At the beginning of the “Yakuza Fan Meeting” stage event at Sega Fes 2019, Sega chief creative officer and Yakuza series general director Toshihiro Nagoshi commented on the new Yakuza game starring Ichiban Kasuga for PlayStation 4.

Here is Nagoshi’s comment:

Given that the game is in the action adventure genre, I’d like to change the game drastically. We’ve tried changing things in past titles, though our audiences often claimed it to be “minor changes.” This time, we want our change to feel like an online game would become from version 1.0 to 2.0, not just another big patch. This process takes time.

We released Judgment a little while ago, and that too was part of the experimentation for this change. The energy we’re pouring into this is on par with how hard we tried to make the first Yakuza. We’re looking forward to the day you can be surprised by that change.

Switching the main character from Kiryu Kazuma to Kasuga Ichiban also was a good idea for this change. If the personality differs, the objective changes, if the objective changes, the game itself changes. They speak differently, and they think and act differently.

Changing the main character would open up new paths and help change the notion of “it’s a Yakuza game right? You just walk around a city right?”,that many have.

We want to use this change of main characters in the best way possible. When it comes to the story, before we had many scene that we’re teary or made you and the main character infuriated at something. This time, we’re thinking about putting in more comedic and goofy scenes that connect into the end, which has an impact of the player’s emotions.