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Yakuza 3's Hostess Clubs Cut in the West
by Alice O'Connor, Feb 24, 2010 9:25am PSTYakuza 3 players in the west will be unable to frequent or run hostess clubs as IGN reports they're one of several elements cut from the US and European releases of Amusement Vision's Japanese mafia action-adventure to save development time.
"We took out certain bits in order to bring the game to the west in the time alloted [sic] for us to do so. The parts we ended up taking out were parts that we felt wouldn't make sense (like a Japanese history quiz game) or wouldn't resonate as much (such as the concept of a hostess club)," publisher Sega told the site.
Stereotypically frequented by businessmen, hostess clubs are an established part of Japanese culture offering the opportunity to drink, smoke, make conversation and sing karaoke with attractive young ladies in exchange for cold hard yen.
"We didn't replace the parts we took out," said the Sega representative, "but we made absolutely sure that the story continuity stayed intact so that the story experience was the same as the Japanese version and that it didn't take away the human drama so inherent to the Yakuza series."
Yakuza 3 arrives exclusively for PlayStation 3 in March, with pre-order bonuses on offer.
Comments
And yea, they did rush the localization. The game is a year old, and every week that it isn't on the shelf is filled with new games trying to outshine it. If they waited the 2 months or so that it would take to localize all the hostess clubs, their audience would have FF13 and GoW3 fresh on their minds, and it would subjectively look even uglier. I want to know more about Kazuma, so I'll take what I can get.
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Part of why I thought Yakuza was great, was because it was distinctly Japanese. I don't know how accurate it really was, but it was interesting trying to learn about this place really foreign to me. I'd imagine this would be the same reason why some people prefer fantasy RPGs, not because it resembles Southern California.
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I'm a bit bummed, but it's not like I have any real choice, do I? Sega doesn't really give a shit about the series in the West and it's pretty apparent that they're just trying to rush the localization onto shelves to try to get impulse buyers that are picking up God of War 3 and Final Fantasy XIII. Shame they didn't plan it out a bit more in advance...maybe with a few more months and an actual advertising campaign, they could have both brought it over uncut AND had some sort of awareness about it other than "oh, I think I played the shitty demo for it".
They'll probably use this game's inevitably horrible sales to justify not bringing out Yakuza 4 or Kenzan in the US without ever trying to analyze just why the game sold so poorly.
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There was a CSI episode about this sort of thing. I think they could've left it in without confusing too many of the people who'd be playing it anyway.