Right now, it feels like we’ve been struck by Yakuza fever. With the beloved Japanese game once spurning the West, this month sees the arrival of not one but TWO new entires in the franchise: Yakuza 0 for PC and Yakuza Kiwami 2 for PS4. But after sitting down with producer Daisuke Sato to discuss the series’ past and future it appears that a different, more post-apocalyptic future looms over the horizon.
Sega’s next game from the studio behind Kiryu’s long-running crime epic, isn’t Yakuza at all — it’s Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise. In what feels like a marriage dreamed up on anime message boards, Lost Paradise is an open-world game based on the hyper-macho and ultra-violent manga that first exploded onto Japan’s Weekly Shōnen Jump in the 1980s — brought to life by the team behind Yakuza.
Bloody faithful
“The Yakuza studio have been working more than 12 years on the Yakuza series,” Sato tells us. “We’ve been experiencing many kind of games like the mainline and spin-off titles, but it was always bound by the Yakuza universe.”
It’s not surprising that series fatigue might be setting in then, but in a spot of good timing, the team were approached by the rights holders of Buronson and Tetsuo Hara’s manga. “It’s their 35th anniversary this year,” explains Sato. “They were looking for opportunities to develop the IP with many new partnerships, from games to books.”
It’s arguably a perfect fit. Not only does warrior Kenshiro share the same Japanese voice actor as Kiryu in Takaya Kuroda (the localisation does, however, include English voice-acting), both are also the very epitome of hyper-masculinity and chivalry. Each of these anti-heroes use their strength to protect the lives of the weak and innocent against ruffians and warlords, while also facing confrontations with their own clan ‘brothers’.
The huge difference, of course, is that, despite the kind of damage that would hospitalise anyone in real life, Kiryu is essentially gaming’s Batman – he’s never canonically killed anyone. Kenshiro, on the other hand, basically bathes in blood daily. In the anime, the burly protagonist practises the deadly martial arts style ‘Hokuto Shinken’, allowing him to kill a man by hitting their bodies’ secret vital points. It’s an exceptionally gory element of the series that the developers were keen to faithfully recreate for the upcoming game.
“The battle system is unique in the way that it has to be adapted to the way Kenshiro fights,” says Sato. Whereas charging up a Heat gauge in Yakuza lets you unleash an OTT Heat move, in Lost Paradise you launch into a mini-QTE sequence of combo connections until your foe’s head swells, eyes bulging, before exploding into a pulpy mess. “It’s a bit gross,” he acknowledges, laughing through his translator.
From Kamurocho to the wasteland
This There have been other licensed games of Fist of the North Star since the days of the NES — but most never received a Western release. Before you shed any tears though, they also weren’t particularly good, offering players little more than janky beat-em-ups and banal brawlers. The only titles to receive releases in both North America and Europe, Koei Tecmo’s ‘Musou’ iteration Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage series, hold unfavourable scores on Metacritic.
Following the Yakuza template then, Lost Paradise expands beyond mindless brawling for other activities, including a mini-game where Kenshiro puts on a tux to mix cocktails in a bar featured in the game’s main hub, Eden.
Eden is, however, just one aspect of the game, which is after all set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by nuclear war. “Everything else is devastated, lacking water and food, and people have to fight to survive,” says Sato. “So around this city is a huge map of desert wasteland where you can actually explore riding in a buggy.” Apparently, the buggy can be customised while a lot of exploration and side quests will take place in these parts.
But as technically the latest of Sega’s releases, it’s perhaps jarring that it runs on last-gen tech rather than Yakuza 6’s Dragon Engine, though this is apparently down to development on the game being started much earlier.
“It was a period when we were actually still developing Yakuza 6 and the Dragon Engine was not clearly defined,” Sato explains. “We just wanted to be sure that everything would be very stable and running fine.” The upside is that the game runs at a solid 60fps, with its cel-shaded, manga-esque aesthetic meaning that Lost Paradies’s character model actually hold up better than expected.
Lost localisations
Although Lost Paradise comes packaged for the West as its own title ( and hopefully one to finally do the manga justice) it’s still essentially a Yakuza spin-off (the Japanese release has the title Hokuto Ga Gotoku, a portmanteau of the Japanese names of Fist of the North Star and Yakuza respectively).
The tragedy is that the majority of these spin-offs, notably the samurai-themed Yakuza Kenzan and Yakuza Ishin were never released outside of Japan. So what was it about a cult manga adaptation that felt like a more surefire hit for Sega, or has the newfound acclaim for the Yakuza series been a factor?
“Kenzan and Ishin were focusing on the Japanese traditional past universe – we weren’t very sure how the West would feel about it,” says Sato. “But we think Fist of the North Star is a worldwide-known IP and it’s had fans in the US and Europe for a long time. We think both Yakuza and Fist of the North Star fans have a chance to be attracted by this game.”
It’s true that Japanese-themed games were more of an anomaly a few years ago, but with the likes of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Ghost of Tsushima and Nioh 2 all appearing at E3 this year, there certainly seems to be a bigger appetite for all things samurai and ninja.
Should Lost Paradise get the international success it’s looking for, might localisations of those old Yakuza spin-offs also be reconsidered? It’s, however, a question that’s cut off by Sega’s PR faster than the ‘Atatatatatatatatata!’ of Kenshiro. You are already dead.
Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise is out on PS4 on October 4th.
