Sega’s organized crime epic blends high-stakes drama with goofy humor and absurdly in-depth minigames. The latest installment, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, launched in January 2024.
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Sega’s Yakuza crime games are infected with zombies (and zombies from other games). In the game’s fictional Kamurocho, schoolgirls and business ladies are turning into the walking dead. But when you finally kill them, they don’t exactly end up lady-like. Then again, trying to eat people isn’t very lady-like, either. Funny, that. A whole bunch…
Survival shooter Left 4 Dead features a whole cast of memorable zombies. So does upcoming zombie game Yakuza: Of The End. Thing is, I remember them being in Left 4 Dead first. The demo for Yakuza: Of The End shows some of the zombies that appear in the game. They seem to be either homages…
Never one to shy away from real world cross promotions, Japanese crime game Yakuza: Of The End lets gamers belt out tunes that feature two of the game’s characters in the cheesy sing-a-long music video. Main character Kiryu Kazuma will appear and sing along to MachineGun Kiss, a tune he sang in Yakuza 4 as…
On February 22 (NA) and February 23 (EU), a Yakuza 4 demo will punch the PlayStation Network in the face then smash a bike over its head.
Esper Ito, above, is actually less creepy-looking as a video game zombie. No, really. But that still doesn’t take away his position as Japan’s bravest (and craziest?) comedian. The Yakuza crime series of games is not only famous for its take on the Tokyo underworld, but also the absurd amount of Japanese celebrity cameos the…
Jun Komori started out as a fashion model, appearing in magazines like Popteen. There are tons of magazine models. So Jun started to be different by making stupid faces. At a press conference today in Tokyo it was revealed that Komori will be the Yakuza franchise’s latest massage “therapist” in the forthcoming Yakuza: Of The…
There’s a delightful little saying we have here in Australia, which goes a little something like (NSFW) “glass the c#@t“. It’s not pretty, but there you have it. Anyway, it features in this new trailer for Yakuza 4. This is the second in Sega’s new attempts to try and package the notoriously fickle Japanese crime…
Ever wonder why thugs turn to a life of crime? Maybe it’s because their threads cost so damn much. This outfit, based on the tracksuit protagonist Tatsuya Ukyo wears in PSP game Yakuza: New Chapter Black Panther and its spin-off television drama. The outfit is from Japanese designer DressCamp and will set you back ¥42,000…
The developers behind the Yakuza crime series are working on a sci-fi title called Binary Domain. It’s a pre-rendered trailer with robots, shooting and bad dialogue. But, hey, robots. Much of the trailer is filled either with stock third-person character design or characters nicked from movies or TV. While the game is supposed to appeal…
Toshihiro Nagoshi, the producer behind the Yakuza franchise, is moving from the gritty urban streets of Japan to somewhere more celestial: space. In the latest issue of Famitsu, Nagoshi talks about his upcoming project, Binary Domain. The game differs from his previous titles in that not only it is multi-platform and sci-fi themed, but it…
Long a tough sell to Western gamers, Sega may actually have found a way to market the Yakuza series of crime games outside Japan: package its trailers like the hammy movies the games so dearly want to be. Yakuza 4, the latest game in the series, was released in Japan in March, but won’t be…
Toshihiro Nagoshi is known for two things: Being very brown and making video games. He looks even browner on television. The Yakuza franchise, which has already seen a movie adaptation, is currently getting a television adaptation in Japan. The program is based on the new PSP game, Yakuza: New Chapter Black Panther Nagoshi has undergone…
To: Crecente From: Bashcraft RE: …A Day Without An Owen Last Christmas on the flight back to Japan, I read about half of Tokyo Vice. It’s a non-fiction crime book by Jake Adelstein, a writer we’ve featured here on Kotaku a couple of times. But! I didn’t finish the book on the plane. I accidentally…
Real honest-to-goodness yakuza have already made their thoughts known on Sega’s crime opus Yakuza 3. Now a Tokyo police officer and a yakuza lawyer weigh in on the game and suss out what’s realistic and what’s not. Jake Adelstein, author of the non-fiction Tokyo Vice, interviewed a handful of Japanese gangster about Yakuza 3 and…
Jake Adelstein, author of the non-fiction underworld yarn Tokyo Vice, got several gangsters to review Sega’s crime game Yakuza 3. But how? According to the original story, Adelstein appeared at “a shady real estate office in Tokyo” with cigarettes and whiskey “to teach these gangsters how to handle a PlayStation controller”. That wasn’t the only…
Sega’s ultra-popular (in Japan) Yakuza series is going completely bananas with its next console-based entry, Yakuza: Of The End. Sega is taking the crime-culture Japanese gangster series and throwing a zombie invasion into the mix. Huh? According to Masayoshi Kikuchi, producer of the Yakuza games, it was his inspired idea to introduce the hordes of…
As seen at the Sega booth at this year’s Tokyo Game Show.
Yakuza is Sega’s crime saga. The upcoming entry will have zombies in it. Yeah. The first image Sega showed of upcoming Yakuza game, Yakuza: Of The End, depicted the in-game Kamurocho, the in-game version of Shinjuku’s Kabukicho, in ruins. The game’s designer said that the theme for Of The End was “destruction”. A more apt…
Chiaki Kuriyama, best known in the West for her role as Gogo Yubari, is joining the cast of the next Yakuza game, Yakuza: To The End. Kuriyama will be playing the role of Misuzu Asagi. “Because I’ve long loved Yakuza,” the actress said, “I was really happy when I got the part.” She says that…
Sega is releasing a new Yakuza crime game this month in Japan. This game already has a title — Yakuza: New Chapter Black Panther. The Japanese company has another new Yakuza game. This game doesn’t have a title. Rather, it did not, because it has one now. The game is called “Ryu Ga Gotoku: To…
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