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Developer RGG Studio's knack for pumping out great Yakuza games on an almost yearly basis is once again getting attention, especially in an era where big-budget sequels can take more than half a decade to make.
Sega and RGG this week announced that the sixth Yakuza game in five years, Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, would be releasing next February. That means the swashbuckling action spin-off is coming out just a year after the last mainline entry, this year's Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, proving that Yakuza fans, as always, stay well fed.
Baldur's Gate 3 publisher director Michael 'Cromwelp' Douse reacted to the news, calling it some "genius sh*t." He points to how each game in the series iterates on the last, instead of throwing all the work away and building something new. "Fractal design," he tweets. "Persistence where it matters, renewal where it makes sense. Economically solid, but also in terms of managing a community it’s huge. Sports games been doing it for years. Unsure as to why more don’t."
Call of Duty, Just Dance, and some sports games aside, the days of annual series are pretty much over. There were a good few years where we'd get a new Halo and Assassin's Creed annually, but ballooning game budgets and gamer expectations that every new entry should be an 'evolution' have put a stop to that.
Rather than rebooting everything from scratch after each game, RGG Studios is known for re-using assets, locations, minigames, and there are even some animations that haven't changed in years. Studio director Masayoshi Yokoyama recently talked about how other series - like GTA or Assassin's Creed - practically "reinvent a large portion of the game" in between instalments, but Yakuza's secret ingredient is how it iterates on what came before.
Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, for example, is building off of the action combat the series was once known for and it's re-using the main Hawaiian town that hosted the majority of Infinite Wealth's events. Oh, it is adding a jump button for the first time in the series, though. That could be huge, genuinely... Well, mostly for the Yakuza minigame freaks among us.
