If it wasn’t for vocal fan support, I’m unsure Yakuza 5 would have seen a digital release at all. Unfortunately, Dead Souls was a commercial and critical failure in the West, and didn’t fare much better in Japan, leading Sega to cease localisation of the series for several years. He recalls working on it with a sense of admiration, like it was a time fraught with compromise that allowed him and his team to take Yakuza to creative places it had never been before. Hearing Hosokawa-san reminisce about the game’s creation is oddly sobering. Personally, it was an experience that I wouldn’t be here without.” There was so much I learned for my personal growth, even if business-wise it might not have led to much. “I learned how to manage a game and bring it through the initial stages of development and properly wrap things up for release. “ was the first game I directed and it was filled with learning experiences,” Hosakawa-san explains. Related: Life Is Strange True Colors Preview - Being Broken Is What Makes Us Human
Despite its flaws, I admire it - a notion echoed by the game’s director, Kazuki Hosokawa. That being said, it remains an enjoyable romp, retaining the lovable characters and overblown melodrama of the main games while trying and failing to take gameplay in a new direction. As you’d expect, swapping out street thugs for flesh eaters didn’t have the desired effect, and closing off the streets of Kamurocho as the infection worsened only served to highlight how empty Yakuza can feel when you take away the urban authenticity that helps it shine so brightly. Fists and kicks were swapped out for guns and grenades, with the studio jumping into a genre it previously had no experience with. Yakuza: Dead Souls was equally as unusual, building off the resurging popularity of zombies brought about by The Walking Dead with a non-canonical adventure that took existing characters and hurled them into the apocalypse. With Binary Domain, it was hurling us into the future to fight against hostile robots in an effort to save humanity.
Even today, Binary Domain is a strange departure for a studio that has cut its teeth on semi-realistic depictions of the Japanese criminal underworld. Both helmed by Ryu ga Gotoku Studio, these experimental projects toyed with existing ideas while branching out in a direction the development team had never considered before. Binary Domain and Yakuza: Dead Souls are two understated gems of the seventh console generation.
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