The 2010 PSP game Kurohyou: Ryu Ga Gotoku Shinshou, a spinoff of the Yakuza series, is now available to play with English subtitles thanks to a newly released fan project.
The fan group TeamK4L has released the Kurohyou English translation on its official website after delaying it out of 2022. You'll need a copy of the game to install the file on, but once that's done you'll be able to play the game and actually understand just what the heck is going on! Hooray for fans.
If you've been waiting for a long time to play Kurohyou in English, that's your cue to leave this page and go live your best life, but if you're here and you aren't as familiar with the lost Yakuza game, stick around for some context.
Kurohyou: Ryu Ga Gotoku Shinshou is a spinoff that eschews the traditional one-against-many brawling of the mainline Yakuza/Like a Dragon series for one-on-one fights similar to Def Jam Fight for NY. There's still a big, melodramatic narrative involving scheming crime families and inept law enforcement around the fictional district of Kamurocho, and the game is packed with classic Yakuza mini-games like hostess clubs, karaoke, and casino games, but the fighting is very different. Exploration is similar to Yakuza 1 and 2 where the camera is fixed in one position, transitioning into different areas of the map as you move through them.
It may not be considered one of the best Yakuza games ever, but Kurohyou was popular enough in Japan to spawn not only a 2012 sequel, which has already been translated by TeamK4L, but also a television series that aired in Tokyo in 2010.
Here's our Like a Dragon: Ishin review from earlier in the year just in case you need another reason to revisit that absolute gem of a remake.
