Today was a momentous day for the Yakuza franchise. Yakuza 0 made its presence known at E3 2016, and we can hope to see more of the franchise in gaming conventions across the West in the future.
The YakuzaFan tumblr account was able to capture today’s segment of the PlayStation LiveCast that featured an interview with Yakuza series producer and SEGA’s Chief Creative Officer Toshihiro Nagoshi, and Atlus Producer Sam Mullen. It’s nice that Nagoshi could be involved with the interview via Sam’s prompting.
This is a good overview video to watch if you want a refresher course on the concept of the game’s setting and gameplay. It’s set against the backdrop of a live demo of Kazuma Kiryu’s scenario campaign. The demo shows off Kiryu’s fighting styles, a subquest, and the Telephone Club minigame. The player is also pretty good at the game, in case anyone is worried about bad gameplay.
Secondly, we have a Q&A session featuring Toshihiro Nagoshi as respondent and Sam Mullen as translator. Slightly longer than the previous video, for the most part it manages to cover ground that isn’t addressed in the same manner as the LiveCast video. Some topics addressed include Goro Majima, the development team’s approach to world-building, and the evolution of the Yakuza series and its characters over time. This Q&A was published to GameSpot’s YouTube account.
The last one-and-a-half minute features a nice thank-you message from Nagoshi to the audience! Hopefully the West may see more of him in the future, if we are fortunate!
Credit to the YakuzaFan tumblr for highlighting to these two videos (and for publishing the first video), and credit for this article’s featured image belongs to the GameSpot video posted within this article.
He was in Los Angeles and in a few hours he was in a japanese live stream, like the boss he is lol