In 2022, Yakuza is a pretty big series in the West, as we saw yesterday when eight games made it to PlayStation Plus. But it wasnât always this way! Between the release of Yakuza 2 and 3 things were looking incredibly dicey for English-speakers, and there were real fears that if Yakuza 3 didnât sell well, it would be the last game in the franchise weâd ever get to see here.
I know this sounds absurd given the number and prominence of Yakuza games around these days, but itâs true! Folks were so anxious about it, in fact, that every tiny little change that Sega made to Yakuza 3’s English release was scrutinised to hell and back, with fans terrified that anything that could potentially hurt sales would mean the end of the series in the West.
All that fear counted for nothing, of courseâYakuza 3 did just fine and the rest is historyâbut all that trepidation over low sales helped set the stage for why, around the same time, a different Yakuza game was released in Japan (later followed by a sequel) that we still to this day have not been able to play in English. And itâs about time that changes.
In 2008, Sega released Ryu ga Gotoku Kenzan! for the PS3, which I guess you can best describe as a Yakuza holiday special. Set in Kyoto in 1605, it was a Yakuza game sent back in time, with players still controlling Kazuma Kiryu, only now heâs called Kazumanosuke Kiryu, and instead of being a gangster heâs a retired swordsman now working as a bodyguard.
Then in 2014 Sega released Ryu ga Gotoku Ishin! for the PS4, which did the same thingâonly now set during the end of the Shogunate in the mid-19th centuryâand introduced more cameos from the main series, with appearances from favourites like Majima and Daigo.
While set in different time periods and with a sword-heavy, historical slant, these were still Yakuza games through and through. Check out the Japanese trailer for Ishin and youâll see what I mean:
Ishin even has, if youâre a fan of the karaoke sequences in the main games, its own historical take:
These look great! I really want to play them!
Sega and developers Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio have long had multiple reasons to keep these games in Japan. The first was an understandable fear that, if nobody was buying the main Yakuza games, why would they bother with these spinoffs? As that was slowly nullified by the seriesâ increasing popularity in the West, there remained concerns that much of the vibe of the games would be lost on a Western audience, who wouldnât be as familiar with the nuances of the time period. (Itâs telling here that another Yakuza spinoff, the gun-heavy Dead Souls, was given an English-language release, which says a lot about Segaâs perceptions of the Western market.)
Those have now been joined (or replaced) by technical issues, as we covered just last year, when director Daisuke Sato said:
Personally, I would like for these titles to be localized and enjoyed by our Western fans. We were prioritizing regaining our ground with the series in the West from Yakuza 0, so time just flew by without an ideal time to release these games.
In my opinion, the action is one of the best in the series, so Iâd like to localize them if we get the chance. However, the game is also close to 7 years old, so we may need to put in additional work to remake it instead of a simple port, so the decision is a bit more complicated.
Despite the potential in those statements, and the fact the developers have said theyâre working on games beyond the Yakuza and Judgment series, we havenât heard squat on the possibility since. But even if it does take some workâand in the case of Ryu ga Gotoku Kenzan!, some serious workâto get the games up to speed on modern hardware for modern expectations, thereâs never been a better time to pull the trigger on that spend.
The Yakuza Kiwami gamesâremakes of the first two entries in the seriesâhave done well, and that was for two games that had already been available in the West! These spinoffs would be starting from scratch, not to mention appealing beyond the existing Yakuza fanbase to the potentially wider audiences that lapped up the setting of, say, Ghost of Tsushima.
Anyway, Iâm not here to demand these games. Weâve all managed to survive the last 15 years without them, and could maybe survive another 15, outside world permitting. Iâm just here to maybe give Sega a nudge, a reminder that, hey, we love Yakuza games, but maybe one day we could also love those other Yakuza games, the ones with the swords, as well.
