SEGA has finally confirmed that the popular Japanese video game "Yakuza 0" will be coming to the West in early 2017. The Western release of the video game will also have different changes to make it more convenient for the western audience.
Associate localization producer Scott Strichart said on the official blog of PlayStation that the video game will be coming to North America and Europe, and it will be released on January 24, 2017. This will be a prequel to all of previous video games of the popular Japanese gang series.
The Yakuza with a heart of gold protagonist Kazuma Kiryu will be 20 years old in this game, and he is still new to the world of the Japanese Yakuza gang. Goro Majima, who is known to be the guy with a snake-skin jacket, will be a suave and calculated owner of a cabaret in this prequel. He also wants to go back being a Yakuza member.
Strichart said that their localization team will be stepping it up to another level with this video game. One of the changes that fans of this video game will notice is that all of the chapter titles, character introductions, opponent names, and on-screen directions will be in English.
The localization producer confirmed that the words on those segments will not be in kanji and will not be subtitled anymore. He promised that players will feel the difference when the fans play the video game, even if it looks like a small change to them.
Another change that the players will find out is that the team will be maintaining the general-use honorifics in the English script, Strichart revealed. The original Japanese voices will be intact to make it more authentic for the players when they play the game. He explained that they wanted to bring the subtitles that the English players will be reading closer to what the characters are saying in a scene.
Strichart said that the use of honorifics will play an important role in understanding the respect the characters have for each other. He believes that this gives the story more depth when players view the scenes.
The team also got the chance to get this game back to the start, since this is the prequel of the series, Strichart said. This will show how a power struggle inside a criminal organization will look like.
According to the official website of the video game, the story will have two locations, which are Tokyo and Osaka. Tokyo in this story will be the entertainment capital of the East, while Osaka will be the entertainment capital of the West in Japan.
The website also revealed that the video game will have substories that have a total number of 100. This will also show cameos of some familiar faces from the game series during their younger days. It will also have different minigames for players to try out like the Coliseum, Shogi, bowling, and many more.
Check out the video game's Legends trailer video below: