Yakuza
It’s easy to forget the year 2022, now that we seem to have a new or remastered Yakuza game every six months, which for a long time the series was MIA of the west coast, largely due to the disastrous decisions taken by Sega for the release of the original game in 2006.
The goal of the Yakuza series is to be Japanese as hell, from convenience stores to over-voice acting, but for the series’ debut in North America and Europe Sega took the strange decision to tilt essentially all experience on its axis. by its location.
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Voice actors such as Michael Madsen, Mark Hamill and Eliza Dushku were added (at the expense of the Japanese audio track, which was completely cut off), the tone of the script was changed to be a little more street and all The marketing atmosphere of the game was very Grand Theft Auto-meets-Goodfellas, all of whom made the game real, which as we now know is actually an hour-long soap opera broken by throwing bikes in the face of a guy, a big skinny favor.
It didn’t work as well in the West as it did in Japan, and when Yakuza 2 had a similar fate (despite avoiding most of these problems, like keeping its Japanese audio) it seemed for a long time, while the spin-offs and Yakuza 3 were a huge hit in their home market, but they were never released overseas: that the West had flown it and Yakuza would be lost forever.
Fortunately, this has not been the case, and the decision to locate the titles more faithfully has paid off. Even these first two Yakuza games, so originally divisive in the West, have been remade and re-released with great success. But for some, looking back at the original 2006 game release on PS2, that’s still not enough.
The story goes on
And now we have Sylwahan’s restored Yakuza project, which, as its name suggests, seeks to take the original PlayStation 2 game, which you could easily argue, since the original is the best way to consume it, and fix it . Not in terms of its overall image or gameplay, we’ve already done that with Kiwami, but in terms of undoing the damage that the original location summary did to the intended gaming experience (I’d like to make it clear here are the orders from the superior to make Yakuza more gangster is to blame here, not the work of the individual actors or the location staff).
“I started my trip to Yakuza with the original PS2,” says Sylwahan, “and that’s what I fell in love with, the great location and all. But even if this one has reached the status of endearing meme after more than 15 years, I would have liked something that was less “out there,” so that was my goal.
So it has been proposed to make changes such as removing the English dubbing from the PS2 game and replacing it with the original Japanese audio track (no space for both, a problem that also suffered from the official release) , tidying up a lot of visual markers. like chapter title cards and move the position of subtitles to make it easier to read.
The main work, however, is presented in the form of subtitles for the game. Yakuza has about 20,000 lines of dialogue, and this project has edited “about 50%” of them, ranging from “removing excessive vulgarity” to restoring original character names to small grammatical changes. how to ensure the “consistent use of honorifics.”
Here’s a trailer showing the changes in action:
Yakuza Restored ad trailer
We expect the project to be released later this week.