Speaking to French website gameblog (by Romain Mahut) Yakuza producer Daisuke Sato shared his thoughts on changing up the system from action to RPG and the fan backlash. Bringing Ishin and Kenzan to the west in a post Ghost of Tsushima world and the possibility of a Binary Domain remaster. The best part is the entire interview has been translated in to English allowing non french speakers the ability to read through the entire thing!
The most interesting part of the interview (which is great I HIGHLY suggest reading the entire thing) is Sato-sans thoughts on bringing over the missing Yakuza Samurai games Kenzan and Ishin to the west:
Ghost of Tsushima has shown that Western players are interested in games taking place in Medieval Japan. Do you regret not releasing Kenzan and Ishin in the West? Has your stance regarding those games changed since Ghost of Tsushima’s release?
Even long before Ghost of Tsushima, I did want to release “samurai” games like Kenzan and Ishin in the West. Unfortunately, after Yakuza 0, we were very busy with remastering the numbering Yakuza titles for the PS4, so we missed the opportunity to work on some of these other games. However, if anything, Ghost of Tsushima has helped Western gamers become more interested in samurai, so I should think of it as now is a more opportune time to release these titles.
At the time of release both titles were deemed “too Japanese” to be worth bringing over to the west and add to that a very lengthy localization cycle (when Kenzan came out in Japan we didn’t have Yakuza 2 here yet and were already months in to the Playstation 3’s life cycle) it seemed like we would never get a chance to play it in English.
Sato also mentions that they prototyped Kamurocho in VR but have no plans to release anything as of yet and he lists some of his ideas of where the series could go next. There’s also some detail that at some point Yakuza: Like a Dragon had a combination of Action and RPG battle systems but the action one was removed entirely to let players focus on the RPG mechanics.