Like a Dragon creators won’t buckle to mainstream western tastes: ‘people start making strange things when they misunderstand what their business is supposed to be’
The Yakuza series has spawned well over a dozen games since it debuted in 2005, and I haven’t included any of the substantial remasters in that figure. As prolific as Ryu Ga Gotoku is, they’re also remarkably consistent: the same bonkers mix of melodrama and absurd humour is threaded through every one of these games, even the ones set in the 17th century.
It’s a formula that took a while to cotton on outside of Japan: it didn’t really land as a big commercial success in the west until 2015’s Yakuza 0. And that game landed loudly, despite making no overt compromises for western audiences.
“No, it won’t,” he said. “If we really wanted to make a game for overseas audiences, it would obviously be better to make a foreign protagonist and set the story overseas. But if we did that, it wouldn’t be Like A Dragon. There would be no point in us making it.”
He went on: “Instead, we have to preserve what makes us us, and communicate that to the world. If we’re not doing that, we might as well dissolve the team right now and make a totally different game.”
It’s well worth reading the full Automaton interview for some interesting—and unusually candid—insight into how and why RGG Studio makes its peculiar Japanese crime capers.