The Next Yakuza Is Going to Be Enormous

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Yakuza 5 -- latest in Sega and Toshihiro Nagoshi's series of free-running Japanese mobster action games -- is a long way away. Nagoshi's team dropped the Yakuza series' traditional yearly release schedule for the numbered titles with this one, something that raised more than a few eyebrows over in Japan. There's a reason for that though -- according to Nagoshi and producer/scriptwriter Masayoshi Yokoyama, Yakuza 5 will be to the series what Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was to GTA, a massive expansion on the core concept that takes the franchise to new heights.

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"I'd like for people to wait for further announcements for the details, but we're taking a completely different approach with this title," Nagoshi told Famitsu magazine this week. "We broke the tradition of releasing one numbered Yakuza title per year because we wanted to reconsider the design from the beginning. If Yakuza 5 was a building, then this would be a complete rebuild instead of an expansion. It's a game in the series, of course, so in terms of style it would be a Japan-style house made by Japanese people, but we want it to be a noticeably different experience, inside and out."

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The game will be similar to previous Yakuza games in some respects -- it'll remain a PlayStation 3 exclusive, for one, and Kazuma Kiryu will once again be the hero, although Yokoyama hinted that there may be other playable characters akin to Yakuza 4. The big story here, though, is the game's setting. Sega held an online survey in late October asking gamers which Japanese city -- Sapporo, Osaka, Nagoya or Fukuoka -- they'd like to see most in the next Yakuza title. Sapporo (pictured above) was the clear favorite, earning about 40 percent of the vote. "The amount of support that Sapporo received was something that struck me in particular," Nagoshi admitted. "That got a lot of votes from people who lived there or are related to there, but it was surprising to see the number of votes it got from other regions as well. One of the main reasons people gave is that, due to the snowy winter image it has, many found it easy to imagine the sort of visual transformation it'd bring to the game. I have to admit that having Kiryu wearing winter clothes and being framed by snow is an easy way to imagine a new visual package for the game. Regardless, there's definitely a lot of core support for moving the core of the drama away from Kamurocho."

So which city is Yakuza 5 taking place in? "After considering all the relevant issues, we've decided to take the four cities in the survey, add Kamurocho in Tokyo, and have all five cities appear in the game." Nagoshi said. "This was something we had concepted in at the beginning but gave up on due to the amount of time and work it'd take. With the response to this survey and the general upscaling we're doing to this game, though, we've decided to take the challenge after all."

This is, to say the least, an gigantic, San Andreas-size scaling up for Yakuza. "If we're going to go through with this," Yokoyama said, "our intention is to have each city be fully playable in the adventure parts of the game. Each city is going to be at least as large in scale, if not moreso, than Sotenbori [from Yakuza 2] or Ryukyu [in Yakuza 3]. From the standpoint of development, even making a single city is pretty difficult. In terms of the graphics, there are so many things you have to implement, and then when you try to recreate the individual color of the city after that, that's equivalent to making another game entirely. Along those lines, if we're going to make five cities, that's going to take a lot of resolve -- you could say it's like making four or five different games at once."

The scale upgrade (and subsequent delay) also allows the studio to tackle some of the nagging technical issues that Yakuza has sported ever since it first went to the PlayStation 3 with the Japan-only Yakuza Kenzan! "Outside of whenever it'd be useful to preserve the tempo of the story scenes, we want to avoid cutting things off as much as we can," Yokoyama said. "Improving the ease of play is something we're devoting major resources to with Yakuza 5 -- compared to previous games, we're putting a lot into every aspect of the project."

"In terms of technology," Nagoshi added, "there are a lot of issues that have been bothering us but we couldn't do anything about due to time limits. It's been the case for a while that there was stuff we could do if we had the time, but we couldn't. The basic system has been the same since Kenzan, and with Yakuza 4 we started to see the limits of it. We needed to go to the next level, and to do that, we needed time. I'm hoping we can free ourselves of that sort of frustration with 5."

Nagoshi always feels like he's got something to prove with each Yakuza his team releases, and that drive is all the more heated with this one. "I hope people will look forward to the really huge expansion of scale and technology we're implementing here," he said. "We want to do our best to make as many of our fans' hopes come true as possible. We feel like our studio bears a responsibility to provide the best quality Japan can manage, so we don't want to release anything we're reluctant about -- we want to go all out and show how well-made and complete Japanese games can be."