This coming Friday, November 15th, 2024, Xbox Game Pass subscribers will lose access to Like a Dragon: Ishin! and Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name.
Both are key parts of the excellent long-running Like a Dragon/Yakuza RPG franchise, which recently got a huge influx of new interest thanks to the debut of a middling Amazon Prime TV show. The former game is a samurai adventure that I once called one of the best modern games in that milieu, and the latter is an excellent tale that runs concurrent to the seventh game in the main franchise.
Gaiden’s big hook is that it gives protagonist Kiryu Spider-Man style web shooting powers, so he can throw dudes around and grab items from far away. Yes, it’s about as silly as that sounds.
The Like a Dragon franchise has a surprisingly strong history with the Xbox Game Pass service — or at least, it did until this week. Both of these titles joined the library on their initial launch days, so it’s strange to see them both leave. Most of the rest of the franchise is still on the service as of this moment, with all seven main installments and prequel Yakuza 0 still accessible — but this makes it feel like their days are numbered.
