Don’t have friends, have family
The critical path of Pirate Yakuza will endear you plenty to your main ride-or-die characters like Jason, Noah, and Masaru, but as mentioned before, these are also the characters you’re gonna carry with you the entire game. As such, giving them priority attention above everyone else pays dividends like crazy. That’s not just because they have the best-written storylines, but they start out with such high stats that prioritizing them early generally means you can stick them in one position right from jump, and they’ll evolve faster the rest. For most of them, it means keeping them happy and fed while on the ship, and bringing them on raids. For Noah, that means taking in the optional conversations dotted around Honolulu early and often. For Noah’s tiger cat, Goro, though, that means visiting Nele Island just as early and often with the fancy pet food.
