To do that though, it’s actually got to be as good as it looks. Will it be? We’ll see.
That said, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii faces nowhere near the pressure the second of these games does to actually live up to the hype.
GTA 6 is a thing people were losing sleep over the night after GTA 5 came out. How would Rockstar, the studio of games which are the biggest blockbusters in a medium that has plenty of those of the regular, the studio of masterpieces with horse balls that actually grow and shrink depending on the in-game temperature, follow on from its return to Los Santos?
What would it add in to outdo 5 in the same way it had done to GTA 4, a brilliant game in its own right? How would it make this another game that you fired up and were immediately convinced that what you’re playing isn’t just a crime drama or action movie that puts you behind the controls, but something that feels like a landmark moment in gaming itself?
Frankly, having only seen one trailer so far, I’ve got no idea, aside from the introduction of some Florida man weirdness.
Maybe that’s what these two games have in common. Two Florida men, armed with a potentially endless jug of fun hijinks to step into our lives and pour over our heads, a slightly grottier version of the Matrix’s very 3AM on a night out choice between blue and red pills.
I’m sure there’ll be plenty of very intelligent games that come out in 2025 which I’ll also fall in love with, but I’m in this to have fun. I’m here for the rush, and these two games feel like they’ve got the potential to be an adrenaline shot to the heart that would’ve brought Mia Wallace back to life so hard she’d have been doing the twist on the ceiling.