Sony’s PlayStation Blog went live last week with the inaugural segment of Sony’s Yakuza 5 developer interview series. Gio Corsi of Sony’s Third Party Productions team spoke with series director Toshihiro Nagoshi and Yakuza 5 producer Masayoshi Yokoyama this past April. The fruits of this production start with this first video.
Yakuza 5 came out in Japan in December 2012, but late in the year 2014 Sony’s Third Party Productions team announced they would be working in conjunction with SEGA to localize the game for the West.
The interview mostly focuses on broader concepts and questions designed to communicate the essence of Yakuza 5 and the franchise as a whole. Nagoshi and Yokoyama comment that Yakuza was initially designed to appeal and be easily relatable to Japanese gamers, using their own experiences and ideas of fun as a reference point. Perceiving that games designed for a Japanese audience seemed to be in the minority, the developers hope that players enjoy playing the games that SEGA enjoys creating using their strong sense of developer identity. Like its predecessor Yakuza 4, the fifth game in the series features multiple playable characters, but this game tells its story with each character’s scenario taking in place in different cities in Japan.
Some user-submitted questions that Gio Corsi took in through #Yakuza5PS on Twitter earlier in March were also fielded in this interview. The first question-and-answer deals with the uniqueness of using the yakuza as a foundation for creating games and telling a story, and the second expounds upon the developers’ vision in making each playable character’s scenario take place in a different city.
Check out the interview video below! This is the first video of three parts, so keep an eye out for the second part in the future. Yakuza 5 is scheduled to release later this year.
