Kiryu Kazuma is the main protagonist of the Yakuza franchise, or at least he was until the release of Yakuza: Like a Dragon when he passed the torch over to a new protagonist called Ichiban Kasuga. Despite no longer being the lead character, Kiryu continues to be the face of the Yakuza franchise for most people.
It’s no surprise that a fan-favorite character such as Kiryu has had many memes made about him, especially as the Yakuza games are filled to the brim with funny content. Check out some of these hilarious memes.
10 Back in Town
Anyone who has played the original Yakuza game or the Kiwami remake will know the context of this meme and why it’s funny. Poor innocent Kiryu takes the blame for a murder his best friend and side character Nishiki committed, and when he is released ten years later he can’t wait to see his old buddy.
Unfortunately, Nishiki isn’t the same guy as before and actually serves as one of the antagonists of the game. That’s one way to stop being best friends with someone…
9 Something Doesn’t Add Up Here
Kiryu appears to suffer from the same affliction as Batman does; they both claim to not be willing to kill people, but most of the time when they’re taking down bad guys, you just know that those people aren’t surviving the beatings.
The idea that your opponents are going to survive the attack is even less likely when Kiryu uses lethal weapons such as Katanas, guns, swords, and more. The Kiryu in cutscenes is a far cry from the Kiryu beating people in the street, and this meme conveys the difference between the two.
8 Great With Kids
Kiryu is pretty clueless when it comes to most things, and that’s part of what makes his character so endearing to fans. So what happens when you take a clueless guy and make him take care of a kid?
Well, there are definitely some bad decisions made… Kiryu takes young Haruka to the underground gambling den, a place where you can play minigames. Arguably, this isn’t the worst place he takes her to, as he also takes her to a soapland.
7 Gotta Get Those Locker Keys
One of the collectibles in more than one of the Yakuza games is locker keys, which are scattered all around the city of Kamurocho. Collecting the keys allows you to open the lockers to score various loot and goodies.
Of course, it does mean that Kiryu is just randomly carrying around a lot of keys, which this meme rather hilariously points out. Just imagine having to sort through all those to find the one you actually want to use.
6 The Dragon of Doge-jima
This meme is quite funny as it’s so very true. Kiryu is known as the Dragon of Dojima and for being a formidable opponent with some rather awesome moves. However, he only really seems to embody this legendary title in the prequel title, Yakuza 0, as in all the other games he has to return to form and re-learn all of the moves he used to know.
Of course, this is a way for the game to introduce a mechanic in which players progress and level up, but plotline-wise, it just seems rather odd that he just forgot how to be awesome.
5 The Many Faces of Kiryu
The funny thing about this meme is that it shows some great examples of the many weird and wonderful things that Kiryu gets up to in both the main plotlines and substory sidequests.
Of course, it also highlights the very different tones of pictures that people use for their social media accounts. Truthfully, you know Kiryu isn’t going to be on any of these social media sites as he’s not exactly the best with technology, largely due to him being incarcerated for so long.
4 Yakuza Players be Like…
When Yakuza 4 released it decided to add a fresh mechanic to the game, where instead of having Kiryu as the sole main protagonist, he instead shared the limelight with three other characters — Shun Akiyama, Taiga Saejima, and Masayoshi Tanimura.
While it was great to have a variety of characters and more story content, many players just wanted to get back to playing as their favorite, Kiryu, and this meme perfectly conveys that. That’s not to say that the other characters don’t have their own fan following, but Kiryu is of course the most popular choice.
3 What’s That in Your Pocket?
While the Dragon of Dojima might only need his fists (and legs) as his primary weapons, the Yakuza games do actually let you equip weapons for some added damage. The downside to this is that the police, or Majima pretending to be an officer, might check you for weapons in the first game.
One item you get plenty of in the game without even trying is pocket tissues, NPCs literally hand them out for free, so you’ll soon have your pockets full of them.
2 One Man Army
Something that happens in all the games is that Kiryu, a single person, is able to defeat whoever he is up against. It’s obviously far-fetched, but it’s just become one of those Yakuza traits that fans love and this meme pays tribute to that fact.
Kiryu just whips off his shirt and enters the battle with no weapons, but still comes out on top. He’s gone up against so many people, he’s even fought tigers bare-handed, and yet the Dragon of Dojima always wins. That’s why Kiryu is such a legend after all.
1 I Am Not a Cat
The world recently found something new to create memes of after a lawyer accidentally joined a zoom call with a cat filter on and didn’t know how to remove it, forcing him to state “I am not a cat”.
This meme takes that idea but makes it a Tojo clan meeting and has Kiryu as the person using the filter. As previously mentioned, Kiryu is not the best with technology so it’s totally spot-on that it would be him to make this mistake. It’s also adorable that he has misspelled “dragon” for his zoom name.
