8 Games That Radically Changed How You See The World
1. Like a Dragon
The Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise may be a deeply silly collection of melodramatic action games populated with hilariously cartoonish characters, but there's also a heart-on-sleeve earnestness to the character interactions throughout.
To take one look at the games, it'd be easy to dismiss them as uncritically hyper-masculine nonsense, yet especially in more recent entries, the franchise has offered up one of gaming's most potent meditations on masculinity itself.
Bromance and meaningful male friendships are ever-present throughout the series, with the central characters regularly dialoguing about their problems in healthy ways - in-between, y'know, beating street thugs to a pulp with a bicycle.
Beyond that, the series riffs powerfully on themes such as regret, self-improvement, second chances, and the power of forgiveness, inspiring players to take some of its ideas to heart in-between all the ridiculousness.
Nobody expected this franchise to do anything but entertain, yet like so much great media, it massages genuine life lessons into a superficially frothy, straight-forward framework.