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How Yakuza 5 aims 'squarely at adult Japanese players'

Yakuza 5's North American release is on its way, so PlayStation's Gio Corsi talks to the series' producers to get a better idea of how it is taking direct aim at the Japanese gaming audience.

Ozzie Mejia

June 26, 2015 12:15 PM

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The fifth game in the Yakuza series has been a long time coming. The game has been in development for almost four years and was only recently announced for North America during December's PlayStation Experience event. Now the game's developers are going into more detail about what it will entail through the first of three interviews.

"It's an action adventure game, but the dramatic scenes are created by Japanese people, aimed at a Japanese audience," series director Toshihiro Nagoshi told PlayStation's Gio Corsi. "Titles created for a worldwide audience are appealing and interesting as well, of course, but there weren't many games that were aimed squarely at adult Japanese players. So it was important to me to make a game that really speaks to that market."

Nagoshi and producer Masayoshi Yokoyama go on to discuss the game's uniquely Japanese aesthetic, the game's story that spans five major Japanese cities, some of the game's other playable characters beyond Kazuma Kiryu. They also take several Twitter questions that go into the series' origins and themes.

The full interview is available below. Yakuza 5 is coming soon to PlayStation 3.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?