Sega’s Yakuza Team Has Serious Balls
It’s been clear for a while that the next Yakuza game will have some big changes, ever since Sega originally announced the game two years ago. They confirmed in 2017 that it will have a new protagonist with Ichiban Kasuga, taking the mantle from longtime protagonist Kazuma Kiryu. But little did anyone know what the team at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio really had in mind.
The reveal started by clarifying and reconfirming existing details, which started as music to the ears of the franchise’s fans. Instead of Shin Ryu Ga Gotoku (literally translated as “New Yakuza”), the final name will be Ryu Ga Gotoku 7, hammering home how it’s a follow-up to Ryu Ga Gotoku 6/Yakuza 6. The trailer elaborated on Kasuga and his past, along with the introductions of some characters that will be central to the story. The location change was universally celebrated, as the game will ditch the all-too-familiar series mainstay of Kamurocho (based off real-life location Kabukicho) for Yokohama.
The BIG change series co-creator and producer Toshihiro Nagoshi hinted at concerned its battle system. The real-time battles have been replaced with turn-based skirmishes where players select commands instead of taking direct action. To say the fanbase is steeply divided on this is a massive understatement, hardly a surprise considering just how large a change this will be, in a series that’s existed in Japan since 2005.
Previous Yakuza games contained flashy battles between the main playable characters and weak and strong enemies, while players could further develop the move sets of those characters over time. The system has evolved in several ways over the years. Kiryu’s style has received adjustments and upgrades between installments and game engine switches, but several more styles came with additional playable characters like Shun Akiyama and Goro Maijima. Battles received further upgrades with the recently-released Judgment, through protagonist Takayuki Yagami’s multiple styles. Now, they’re discarding all that for something different, and it’s left fans who preferred the action style disappointed.
It’s funny to see where most of the division is coming from. Japanese Twitter is reportedly pissed off about the change, but English-speakers seem evenly divided about it. That makes sense. The series has been popular in Japan since the mid-00s, but didn’t achieve success in western territories until Yakuza 0 only two-and-a-half years ago. Several players like seeing the characters go one-on-one in key fights in brutal tests of power, something the new game won’t have. The Japanese response was venomous enough that it prompted producer Daisuke Sato to make a three-tweet statement thanking fans for their harsh feedback. He also said it’s possible the reveal presentation for the game wasn’t the best it could have been.
He could be right, because the details at least sound promising. The battle system will specifically be called the “live command RPG battle” system, the intention of which is to combine the series trademark over-the-top action with a turn-based style. Kasuga will fight alongside a party with other characters who’ve yet to be introduced, with several returning and new techniques. Sega is calling the battles “immersive” and “dynamic,” which will hopefully be the case to distinguish it from other games with turn-based battles. The idea of initially choosing commands with the face buttons is right out of Persona 5, so they’re taking inspiration from a good place. It also helps that Sega owns Atlus. No one saw this change coming, to say the least.
But perhaps we should have. What’s particularly humorous is how this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this system. Sega previously released a video showcasing the game as a turn-based RPG for an April Fools’ Day joke; it was taken as good fun, and several people thought it would be a good idea to have a mode like this in the game. No one predicted this was the actual game. Even the Dragon Quest homage was teased through the music track taking inspiration from one of the series’ battle themes, as Ichiban is a big fan of the franchise in the main game (used with permission from DQ creator Yuji Horii). Given the way I wrote the title in my post, it could have been taken as an implication that I wanted the whole game to be like this. I take full responsibility.
Sega’s producers are openly acknowledging that the game’s reveal wasn’t too great, meaning the Tokyo Game Show demonstration will be critical to its future reception. The April Fools’ video showed how the game could keep the over-the-top action while being turn-based, but the small clip of gameplay from the conference going around made battles look bland. Yakuza games don’t have the best pacing, especially early on, so hopefully the battles don’t slow it down even further. I can understand why they wanted to make these changes, because they’ve made so many of these games at such a fast pace over nearly 15 years, and want to do something different. Hopefully it works out for them.
The seventh Yakuza game will release in Japan and certain Asian territories on January 16th. The western release will follow later in 2020, where it will be called Yakuza: Like a Dragon according to a now-deleted Sega Europe tweet, which will distinguish it from previous games. (Maybe they should have done that in Japan too.) If the game isn’t received well, Nagoshi said they’ll have no problem going back to the style from the previous games. Their future moves will depend on how it sells in Japan and other Asian markets, and we won’t have to wait long to find out how it performs. Regardless of its reception, it’s worth respecting the massive risk they’re taking here.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
