While the protagonist of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Ichiban Kasuga, is commonly stated to have debuted in the 2018 game Ryu Ga Gotoku Online, he actually was first revealed in a trailer for the game Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, which is considered a spin-off of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise. This trailer aired almost a year before Ryu Ga Gotoku Online and is notable as Ichiban does not appear in Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise.

The antagonist of the original Yakuza was voiced by Kazuhiro Nakaya, who later went on to voice Ichiban Kasuga, the protagonist of Yakuza: Like A Dragon. The two characters also have the same koi tattoo, leading fans to speculate on the parallels between both characters, but aside from their voice actors and tattoos, there are only surface-level parallels.

Unused animations for Ichiban Kasuga riding a skateboard exist in the data for Yakuza: Like a Dragon, suggesting he was intended to get around the world map on a skateboard at one point. Skateboarding would later be implemented in Lost Judgment.

Eri Kamataki, who appears as a party member in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, was modelled and named after a real-life actress by the same name. The real Eri Kamataki (entrant no. 7) won a contest of more than 1000 entrants to appear as "Ichiban's female co-star" and so appeared as a playable character in the game.

In a 2020 interview with the YouTube channel Archipel, series producer Toshihiro Nagoshi claimed that the decision to change Yakuza: Like a Dragon from an action game to a turn-based RPG came from a 2019 April Fools' Day video for Yakuza Online showing turn-based combat which was received positively by fans. However, fans and news outlets seemed to take this statement seriously, and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's head Masayoshi Yokoyama later had to clarify that it was a joke. The decision to shift to turn-based combat was made before production on the game even began due to it being too drastic of a change to make late into development.