I was conflicted coming out of my first hands-on with Stranger Than Heaven earlier this year, generally liking what I saw but unsure if its slower, clunky combat system would get better in time. That was a 45-minute demo that thrust you into battle without any real setup, but in a new three-hour demo, I got to play it from the start, see a bit of its decade-spanning story in action, and explore the different towns that represent each time period while playing all-new minigames that fill the streets. That also meant getting real familiar with how to throw hands in the re-tuned combat, and it feels like I've done a complete 180-degree turn on RGG Studio's next game. Meaning, I’m now all-in on the Yakuza team’s latest.

Stranger Than Heaven's premise drew me from the first reveal – a story about a man of mixed ethnicity in a tumultuous time between Japan and the US, spanning decades and leading into where the Tojo Clan began in 1960s Kamurocho. As someone who's played every Yakuza / Like A Dragon game, this sounds like it could hit hard. Being familiar with the dynamic of being mixed and struggling to find your place in society, it seems like a story that's touching on something very few game stories have.

It starts with lead character Makoto Daito looking to get out of San Francisco in 1915 while fleeing the scene of a crime he did not commit. But the bastard cops pursuing him don't care – they can pin the crime on a "foreigner" and call it a day.

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