Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii’ Trailer

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii hits PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Steam on February 21, 2025, and it’s looking positively insane. In a good way, of course.

Sega has just released a brand new trailer for the latest entry in its long-running Yakuza franchise, or Shenmue Next as I prefer to call it. This latest video showcases the game’s now-unveiled English dubbing, which includes talent like Matthew Mercer, Samoa Joe, Maya Tuttle and Debra Wilson, among others. You can check out the fresh trailer below:

It’s cool to see Debra Wilson still showing up in video games, and looking at her Wikipedia page, she’s apparently contributed voicework to a ton of titles, like Diablo IV, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and God of War Ragnarök. I adored her on Mad TV back in the ‘90s, especially when she’d play Oprah and Whitney Houston. Absolutely hilarious. Real ones know Mat TV was way funnier than SNL, by the way.

Matthew Mercer has also lent his voice expertise to a bunch of games, like Monster Hunter: World, Death Stranding and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but I mostly know him from an obscure sixth-generation console 3D platformer called Scaler. Did anyone else play this game, or did I experience it in a fever dream? Anything is possible.

Additionally, Sega’s Steam Winter Sale is happening right now, and a bunch of Yakuza games can be purchased on the cheap, which could be a good way to prepare for Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii’s imminent launch. Although, if you haven’t started playing the Yakuza series yet, you probably won’t have time to finish all the entries before February. According to the current tally, there are 23 total games, but to be fair, I believe this includes software we never got in the West, such as PSP stuff. Still, you can’t say Sega hasn’t been prolific.

Over the years, I think I’ve played three or four of the Yakuza games and genuinely enjoyed them, but truth be told, they’ve all blurred together in my murky mind. As I mentioned previously, they’ve definitely felt Shenmue-adjacent to me, with a lot of wacky Dreamcast DNA seemingly carried over from Yu Suzuki’s classic work. I still hold on to this distant free-time fantasy of starting at the very beginning of the series, perhaps with Yakuza 0, and then playing through literally everything over the course of a few screen-addled months. As if I don’t have a thousand other games to play.

I might at least attempt such a feat in the new year so I can come to Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii with some modicum of familiarity. Even if I don’t, the new entry looks downright fantastic, with plenty of signature Yakuza oddity and swashbuckling flair to draw me in, regardless. The VO sound great so far, and as someone in the YouTube comments pointed out, there appears to be full lip-sync happening here. It tends to pull me completely out of gaming experiences when English lip-syncing is noticeably off, so this is good news.

Now, if I can only finish the dozen other games I’m currently playing before January 1st so that I can dive into Yakuza from the very beginning…