Like a Dragon 1 (Yakuza) Cover Arts

Like a Dragon (known as "Yakuza" outside of Asia) is an action beat 'em up game where you play as Kazuma Kiryu, a yakuza who's whole life changes when he takes the blame of the murder of his boss and is imprisoned for 10 years (in the joint). After his release, he learns that his world has completely changed and that 10 billion yen has been stolen with the entire underworld going after it. The game has different cover arts when it released in Asia and internationally and I'll be covering them in this post as well as the remake, Like a Dragon Kiwami (Yakuza Kiwami).




This is the cover art released in Asia and I have to say that I really love this one. It's such a minimalistic cover with Kiryu kicking the sky yet it tells you what the gameplay is about. Not only that, but the black and white colors make the red from the logo and the warning sign stand out. Not much else I can say other than it's an amazing cover.


Here we have the one released in the West with a render of Kiryu showing us his dragon tattoo, letting us know this is a game about crime. I think this cover art is just fine. Knowing how American cover arts go, I'm assuming they changed it since crime games like GTA were very popular at the time and wanted to market that to an American audience. I do think changing the title name wasn't a good idea since Kiryu has been ex-communicated from his clan during his imprisonment, but there's no point of getting annoyed by that since the current games reverted back to the original Japanese title.



Finally, we have Kiwami 1. I put them close to each other since the Asian and Western ones are similar besides the background and Haruka's pose. Both cover arts show us Kiryu and Nishikiyama (nicknamed "Nishiki") in the front standing opposite to each other representing their tense relationship from sworn brothers to enemies with Haruka in the middle looking lost, wandering around the streets of Kamurocho looking for her mother. I slightly prefer the western one since they added Kamurocho in the background and I think it help showing how lost and alone Haruka looks.

Those were my thoughts on the first game. I was originally going to cover the entire series in this post, but that would have been WAY too long. Instead, I'll just cover the games one by one since every game has a different cover art from different regions, so be on the lookout for that.



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