When it started out, the Yakuza series was focused on telling stories about Japan’s criminal underworld, and that was the series’ primary drive for a long time afterwards, though recent years have seen it reinvent itself. Yakuza: Like Dragon shifted its focus to telling even more personal and everyday slice-of-life stories revolving around middle-aged leading characters, something that its successor, Like Dragon: Infinite Wealth, doubled down on. And it seems that’s the direction it’ll keep heading in.
That’s as per series director Ryosuke Horii and lead planner Hirotaka Chiba, who said in a recent interview with Automaton that the Like a Dragon series, as it’s now known, is going to continue telling stories focused on “middle-aged guy things”.
“We are middle-aged guys ourselves… so I guess that’s the kind of target audience we’re going for, probably,” they said.
Horii went on to talk about how it’s this very aspect that gives the series a unique identity. “I think that this is precisely one of Like a Dragon’s selling points. In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, everything starts with three unemployed middle-aged guys being like ‘Let’s go to Hello Work.’ They have a different air about them than a group of young heroes would, complaining about back pain and the like. But this ‘humanity’ you feel from their age is what gives the game originality.”
Chiba chimed in with an example as well, pointing to a conversation in the game where a character mulls over whether or not to drink beer on account of being worried about his uric acid levels.
“For example, there’s a conversation where Adachi is conflicted about whether he should drink beer or not because he’s worried about his uric acid level,” he said. “We’re making the hearty talks of middle-aged dudes our identity, rather than youthfulness.”
Horii went on to add that though the Like a Dragon series has certainly seen an influx of new fans and demographics, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio doesn’t intend to change the way it makes its games.
“We have had a large increase in new fans, including women, which we’re truly happy and grateful for,” he said. “However, we don’t plan to do anything like deliberately changing conversation topics in order to cater to new fans. That would make us unable to keep talking about things like uric acid levels… [laughs]”
Similarly, Horii says that though the franchise has found a much larger international audience in recent years, that hasn’t impacted the way RGG Studio goes about its creative process.
“Our policy as creators has not changed,” Horii explained. “We are very grateful for the recognition we have received from overseas fans and new, younger players, but we will not change our policy of creating games, which is based on our personal ideas of what’s fun.”
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio will be announcing its next game later this month at Tokyo Game Show, so stay tuned for updates on what the developer has planned next.