Akira Toriyama passed away earlier this month at the age of 68. The creator of Dragon Ball and artist behind games like Chrono Trigger, the Dragon Quest series and Blue Dragon left behind truly one of the most consequential legacies in entertainment anywhere in the world, and we’re all poorer for his absence.
My relationship to his work is truthfully minimal, but I can’t deny the influence he had on the culture. “Which culture?” Every culture. A pop culture icon unrivaled in the modern age. His creations were iconic in the most literal sense I can muster. Goku and the Dragon Quest slime are as legible across borders and backgrounds as Mickey Mouse and the painted Campbell’s Tomato Soup can. He was a GOAT among GOATs, and even if I didn’t personally engage with much of his work, I would be a fool to say he had no effect on me, either. He will be missed, and celebrated, and his legacy will likely endure long after even any of us are dead.
Suffice it to say I’ve been hard bumming about his passing since the announcement hit last week. I think about the fact that he had a family, a wife and two adult kids, and coworkers and peers who all seemed to love him deeply, unequivocally. I think about the tributes his fellow artists paid him, the city squares in Mexico City and Buenos Aires filled with people mourning him, how even fucking French President Emmanuel Macron offered his condolences. How the Chinese government praised him for improving China-Japan relations and how the Japanese government praised him for demonstrating its soft power.
I’m thinking about how my friends talked about him. How the conversation started as a somber appreciation for the immaculate detail he gave his whimsical machine designs and turned into us sharing a procession of hilarious gag clips from DBZ.
I’m thinking about how deep Toriyama’s influence really goes.
I’m thinking about… Ichiban Kasuga.
We’re introduced – really truly, and not as a bit role or cameo in SEGA’s abortive online Yakuza outing – to Kasuga in Yakuza: Like A Dragon. Kasuga is initially notable for two things: first, his distinctive suit being a full color pallete swap with Kazuma Kiryu, and second, the fact that he doesn’t fight like Kiryu, or really any other yakuza heavy. We learn in Yakuza 7‘s prelude that Kasuga pretends to fight his opponents as though he’s in a real-world version of a video game, trading blows pound-for-pound like a hero in a turn-based RPG. (Conveniently, of course, this sets up the justification for the radically different combat system in Yakuza 7.) Ichiban is ridiculed for this by his sworn brother, but we can already see the kind of off-kilter charm to it; he approaches everything, from walking around Kamurocho looking for collection money to how he treats his Patriarch’s disabled son, with the same quasi-heroic attitude and worldview, all stemming from his multiple playthroughs of Dragon Quest, his favorite game.
When we first meet Kasuga, it is New Years Eve 2000 and he is on the verge of turning 24; he will very shortly be spending the next eighteen years of his life behind bars for a murder he did not commit and knowingly took the fall for. As he walks the streets of Kamurocho, the residents happily call out to him to chat; despite being a yakuza member, he’s well-liked and seems to get along with just about everyone. When he gets called to collect on a guy who hasn’t paid the Arakawa Family back on a loan, he takes literally just the man’s nice wallet and leaves the cash with him, knowing – thanks to a childhood rapport with the guy – what he needs the cash for. Ichiban may have delusions of grandeur towards being a hero, but he does everything he can to live honestly by them.
Put plainly, I think Kasuga is a character Toriyama would write.
Now the obvious comparison to make would be Goku, and while it’s true Ichiban shares a lot of traits with Toriyama’s most famous character, like irrepressible good cheer, immense strength and an indomitable will, I’m not actually thinking about Dragon Ball here, nor am I thinking about the work Toriyama did on various RPGs. Instead, I’m thinking about his propensity for gag comedy and goofy, raunchy jokes.
In one scene (famously used as the reveal trailer) in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Kasuga wakes up on Aloha Beach in broad daylight, naked as a jaybird. He was drugged unconscious by another principal character, stripped of his money, clothing and possessions, and dragged to the beach to be left to suffer the wrath of a public indecency arrest. But initially, he doesn’t realize his nudeness. As he tries to piece together what happened to him and stumbles up the beachhead, his, uh, dragonfish is only kept from view by random objects blocking our line of sight: a hermit crab walking up the beach in tandem with him, a bottle of sunscreen, a comically large coconut drink, a surfboard. A woman screams, calling the clueless Kasuga a streaker in English. “Surf’s up, dude!” the man holding the surfboard jokes. “Yeah dude, hang loose bro!” another guy chimes in. It isn’t until an old woman points at his junk that Kasuga finally looks down and covers himself up. “What the hell is going on!” he screams to the heavens in Japanese.
Ichiban Kasuga falls victim to these kinds of gag situations more frequently than just this example. One sidequest starts by having him fill out a dating app profile and chatting with a woman as part of a trial the app developer is running, only for him to get to the end and discover that the woman he was chatting with was actually a homeless guy the dev hired to catfish him for the trial. Then there’s the entire Sujimon League quest line. And the “Let it Snow” quest. And the quest that has Kasuga dodging traffic for a movie shoot. And the Poundmates feature. And on, and on, and on. Kasuga’s like a walking slapstick sketch, a human cartoon, the boke half of a never-ending manzai routine.
Toriyama’s work was so clearly influenced by martial arts movies, especially the work of Jackie Chan. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth tends to pull threads from the same cloth, at least from what I’ve seen in my playthrough so far. Even though the turn-based combat system helps slow things down moment-to-moment, there’s still a lot of fast, dynamic and funny action happening. Prop weapons abound, dance moves turn deadly, and Ichi and his party can, depending on their bond with each other, enact a wide array of devastating combo moves, follow-up actions, tandem finishers and tag-team special attacks that keep battles feeling entertaining and fresh. The new smackdown feature helps keep grinding to a minimum by showing Ichi and his crew just absolutely run a tractor over weaker groups of enemies.
It also helps that the story of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth isn’t just a straight up-and-down Yakuza story anymore. Yes, the yakuza is involved, as are a bunch of other criminal organizations from the series’ past and present, but from the get-go, Ichiban here is just a dude. That’s all he wants to be. And the shenanigans he gets roped into aren’t your typical “as soon as I thought I was out they pulled me back in” kind of framing: no matter what happens to him, he remains committed to being “just a dude” in a way that Kiryu never could quite manage. And while many of the elements of previous Yakuza games are present here, Kasuga’s personality radically reframes them. His party doesn’t grow because he begrudgingly let someone tag along as he dives headfirst into the Honolulu underworld; he readily makes friends. True, Kiryu had to pick him up after he broke out of jail, Tomizawa tried to kill him twice and Chitose drugged him, but they had their reasons! Ichiban put his trust in them, he gives his all for them. When Nanba and Adachi arrive in Honolulu later on, he embraces them as drinking buddies even as he’s letting them know what kind of dangerous shit they’re getting into.
The stories Akira Toriyama liked to tell were filled with light and levity. They were also mostly about fundamentally regular people standing with each other in solidarity against astronomical forces and minuscule odds of success. Chrono Trigger surprised me on a recent playthrough because of how downright funny it was; for every serious moment of drama in Dragon Ball Z you can find two or three hilarious moments that cut the tension in some way. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth sits in that same lane, balancing a barrage of goofy and silly moments with scenes of intense passion and emotional heft. And I can think of no better way to commemorate Toriyama’s life than by playing a game that so clearly took its cues from him.