The recently announced Yakuza 3, 4, 5 remasters have only been announced for Japan but series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi shared bits hinting at its localization for the West and explained why they’re not Kiwami remakes in the latest Sega Nama live stream.
The talk on the remasters start at around 42:08, where Nagoshi is asked if there was a lot of demand for it. “There were several reasons [for doing the remasters], but how should I put it… the top reason was because they now sell overseas, such as Asia and in America and Europe where Yakuza 6 is actually hot at the moment,” said Nagoshi.
He estimates that Yakuza 6 has reached around the 800,000 to 900,000 in sales from Japan, Asia, America, and Europe.
Nagoshi added, “Yakuza used to sell by the loads in Japan and trickled in sales overseas before, but now overseas sales have reached about as much as they do in Japan.”
According to the Yakuza creator, Sega thought about doing Kiwami remakes for Yakuza 3, 4, 5 but he explains that going from a PS2 game to PS4 as a Kiwami remake leaves an impression with the big jump, however, he felt that the PS3 was still a good piece of hardware so the gap of going PS3 to PS4 would be a lot thinner and doesn’t leave as much of an impression compared to a jump from a PS2 game.
That said, if they did make them as Kiwami games, Nagoshi said that they probably could’ve, but then they would’ve felt the need to throw in new content in order to make it worth its value. Making new content meant having to spend more time on it, which would’ve caused delays for other titles such as Yakuza 6, which they didn’t want to do and decided to go with the remasters instead.
Yakuza 3 for PlayStation 4 releases in Japan on August 9, 2018. Yakuza 4’s remaster will follow in Fall 2018 and Yakuza 5 in Spring 2019. You can check out the first trailer and screenshots for Yakuza 3 in our previous report.
Published: Jun 4, 2018 02:00 pm