The late Tupac is in the cast of a new game, not on its soundtrack. His likeness was rebuilt in CG, and SEGA has said no AI went into making it. The game is STRANGER THAN HEAVEN, a new game from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, the team behind the Like a Dragon games. It arrives on January 15, 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC through Steam and the Microsoft Store, and it will also be on Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming. It is fully voiced in English and Japanese, and the subtitles and interface are available in English.

You play Makoto Daito, born to an American father and a Japanese mother, and you follow his life for 50 years across five eras and five cities: 1915 in Kokura, Fukuoka; 1929 in Kure, Hiroshima; 1943 in Minami, Osaka; 1951 in Atami, Shizuoka; and 1965 in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Those decades lead up to the founding of the Tojo Clan, the organization the Like a Dragon games are built around, which makes this game a prequel to the series.

Combat controls are divided between the left and right sides of the body. Left jabs, high or low, and right straights sit on separate shoulder buttons. Hold the guard button and you block. Press the button on the side the punch is coming from at the right moment and you parry. Catch with one hand, hit back with the other, chain a jab into a heavier attack, and send the opponent flying with a charged blow.

Fifty years of punching is not all of it. Makoto picks up rumors on the street and uses them to scout singers and musicians. To make songs, he heads out into the city to collect sound: a broom sweeping a floor, snoring, a train, animal cries, even the shouts of whoever he is fighting. Sounds can be collected mid-fight, too. Each era also has its own minigames.

Masayoshi Yokoyama, who heads Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, talked through how the game came about in a group interview published in June 2026.

Two people sitting face to face in a bar

When was Tupac cast?

Tupac was not part of the plan at the start, Yokoyama has said. The decision came after Yokoyama had gotten to know Snoop Dogg. While the team was shaping a character who matters enormously to the story, it struck him that Tupac could be right for the part, and he took the idea to Snoop. The role is Amaru. The era and the city where Amaru turns up are being held back, because they touch the core of the story.

Snoop Dogg is on screen too, as a character called Orpheus. Makoto reaches Kokura aboard Orpheus’s smuggling boat, and Orpheus embodies the game’s music and hip-hop culture. Makoto was born with the ability to file away the sounds around him as material for music production, and Orpheus is the one who makes him aware of it. Snoop also sings on the main theme, “STRANGER THAN HEAVEN”. Snoop has both a role and a song. Tupac has only a role.

Facing off against a group on a street in daytime

How “stranger” stayed in the title

Inside the company, the person who objected to putting the word “stranger” in the title was the president. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, which Yokoyama runs, sits inside SEGA. The word stayed anyway. It survived, he has said, because the staff on the ground backed it. Opinions from staff based outside Japan also fed into the choice of title.

Neither of the two societies Makoto was born into ever fully accepts him. A life spent being treated as an outsider is what the game is about, so the title needed that word. That is the reasoning Yokoyama gives.

An arched sign with KAMUROCHO in Latin letters

Why the studio went back 50 years

According to Yokoyama, the starting point was a question that stayed with him through years of making Like a Dragon games: why did the men in those games choose the lives they did? To answer it, the team chose the Tojo Clan’s earliest days as its subject. The period did not come first. They worked backwards from the protagonist’s life, and the dates fell where they fell.

The cities are expressive interpretations rather than exact reconstructions, he has said. Buildings from those decades are lower than modern ones, so the team tuned the exploration to be as dense as it is in the rest of the series.

The stage of a jazz club

The theme song’s four artists are all in the cast

The main theme brings together Snoop Dogg, Tori Kelly, Ado and Satoshi Fujihara of Official HIGE DANDISM. When the full cast was announced in September, all four were included: Snoop plays Orpheus, Tori Kelly plays Suzy Day, and Fujihara and Ado have roles of their own.

Yu Shirota leads the cast as Makoto. Yokoyama has said that when casting, he considers first whether a person looks right on screen, rather than how much attention their name brings — a standard he learned on Yakuza 0. He also noted how Shirota’s Spanish roots line up with the part.

Tupac is not the only late performer in the cast. The actor Bunta Sugawara has also been recreated as a CG character, built from old footage and photographs. Takashi Ukaji, who was close to Sugawara in life and is himself in the cast, provides the character’s voice. Sugawara’s family formally gave its permission.

A collaboration with the Japanese film company Toei Company was also announced in September. Posters and billboard ads for Toei films appear in the game, and film trailers play in its movie theaters.

The man who does not fly got on a plane

Yokoyama has long said in public that he never flies. He and Snoop had met through a different project, and Yokoyama wanted to stand on the Summer Game Fest stage with him. Standing there meant flying. So, for the first time in 20 years, he crossed an ocean.

One flight in 20 years, and a song came together in exchange. The only thing left is to hear how it sounds in the game.