It’s easy to forget in 2022, now it feels like we get a new or repaired one Yakuza game every six monthsthat for a very long time this series was by MIA from the West Coast, largely due to Sega’s disastrous decision to release the original game in 2006.
Full score of Yakuza The series is Japanese as hell, from convenience stores to over-dubbed dubbing, but for the movie’s North American and European premiere, Sega made a fundamentally weird decision. is to tilt the whole experience on-axis through localization.
Voice actors like Michael Madsen, Mark Hamill and Eliza Dushku was included (at the expense of the Japanese audio track, which was completely cut), the tone of the script was changed to have a bit more street, and the whole vibe of their marketing. the game is very Grand Theft Auto-meets-Goodfellasit’s all actual gameplay – which we know now is actually an hour-long soap opera broken by throwing a bike in the guy’s face – a huge disservice.
It doesn’t work nearly as well in the West as it does in Japan and when Yakuza 2 met a similar fate (despite avoiding most of those problems, like keeping its Japanese sound) seemingly for a long time — while the sequels and Yakuza 3 was a huge success in its home market but was never released abroad — that the West blew it away, and Yakuza will be lost with us forever.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and the decision to more faithfully localize the titles paid off. Even the first two Yakuza games, so initially divisive in the West, has been remade and re-released with great success. But for some, looking back at the game’s original 2006 release on PS2, that wasn’t enough.
And so now we have Sylwahan’s Yakuza is restored The project, as the name suggests, is looking to take the original PlayStation 2 game — which you could easily argue the original is a better way to consume it — and fix it up. Not in terms of visuals or overall gameplay, we got that with Kiwamibut in terms of undoing the damage the original localization synopsis did to the game’s intended experience (I want to make it clear here that it’s an imperative from above) Yakuza than Mafia here is an error, not the work of individual localization agents or staff).
“I began Yakuza journey with the original PS2”, Sylwahan speak, “And that’s what I love, fun localization and all. But even if the person has reached the like/meme status after 15+ years, I’d prefer something less ‘out there’, so that’s my goal.
So they started making changes like removing the English dub of the PS2 game and replacing it with the original Japanese audio track (there’s no room for both, a problem that the official release also get it), cleans up a bunch of visual markers like chapter title tags, and moves subtitle positions to make them easier to read.
However, the main work appears as the game’s subtitles. Yakuza there are about 20,000 lines of dialogue, and this project edited “about 50%” of them, doing everything from “removing excessive profanity” to restoring the original character names with minor grammatical changes. such as ensuring “consistent use of honorifics”.
Here’s the trailer showing the changes in action:
The project is expected to launch by the end of this week.
