While three new installments in the franchise Yakuza, renamed “Like a Dragon” in the West, have just been confirmed on almost all platforms at the moment, the question of “almost” arises. Why is the Switch so excluded? The producer of the saga actually thinks that the machine is too family-friendly to accommodate this kind of content.
Born on PlayStation 2, the Yakuza/Ryu Ga Gotoku license is therefore closely linked to Sony. All the episodes that have since emerged are indeed playable on PlayStation consoles. In 2013, SEGA had however chosen to bring the first two episodes to Wii U, giving them a high definition treatment.
It is clear that after the lukewarm reception of these releases, Nintendo never again hosted the slightest Yakuza. But while the popularity of the Switch is well established and it doesn’t take much to make its money there, one wonders why the SEGA franchise could not invite itself there.
Yakuza on Switch: the machine would be incompatible with an “underground feeling”
To GameSpot, producer Masayoshi Yokoyama expressed his hesitation to release such a mature title on a machine mainly adopted by families.
“Do we want to release a title like this, where you walk around, where you fight against the whole world and where you do all that Yakuza stuff, on Switch?”
Our man then explains his point of view.
“We still see ourselves as night people, don’t we? We don’t want to walk around in the daytime like everyone else. For us, it’s about showing that sort of underground feeling. I think that underground feeling is what we want to do.”
We can understand the reasoning, but since money rules the world, why not retry the “experiment” conducted on Wii U and launch a few Kiwami episodes on Switch just to take the temperature? It would then be unlikely to see a reception as timid as on Nintendo’s previous home console.
Source: GameSpot