GameCentral goes hands-on with Yakuza prequel Stranger Than Heaven, which boasts an ambitious premise but risks being held back by awkward combat.
RGG Studio is in an odd place. After years of being a low profile Sega subsidiary, it’s now one of the companies’ most important and recognised developers, thanks to the explosive popularity of the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series.
Yet in just the last couple of years, its reputation with fans has degraded. Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii was thoroughly underwhelming, Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut barely justified its own existence, and Yakuza Kiwami 3 was a bad remake only further mired by awful retcons and controversial casting, that managed to trigger boycott demands.
As a result, it’s hard not to approach RGG’s next game, Stranger Than Heaven, with a degree of cynicism, which is a shame as it has so far looked to be the studio’s most ambitious project in quite a while; one with a real sense of passion behind it. Unfortunately, our roughly three hour hands-on session did not make a great first impression.
Billed as a distant prequel to the Yakuza games, Stranger Than Heaven casts you as Makoto Daito and chronicles his life over the course of 50 years.
Although our session covered five segments, featuring a mix of story progression and free roaming, we didn’t get to experience each decade in turn, and instead jumped around Makoto’s timeline, starting with the game’s 1915 prologue, where he stows away on a ship bound from America to Japan.
Want GTA 6 news?
Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for the latest GTA 6 news, reviews of new games you should play and exclusive analysis of the biggest stories of the week.
This serves as the basic combat tutorial, and that combat is perhaps Stranger Than Heaven’s most interesting aspect. Unlike any of the previous Yakuza games, you attack by using the shoulder buttons, where the ones on the left control Makoto’s left arm and leg and the ones on the right control his right arm and leg.
After years of Yakuza’s beat ‘em up combat only changing in minor ways, we were initially pleased to see Stranger Than Heaven try something so drastically different. It’s also well suited to the game’s more grounded tone and is meant to make fights feel more visceral. You aren’t rushing in like a superhero to body slam hordes of foes; you need to wait for openings, dodging or blocking attacks before hitting back and picking off opponents one at a time.
However, it feels like this approach to combat works better in theory than in practice. While the slower pace and more reactive nature of fights is deliberate (and almost Soulslike), they’re not exactly exciting, since they lack the slapstick nature or variety of past Yakuza games.
Every fight we experienced felt roughly the same, since they just involved us hitting each enemy until their willpower (essentially a stamina gauge) depleted and we could then knock them out immediately with an instant takedown attack, by pressing the left and right shoulder buttons at once.
Blocking is also very clunky, since it’s not enough to just hold a button. Enemies can attack from the side, so you need to hold the block button as well as the corresponding shoulder button. This applies to enemies too; you need to see which direction they’re blocking and attack from the other side.
The combat is undeniably novel, but we struggled to truly get the hang of it, especially when it came to perfect blocks and counters. There were also moments where we were knocked to the ground and left prone, forced to roll about to avoid further attacks before getting a prompt that let us stand back up, which was very annoying.
It’s too soon to pass judgment since there’s clearly a lot more to the combat, based on the skill tree we briefly skimmed through. Not to mention there are multiple weapon styles with their own gameplay quirks, such as heavy hammers that have a long wind-up but a wider reach.
We remember not particularly vibing with Beast Of Reincarnation’s combat at first, only for it to become more enjoyable as we unlocked new moves, so the same could apply to Stranger Than Heaven. Although we suspect some will find the combat so bothersome in its early hours that they’ll quickly bounce off.
Some endearing side content – a constant even amongst the weaker Yakuza games – could offset this, but the few we sampled weren’t very engaging. There’re some simple gambling minigames, but also a spinning tops game called beigoma, and Menko, where you slam or slide cards and discs to knock your opponents off a table; both of which we got bored of very quickly.
There is a whole side activity about composing songs and managing music shows, which we wish we got to spend more time on. Since the preview skipped the tutorial, a lot of the finer points were lost on us, but we got to pick from a selection of musicians, lighting, and stage effects to better hype up the crowd and make extra money from a good performance, especially if we succeeded with the quick time events.
Music is clearly an important part of Stranger Than Heaven, as evidenced by the multiple out of context musical sequences we were shown to wrap up the preview and is described as something key to Makoto’s character, that allows him to connect with people.
Makoto’s story has a lot of potential, since it’s not just a simple rags to riches narrative. As someone with mixed heritage, he faces bigotry in both America and Japan, making him a perfect underdog, and the shifting time periods could make Stranger Than Heaven a fascinating period piece chronicling the changes in Japan’s culture and economy.
However, it’s unfortunate that RGG’s obsession with celebrity casting is at its most distracting here. Snoop Dogg’s appearance as ship captain Orpheus is immersion shattering and what little we saw of his performance in the preview proves he adds nothing to the role.
And while he didn’t appear in our session, the digitally reanimated corpse of rapper Tupac is being proudly advertised as a key selling point. Using dead celebrities’ likenesses isn’t an uncommon practice, but unlike the late Toshiro Minifune – an actor famous for his career in samurai films – being brought back for the new Onimusha, Tupac’s inclusion here feels cynical; a blatant marketing stunt meant to sell more copies of the game than any sort of meaningful tribute to the man’s work.
We feel bad being so negative about Stranger Than Heaven when, according to first time director Mikinobu Abe, development is primarily being spearheaded by younger staff members rather than the old guard, which we would otherwise warmly welcome.
Hopefully, more time spent with Stranger Than Heaven’s combat and world will reveal untapped potential and all the glitz and glamour of its production values isn’t a mere front for another fundamentally mediocre Yakuza game.
Formats: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Price: £64.99
Publisher: Sega
Developer: RGG Studio
Release Date: 15th January 2027
Age Rating: 18
Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.