Basic Guide to Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Basic information about playing the game.

Intro

Looking over the guides, I see a lot of advice on how the late game is played, but less basic advice. This guide is aimed at people who are in the first half of the game.

(Well, at least I beat the AI)

Saving the Game and Death Penalties

The game has one autosave slot, and it is written over FREQUENTLY!

There are also 30 save slots. You can save the game almost anytime outside of battle. You'll also be prompted to make one of these manual saves at the end of every chapter. If you go into a building or dungeon, the save system will be disabled.

All pretty standard stuff, right? What's up with writing a guide section about it? Well, the death penalty. If Ichiban goes down, you're given the option of going back to your last manual save or trying the fight again. Trying again costs half your cash! If you've managed to scrape up two million yen and use this option, you'll lose a million yen! Obviously, you're going to want to return to a manual save most of the time.

Unfortunately for you, the first half of this game is easy. Why bother making manual saves when you're beating up entire mobs without losing 10% of your health? Then you run into a part of town you aren't ready for yet, or you just forget to keep an eye on Ichiban's health, and BOOM! Now you have the choice of losing half your cash or hours of gameplay.

There IS a way to keep your money safe: ATMs. Some of the convenience stores have them. Dumping your money into one then taking it out again when you want to buy something is a hassle, though.

Personally, I just set one save slot up as my scratch save slot and save to it frequently. Saves are FAST, so why not? If I manage to get myself killed, that's the save to return to.

Difficulty Level

This game starts out very, very slow. You're allowed to wander around a little in the first couple of chapters, but there's really nothing to do but move on and watch some more story. Enemies are no challenge at all. The third chapter is hardly any better.

The game does open up after that, thank goodness, but it is still stunningly easy. You might want to raise the difficulty level at this point. Sorry, you can't. And no, you didn't miss an option at the start of the game. This is THE difficulty level for the game until you complete it!

It does, slowly but surely, get harder. Enemies in one part of town get replaced by stronger enemies. And then, it happens....

The Chapter 12 Difficulty Spike

In the early Yakuza games, I wondered if perhaps I wasn't the Dragon of Dojimo but was, in fact, a proxy warrior for the real power in Tokyo: the pharmacist. Bosses would kick me around, put me on death's door, and then - Stamina Royal! I'm all better! I could down half a dozen of those things in one boss fight.

In this game, I think I ignored healing items completely until chapter 6. Then I made it a point to stick with food, just to emphasis how fraggin' easy it was. Then THE fight in Chapter 12 happened. Suddenly, my Idol is healing almost every round, I'm chugging down pharmaceuticals, and I'm swapping characters around! Other boss fights took maybe 5 or 10 minutes, but this one took me a full 45 minutes!

The start of Chapter 12 is a minor increase in difficulty, just like several other chapters before it. The killer fight happens when you take a taxi to a group's headquarters. For once, it's a good idea to use one of those ATMs to stash your cash (minus some for the cab ride) so you don't lose much if you have to try the fight again.

Jobbing

Another thing you might want to do right before that spike (or maybe before the battle arena, if you want to mess with that) is filling out your jobs.

Every character can access several jobs - essentially, classes. When job level goes up, more powers become available, and you gain additional stats. Simple, easy stuff.

When you switch from one job to another, you lose most of the skills. The exceptions are the "character skills," which remain with the character once learned. If you switch back to a job, all the skills you lost come back again.

The stats are a little stranger. The stats you gain come in two flavors. Every time you gain a level in a job, you'll gain some higher statistics. Those are only in that class so, if you switch to another class, all those bonuses vanish. However, you'll also get some that come instead of a new power. Those stay forever. In the screenshot on the left, the stat gains at the top are only when the character is in the same job. The +5 magic at the bottom is permanent.

Early in the game, raising levels on your job takes some time. As the game goes on, though, the early job levels get easier and easier. By chapter 10, you can get 5 levels in a new job just from the first mob of bad guys you fight right outside of Hello Work! Before things get too difficult in Chapter 12, you might want to do exactly that. Swap a bunch of characters into jobs you don't plan on keeping them in, take a quick run around the block to get them to level 6 or so, then switch to some other job and repeat as often as your grinding tolerance will allow. You'll get some nice stat bonuses and a few character skills that can be handy. (See other guides for what jobs are best and what character skills you can get from each.)

Most characters have jobs blocked by both their level and their bonding level. As you win fights and eat at restaurants, your bonding level will rise until it gets near the top of the progress bar. Then it will stop dead. That's your queue to go to the bar and chat with them about their life. It's the bar by the park with the plant boxes in front - you'll be introduced to it as part of the story. After some chit chat, the level will go up one, the progress bar will clear, and further fights/feasts will advance it again. (Guys can also advance their bar by going into the club, but I never bothered with it. Levels advance quickly all by themselves.)

Bonds aren't just for jobs, though. Characters that aren't part of the party that's fighting get less experience from the fight according to their bond level. You have to get the bond level up to 5 before they get full experience.

Eli

One companion character is special: Eli.

Once you get a ways into the game, Eli will find you and tell you about this business that's failing. You'll kindly become its CEO to help out. (Did SEGA's boss get his job this way, too?) This will open up a mini-game where you take Eli's struggling business and turn it into a corporate empire.

Unlike other characters, Eli's bonding level advances according to this mini-game. She becomes a companion when you hit the first goal. Every goal after that advances her bonding level one more.
Personally, I hated this mini-game. It's badly explained and wasn't any fun at all for as far as I took it. If you hate it even more than me, don't worry about it. You'll get plenty of other characters to work with. Even the money you earn isn't all that critical - there are other ways to get rich.

Skill Shortcuts

When a battle starts, the enemies are usually all clumped together. They will quickly spread out and try to surround your party. If you want to use an area attack, it's best to do so as fast as you can so you can get as many enemies hit as possible. But to do the attack, you've got to bring up the skills list and pick out the skill. You'll be able to select the skill faster with a mouse, but the fastest way is to use a skill shortcut.

To set one of those up, go to the skills menu, select the character (just highlight, don't press E or return), press F to change the settings, select the shortcut slot, and select the skill, like this:

Now, when Ichi's turn comes up, I can just press S and it will jump right to the target selection for the skill!

Unfortunately, if you switch jobs to one without the skill you've put on shortcut, the shortcut gets wiped out. If I switch Ichiban to the chef job, he loses the hammer skill, so the shortcut goes away as well. If I switch him back to the foreman job, I have to set the shortcut up again. It's annoying, but it only takes a few seconds, as you can see. (If you do this for a character skill instead of a job skill, you won't have to change it later.)

The Dungeons of Japan

You will be introduced to the Underground in chapter 6. In fact, I think it was pretty much the entirety of chapter 6! This is a "repeatable" dungeon, meaning that you can run through it as often as you like. Every time you go in, all the enemies and treasures will be there. There are a couple of save points inside the Underground, but manual saves can't be done except at those points.

The enemies in the Underground get a lot harder after your first journey through it but, after that, they stay fixed forever. (The final boss is level 40.)

If you are inside the Underground and move from one map to another via stairs, then back again, the enemies all refresh but the treasures do not. So, if you want to go back to that save point up the stairs, you can do that - but you'll have to fight all the baddies again. (Not that that's always a bad thing.)

The game warns you that you won't be able to exit again once you go in. That's true. You're going to need to go through a few encounters before you find a ladder up. That doesn't mean you'll have to win those fights, though! There is the option to simply run away, which essentially makes the enemies vanish. If it works.

There's another dungeon like this in Kamurocho - VERY like this, in fact. It uses some of the same maps but with harder enemies. Also, you can exit right back out again if you want.

Quick Notes

Just a bunch of random stuff:

• Make sure Ichiban does the Foreman job at least a little bit once it becomes available. Having that job teaches him how to smash barriers on the map.
  
• Weapon upgrading: if there's a way to know what weapons can be upgraded before you buy them, I sure never found it. There is a 'romance workshop' app on your phone that will let you check after you buy, but you still can't tell if you can only upgrade once or if you've got a weapon that will upgrade lots of times.
  
• When you first start the game and load a save, use just the keyboard! The game will automatically select your most recent manual save but, if you move the mouse even a tiny amount, it will select whatever save happens to be under the mouse! If you load the wrong save and do anything that makes the autosave get overwritten, you could be out a lot of hours.
  
• Bugs are, for some reason, often used in upgrading weapons. Don't go giving away your bugs to that part-time hero thing right away! Particularly not cockroaches. Unless you really enjoy the can collection mini-game, those are going to be rather valuable.
  
• The jobs DLC is cheap now, but you aren't going to be able to use it until you start getting characters to bond level 5. Even then, their initial weapons are weak and better weapons for them cost millions. (You can always set them up with their DLC job and just not use them in fights until you can afford the weapons.)
  
• Check those vending machines! Gold plates are worth 100K and platinum is worth twice that. More expensive parts of town seem to have better results.
  
• In the business management mini-game, you'll find you often need to go through and shmooze your employees to make them happy. When you get several employees, this becomes insanely tedious. Check the employee options, though, and you'll find an option that will automatically pay to bring every employee in your company up to top happiness!
  
• Certain girls around town will have 'chat with' options. These are for romancing them. You won't be able to get an actual date with them until your personality stats are very high, though, so I wouldn't even bother to look until you get a stat up to 8.
  
• The part-time hero system has you hunting specific types of enemies. As near as I can tell, the game makes sure that none of these enemies ever completely vanish, but they do become FAR scarcer as your level advances. If you want to get all of these, you better make it high priority. If you advance too far beyond it, catching up is horribly dull. (Personally, I gave up on it after.)
  
• If you want to take a picture of one of those statue things, use the C key. You can turn the camera around if you want a picture of yourself.