Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Sega's Ryu ga Gotoku series is one of gaming's strangest and most committed marriages of tone. On one screen it is a sincere crime melodrama about ex-yakuza Kazuma Kiryu and the neon backstreets of Kamurocho. Turn the camera slightly and it is a karaoke bar, a go-kart track, or a man fighting a gang of street toughs over pocket change. That tonal whiplash is the point, and almost no other franchise sustains it for this long.

The saga reinvented itself twice over: first as Kiryu's bare-knuckle brawler era, then as a full turn-based RPG headed by the irrepressible Ichiban Kasuga. Alongside the mainline run sit the Judgment detective spin-offs and a 2007 live-action film adaptation. The pleasure here is breadth: substance and silliness sharing the same city block.

The Yakuza: Like a Dragon franchise spans 19 games, 1 films in the CrossBinge catalog.