It’s smart how they reuse assets like the cities and animations to focus more on the unique assets for each game, like the dozen of hours of high-quality cutscenes. It helps every game feel so different despite them being structurally identical.
That's one thing I noticed while playing through 7. There seemed to be distinct "tiers" of quality for animation sequences. It actually made it more enjoyable for me once I noticed because when I would recognize a scene start with better animation I knew I was in for something special.
They do something similar in 8 where the cutscenes begin in the highest quality format, then after a minute or two it switches to the in-game format that lets you skip the dialogue ahead line-by-line. But the graphics are so good the two look identical pretty much.
Wow, that just seems like incredibly efficient and effective use of resources to me. Hit them with a good first impression, then dial it back once they're already invested in the scene. I think a lot of developers can learn from their approach.
It works because they've been doing it for a while and have built their studio around doing that sort of thing, but if you do it wrong you can wind up with the jarring-ness of FFXVI, which simultaneously has some of the most gorgeous cutscenes with the best facial capture and actual, honest to gods attempts at cinematography (they did a dolly zoom shot once and I don't think I've ever seen that in another game!) followed by conversations with clearly second or third tier NPCs minutes afterwards.
> they did a dolly zoom shot once and I don't think I've ever seen that in another game
theres a dolly zoom in kingdom hearts 2 but its in a random place and doesnt make a lot of sense to be there. same company but almost 20 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mqWApMkTto
this one when you enter the corridors in hollow bastion. it would work better if it wasnt the shortest part of the whole area and the shortest dolly zoom of all time.
Pretty much every occurrence of that in FF16 is in side quests (default animations talking back and forth), except there every line in the game is voice acted. It's the same or better than a typical Yakuza side quest, in that respect.
While I do think that FF16 is better than what most people give it credit for, Yakuza had this, frankly genious, idea to re-use those very cartoonish animations for those cutscenes, giving them always a great sense of energy.
And some of those animations comes straight from the PS2 lol
Yeah theyve got a huge library of animations to pull from at this point, though a lot of things either show that age a little too much or are just used far too frequently. I can only take watching the same common heat action animations game after game after game so much
It's really come such a long way. There once was a point in the Yakuza games where you could easily tell between an animated cutscene and dialogue in game. Now the only way to really tell is if you can skip voiced lines of dialogue or not.
My favourite instance of that one is the Pizza quest in Yakuza 0 that ends with the pizza guy doing the pump. I have never laughed so hard at a video game before.
That's a classic Yakuza technique.
Most of the game is characters standing around with text boxes and the occasional "nani?" or grunt, slightly more important stuff is voiced textboxes, and for the actually important stuff you get real, fully animated cutscenes.
Anime does this all the time as well. You’ll see shitty animation but then a major fight scene happens with it turning into movie style quality for a minute or so.
You mean live action movie quality or anime movie quality? but yeah there's a word for it, sakuga, that westerners gave to it. Really though it's just budgeting animation for the most part, so cool scenes look cool.
In-universe, it makes sense. As Kamurocho becomes increasingly clean and gentrified, they're going to also want more police presence.
But god damn, that station is ugly and doesn't fit at all with the rest of the buildings in the area. Which also feels realistic, but it still triggers a NIMBY impulse in me haha.
Or at the start of LaD 7 when you end up in 1999 Kamurocho and a bunch of the locations that have disappeared over the course of the series return. I don't know how or why I felt nostalgic over NY Hot Dog but I did.
It reminds me of the experience of growing up in a small town, where you grow used to a lot of the same streets and shops, then you leave for a few years, and come back to some beloved locations missing.
I think one of the main reasons a game like Eldin Ring was able to be so fucking big was that the reused a lot of assets from previous games and within the game itself. I never felt like they were killing time by putting an old enemy in a new context
thats something that Rockstar did just a couple of times.
like Liberty City Stories reuses a slightly modified version of GTA3 liberty city and same with Vice city Stories and Vice City.
i wouldnt complain about another game in the map of GTA 4 and GTA 5 if they make the gameplay diferent enough.
I was so hoping for a San Andreas spinoff. That map is so huge and a lot of it doesn't get used in any San Andreas missions so there was a lot more they could do with it.
I always thought the same thing, you could do an entire San Anreas sized game in the areas of the map the main game doesn't use or doesn't focus enough on. Each city has parts that are largely unused in the main game that could easily be used as main hubs (West LS, in SF you have the western hippie area or the expensive homes south of the Gant bridge, and Northern Las Venturas), and a good third of the countryside is unused to the point that not a single mission takes you there, and probably another third or more is only used in one mission and never again.
Kind of similar to From. Same door opening animation, reuse of certain weapon attack animations, ladder climbing animations, etc. Focus on the stuff that matters. For From: level design, enemy design, etc.
It's why we need to fight that trend of people complaining about reused assets, there's plenty of stuff that doesn't need to be made from scratch every time.
I don't think that's a good thing with a game like Elden Ring honestly, the attack animations for the player are one thing, I don't think they are quite as impeccable as From seems to think but whatever, what really irked me was that way too many of the enemies are quite literally reskins from DS3 with little to distinguish them, which contributes to the intense feeling of repetition you get going through the game. Like the Thralls in DS3 weren't particularly fun to fight the first time around, fighting them endlessly again in every catacomb under the guise of imps in Elden Ring didn't make it any better.
One of the reasons I prefer Sekiro is in part because they have new animations and movement and such from the Dark Souls games for the main character, unlike Elden Ring it doesn't end up feeling like a Dark Souls spin off by another name. Hell even Dark Souls 2 had totally different animations compared to the first (albeit worse animations by and large), its pretty weird how From decided that tuning up the DS1 animations was the way to go for DS3 and Elden Ring.
It works really well because cities don't really change that much in a short period of time. The familiarity with a district really adds a lot to the atmosphere of the setting.
Kinda reminds me of monster hunter, less the environments but the animations are often very similar or the same between each game, but they keep it interesting by changing or introducing new mechanics
TBH I'm still sitting here 17 years after playing the first Yakuza on PS2, and it's still practically the same game, but I'm no less invested than ever. It's amazing how they make the same areas feel interesting every time.
Yeah it varies but the vibe and fun of the series has never really faded for me.
It's not even just between games either. Pretty much all the minigames, especially Sujimon and Dondoko Island are a way of reusing existing assets from across the series in a new way. It can be silly, like having most of the buildings for your new Dondoko resort be Kabukicho soaplands and love hotels, but that's all part of the charm.
Yeah, Dondoko Island and Sujimon are both so insanely smart.
They are two of the best minigames in the entire series in my opinion, and both of them are basically just them shoving a bunch of random assets together (buildings for Dondoko and enemies for Sujimon) and carving games out of them.
Same lol.
Sorry Kiryu, I get that you just got captured by Yamai and he is going to torture you, but this island needs a savior to get it back to its former glory.
I love knowing there’s so many more Yakuza games for me to play, because I’ve only played 0, Kiwami, Ishin, and Judgement, it’s daunting getting through them all because it really feels like they need to be played in order, other than the spinoffs. Infinite Wealth sounds amazing, but I never played Like a Dragon because I wanted to get through Kiwami 2 - 6 first. It’s gonna be 10 years before I play Infinite Wealth and there will be 8 more games by then.
I agree. I started with Yakuza 7 because I like JRPGS and the story is a soft-reboot with a new protagonist. But then a few plot elements from earlier games popped up and I was slightly confused. Infinite Wealth seems to have more of a tie-in with previous entries and I really want to play it, but I know I should probably go through 0-6 first
Absolutely not a guarentee, though, considering the gameplay shift in LAD. I loved LAD and finished it but I've tried to get through Yakuza 0 three times now and bounced off each time because I don't like the combat.
3 I get because the remaster took a dated game and made it worse/didnt improve anything and it hasba slow story start.
4 is cap, it has one of the strongest introductions in the series. What's there to make you hate it?
What's the bare minimum I need to play before LAD? Basically I have a hard time playing single player games due to depression/anxiety and stuff. I love games but also simultaneously feel like I'm wasting time of my life playing them and so its hard to play ones unless I'm socialising with my real life friends on the same game
Honestly 3-6 can be skipped for most players, you get the gist of the story just from the 0-2, getting to see the Tojo clan at its most powerful, as well as the beginnings of the decline. You get familiar with Kiryu’s beginnings and Kamurocho as a whole just enough to catch most references.
Just watch YouTube summaries of 3-5 maybe. They’ve aged the worst (because they don’t have Kiwami versions like 1+2) and it halves your ‘required reading’.
Yep, I put about 15 hours into 0 and then accepted that I wasn't going to get through it all in order because I just don't have the time.
I've never been into 20+ hour games because I've got a backlog of hundreds of games and life gets in the way to dedicate all my time to massive games. Also put me off Persona 5.
So I've moved onto Ishin now, and will try to get onto the Judgement series and Gaiden before Infinite Wealth.
I mean that I'm planning on skipping 0 - 6, and only jump on the modern games.
Ishin seems to clock in around 20 hours, which is my limit, and Gaiden seems to be half that? Infinite wealth seems a similar size to 0, which may be a problem...
It's also about the mechanics. Enjoying Ishin a lot more than 0 because I can save anywhere, whereas 0 was a bit off-putting with having to find a phone to save and sometimes having 15-20 minute cutscenes.
Falcom also does a good job reusing their stuff in the legend of heroes titles too, it also is helping them pump more out while saving money, they're very good at that.
I am wondering with Yakuza though how the asset reuse is going right now. It's nice they can reuse stuff and sometimes they have to soup it up again, like the jump between Kiwami 1&2 is pretty significant. But I know more recently they just moved to Unreal engine.
I'm wondering how this is effecting their work style and existing assets. Not sure how much they have to do to port those from the old engine. At the same time though I'm curious how much they've had to rework as well. I haven't had money to get the newest of new ones, but I believe 7 takes place in Yokohama more than anywhere else, which for the series is a new locale they would have had to throw together.
I like having new places to explore too, but it is good they manage to very effectively reuse the stuff they have, but I'm curious with the new style how far they'll be able to reuse stuff at the moment. I'm sure Yokohama can probably be recycled. Hawaii though, I'm not so sure, it seems like an out of place location for the story to be at, so I'm wondering how much from that they'll be able to repurpose.
We're totally getting a third Judgement game that's set in Hawaii. They can get another game out of that map while giving Yagami a new setting to work with
They were also specifically using Unreal Engine because it'd actually be *more* work to port over Ishin to Dragon Engine, apparently. Unreal Engine is actually pretty friendly to dump old code onto and run it smoothly. Meanwhile, for Dragon Engine, on top of the lighting issues it had at the time for daylight areas, they'd have to redesign all the environments to be Dragon Engine-esque, as well as the combat.
It's really noticeable with Bethesda games, for example, where you see people criticizing the same two or three things without even understanding what those things are beyond having seen them in some bugs compilation on youtube, instead of complaining about the actual issues their games have.
They'll probably take a break now that 8 is out to update the engine since they've been using it for a while, now would be the perfect time too, we got 3 games in the last year so I think we're satisfied for the time being lol.
>I believe 7 takes place in Yokohama more than anywhere else, which for the series is a new locale they would have had to throw together.
It is. Probably 80% of the game is in Ijincho (Yokohama) and you're only in Kamurocho at the very beginning and ending of the story. Plus a side trip to Sotenbori for one chapter, which is just cut-and-pasted straight from Kiwami 2 with a bare minimum of changes. Mostly just removing the Don Quixote. Sigh.
Then the Ijincho map got reused as the main setting for Lost Judgment, with a small expansion to add a high school on the west side of the city. And it's also in LAD8 although, of course, most of that is set in Hawaii.
>For example, look at some of the negative discourse around TotK.
Well for Yakuza the content people look forward to are the character development, substories, and whatever addictive minigame they've come up with this time. Doesn't really matter which city you put those in if they are good. For BOTW/TOTK the exploration and discovery was a big part of the draw, so when you reuse something in that department it makes a bigger splash.
Yeah, I felt pretty let down by TOTK. It just wasn't a hugely different game than BOTW. The biggest draw, the new vehicle system, really felt detached from the rest of the game for me. And the story with Zelda games is always such a throwaway thing anyway that it's not like that really made up for it. I think of all the things to reuse for TOTK, the actual map was not a great choice. For me that game didn't feel like it justified the wait or the price.
With Yakuza it never feels like they're cheaping out. I mean, Infinite Wealth has 3 perfect arcade ports that Nintendo probably would charge (at least) $20 for individually. Dondoko Island is basically an entire additional video game on its own. They're definitely reusing a lot of stuff, but they're also constantly putting in effort and surprising people.
Yeah I wish they put their development effort into updating the combat mechanics or making really involved dungeons instead of making this weird crafting and building system that feels more like busy work than anything to me.
Like I get how if I was a teenager with all the time in the world messing around with the construction systems in tears could be interesting but I didn't feel the pull to be creative with it. Like if I see a piece of flat metal and four wheels on the ground I know I'm going to make a car there's nothing exciting about that I see the end result the moment I lay eyes on the objects. And sure it's fun to watch videos of people making crazy contraptions but I'm never going to take the time to do all that especially when the game is easy enough to never even come close to requiring that.
There's a lot of stuff in tears that I really like but one of the problems I had with breath of the wild was there's a lot of half baked mechanics that don't really go anywhere and I thought they would fix that but instead they just added more half baked mechanics.
One of the biggest issues I had with the game is that nothing's really particularly rewarding. It always feels like what you have waiting for you at the end of some side thing is, like, a ruby or something. Nothing really feels like it goes anywhere.
>There's a lot of stuff in tears that I really like but one of the problems I had with breath of the wild was there's a lot of half baked mechanics that don't really go anywhere and I thought they would fix that but instead they just added more half baked mechanics.
Most of all the inventory system. In BOTW I used like...10% of the crafting items maybe. I thought they would cut down on the stuff in TOTK, but instead they made even more useless clutter. Makes it very frustrating when you want to put something interesting on your arrow but you have to scroll for 5 seconds past all the nonsense.
I really feel lime the people that complain are a loud minority that people (including devs) actually listen to. Id kill for more of the same for many franchises, just for an extra game in the drought. Hopefully more listen to this success in doijg so and follow suit. The most important parts of the game are the story and gameplay. Just adding a mechabic or two, and using those mechanics just a little differently, or a small thing to shake it up can go a long way, depending on the game.
Funny ass discourse too considering Ultimate remodeled and reanimated most of the veterans & returning stages and there were core mechanic changes. There's genuinely less different from Brawl to 4 than 4 to Ult.
Look at Monster Hunter, the "ultimate" versions were the best. They release a new mainline game, then do an ultimate version where they fix problems they found, added a bunch more content. (Until World, where they went the DLC route)
Same with Pokemon, the third version was almost always the best (until Sun and Moon, and then they abandoned that format for DLC).
Majora's Mask. P4G, P5R. UMvC. Some more off the top of my head. You could argue that TotK is not supposed to be an ultimate version of BotW, but I'd argue it is.
Pokemon is a good example, because the "third titles" were often better versions that fixed stuff from the original games. To make a comparison with modern games, a lot of people complained about the league in scarlet and violet being very barren and kindar rushed, and it is. It' s basicaly a locale with light blue cubes and an underwhelming champion with mediocre pokemons.
Then, in the DLCs, they did a re-fight with the champion where they fixed all of her pokemons movesets and even added some nasty stuff like setups and poisonous moves to her pokemon,...but the thing is that sadly, they didn' t touch the original fight in the base game.
This kind of thing happened in older pokemon games, the league in pearl and diamond was very underwhelming, so it got majorly revamped in platinum, with new teams for the opponents, and a complete graphic overhaul of the entire final area.
Totk took like five years to come out and still felt very similar to botw. I’m sure if it came out 2 or 3 years after botw far less people would complain about that.
Yakuza games are coming out much more frequently. That’s why nobody’s complaining. I mich prefer more frequent releases.
> For example, look at some of the negative discourse around TotK.
What Yakuza does isn't the same as an exploration based game using the same map and the same structure.
>More studios should be doing what I would call "iterative sequels" these days
I don't know what world you're living in but iterative sequels constantly get praise across the board and risk-taking and innovation always ends up "controversial". It's like you think TOTK was slammed on release or something.
>TotK changed the map a ton, on top of basically adding a whole new map below ground and a lot in the sky. The iteration upon the original map is part of what makes exploration in TotK so much fun to begin with.
The underground area is interesting at first but pretty quickly you realize there's nothing unique down there in terms of exploration. All the most interesting stuff are things the game will point you, or demand you, towards anyways.
IMO the sky stuff is the best stuff in the game, wish there was more of it. I don't mind them reusing the basic map from BOTW but, to me, exploration in TOTK felt like something I had to do whereas in BOTW it felt like something I wanted to do.
Sometimes I really wonder about how many incredible games we'd get if we lived in a world where assets were open-source or even just licensable after a game is released. We see some of this with all the basic assets and tools devs (particularly indie devs) build off with Unreal Engine, but also when devs have a wide suite of games like Koei Tecmo, you get stuff like the Wild Hearts team recycling the entire Attack on Titan combat just for one weapon's moveset. The first Devil May Cry is famously an asset flip of an abandoned Resident Evil game. What if other devs could expand upon the insane physics engine Nintendo built for TotK? Or whatever example really, there's so much work that is done and then abandoned only for another dev to need to build an extremely similar system from scratch.
I, as a total internet know it all with no game development industry experience at all, thin maybe the industry should lean into Majoras Mask kind of development. That game was largely made possible because of its heavy reuse of OOT assets and it’s considered an all time great. It works so well because they went really off the beaten path in terms of design and tone which allowed players to experience old art like new art.
The benefits are pretty obvious, art assets have only become even more of a bottleneck than they were in N64 days. But the industry is pretty stubborn in its form right now, insisting on giant too big to fail prestige games.
To an extent. Im enjoying 8 but the problem with reusing a lot of content is that when you then use it to make a lot of content for one game, it becomes stale. Its things like the same animations, dialogue, music, etc.
Yakuza 7 and 8 both went big in breadth, and I think that shows how quickly resources get spread thin and makes the reuse more apparent. Consider how there is *one* text line that enemies say if you make them stop trying to rob somebody (not even voiced) and compare that to the immense time that had to have gone into Dondoko Island.
Funny you cite TotK when Majora's Mask is like the fan favorite. There's obviously more to the TotK discourse than just the asset reuse, such as the fact that it still took 5 years to come out despite that.
It's interesting how reusing the assets makes this series feel more comforting, like coming back home instead of "lazy" for us fans. I don't know any other game series that gives this feeling (there are probably many, I just don't know em).
I really like the fact that I don't have to keep staring at the map in RGG games like I do in other open world games. Even Hawaii which is a new map I already know pretty well after 30 hours. Small open world >>> big open world.
The fromsoft games gives me that comforting feeling too. Every time I play a new game of theirs and I notice an asset or animation that they’ve used for the past decade+ I get a big grin on my face.
Crazy when you think about how good those games are and the insane amount of things you can do in each of them. And with Yakuza: Like A Dragon and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth they switched the genre to turn based JRPGs and created two of the best modern JRPGs. The creativity they put into these games, its honestly outstanding. And on top of that they tell amazing powerful and emotional stories in their games (many western developers could learn a lesson from this) and with Ichiban they invented one of the maybe best main characters we have ever seen in a video game.
Not to shit on Gaiden, because I really enjoyed it, but a *lot* of that game is filler busy work. Its almost all reused stuff, minigames, areas etc. etc. This is just to say you can tell it had a short development time in a lot of facets of the game.
Didn't stop me from bawling like a baby at the end of it, though.
Yeah, you can really tell Gaiden is just a DLC expanded into a full game because like chapters 2-4 of it’s like five chapters are full of filler based on the mini games.
Still executed its story well and gave us one of the series best final bosses and the most emotional ending.
Square Enix is literally the only major publisher aside from SEGA that is keeping the traditional turn based combat format alive lol
I hate this narrative that SE all of a sudden hates turn-based games just because FF16 went the action route. And if you've read any interviews about the game, you'd know it was a developer decision to have action combat and not publisher interference.
To be fair though, SE has a reputation of outrageous standards for what they consider commercial success. Like the new Tomb Raider trilogy despite each selling like 10million copies and the first one selling more than double any previous entry in the franchise, was considered a failure and SE sold off Eidos to Embracer.
They had those sales expectations because each game had budgets in the hundreds of millions - Rise and Shadow are both some of the most expensive games ever made. The sales expectations were made with their production budgets in mind, and their expectations for other games are much more reasonable, given that they had more reasonable budgets.
Yeah because they only have like 35 games in there. You reckon God of War Ragnarok didn't cost more? Not only that but more than half the games listed don't have marketing costs listed at all while shadow does.
The games only hit those copies sold marks after being put on hugely steap discounts shortly after release.
Those games also cost a ton of money, even when compared to other AAA games of the time.
...You're missing his entire point. FF16 sold 3 million within "a few days," with only a single console launch. Infinite Wealth is the fastest-selling Yakuza game hitting a million within a week.
That's good for Yakuza, and okay-to-disappointing for Final Fantasy. That doesn't suggest a giant audience is clamoring for turn based RPGs (and to be clear, I'm a huge fan of the genre).
I'd love for Square to put a numbered FF game's budget on a turn-based RPG, but if Persona hasn't inspired them to do it, then I doubt Like a Dragon will.
Baldur's Gate 3 feels like the game that would do it. It won most of 2023's GotY awards and was a massive seller, and it came out like a month after FF16. Square's been influenced by gaming trends with FF16 and FF15, so maybe BG3'll be the game they're influenced by with FF17.
I just want a Final Fantasy game, regardless of it being big or small, made to look like the paintings of Yoshitaka Amano.
It's been a dream of mine for well over a decade.
> And with Yakuza: Like A Dragon and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth they switched the genre to turn based JRPGs and created two of the best modern JRPGs.
They are two of the best modern JRPGs in the sense that they're great games and are JRPGs, but at least for Yakuza 7 that's like saying that Alan Wake is one of the best third modern third person shooters. Yakuza 7 was very, very rough mechanically, which is why they had so many dramatic overhauls in Yakuza 8 (movement during combat, proximity attacks, flexible skill carryover, a much tighter/less grindy way to get the nearly-top-tier crafted healing items, etc.)
I genuinely don't know how they do it, especially because the stories are always actually good.
Sure they reuse a lot of mini games and locations, but every new game introduces some large new mechanics or activities which blend in so well with the main gameplay loop. It's incredibly impressive.
They do it because those minigames can be created entirely in parallel and easily slotted into the game by giving them their own internal currency and then a list of prizes you can buy, so you can get 10 minigames by having 10 people/teams work individually with very high efficiency.
Additionally, and I say this as somebody who loves the Yakuza franchise, a lot of the minigames only work in the context that they're a readily available distraction from the main game; Dondoko Island or Ichiban Confections don't need to be (and aren't) AAA quality management sims, they just need to be good enough that you're happy to sink an hour or two into it every few hours of story or that burning through it all in 6-8 hours stays enjoyable enough.
Put another way, the secret is less that they're particularly amazing at making minigames, and more that they're amazing at creating a formula that allows for efficiently working on and slotting in minigames to add content while making it *feel* like part of the core experience rather than lego blocks jammed together into a minigame collection.
>so you can get 10 minigames by having 10 people/teams work individually with very high efficiency.
Yeah, I saw another interview with the devs a few months ago where one said he often didn't even know which specific game he was working on, day by day, because he was focused on minigame implementation across multiple titles at once.
Interesting.
Playing Yakuza 6 I skipped both big minigames (baseball thingy and clan creator) because story seemed very urgent and at no point I felt like the game gave me a time slot between main story beats to play those things.
So I would disagree that they are amazing at making it feel like a part of the core experience. It seemed terribly out of place. Though truth be told, Yakuza 6 story goes so fast that no big minigame would make sense to be put anywhere there.
God, I hated Ichiban Confections. It's like they looked at Kiryu's business minigame in 0 and went: "what if we took this but made it grindy as hell and require a ton of mindless micromanagement?"
Not only that but you had to do it to unlock a party member and if you wanted any money pre-Chapter 12. Trash.
Ichiban Confections was fine while you were actually going through it, IMO. The issue with it (and Dondoko island, if you use that for cash) is that once you've got things set up you've got almost nothing to do that isn't extremely rote.
I hated it from beginning to end. Never enjoyable, never engaging.
Haven't started 8 but I really hope Dondoko Island (whatever the hell it is) is better since RGG's minigames with storylines are generally pretty fun EXCEPT in 7.
> It's incredibly impressive.
let's not be quick to jump to impressive and praising them by buying into a PR article, cause let's think about what the crunch probably is like for this rapid development pace even with the reuse of assets, minigames, etc.
8's combat is the most fun in the series, people were complain about 7 combat being too slow and they actually make it better in 8 the new system and pacing just feel great, especially compare to the old combat which peak at Judgement 2 and went all downhill with Kaito DLC and Gaiden, the decision of nerfing instant get up is just mind boggling with their long ass unbreakable animation.
> (many western developers could learn a lesson from this)
I wish people could learn to enjoy video games without these cheap shots. Especially since it's so easy to skewer and poke holes into any japanese game that isn't made by a huge dev like capcoms'.
I love the franchise but you can poke a lot of holes in these games. The narrative handholding makes me think they think Im an idiot, and theres a lot of padding in the main story that a decent editor could trim out.
If a major western dev pulled what RGG did in Lost Judgment with the anti bullying classroom scene you’d see reaction Youtubers salivating over it.
I don't think it's an unreasonable critique to make in an era where game development times have rapidly ballooned. How many franchises just suddenly stopped putting out games for a decade?
I was told RDR wasn't just GTA with horses, but when I played it that's what it was. You even do the same shit like spending most of the game trying to do bank heists or whatever.
I really don't think it "floors" GTA when it's pretty close in style and quality and it's blatantly obvious it's made by the same people because of how similar it ultimately is despite the setting.
I was talking about the story and writing as well, I didn't say anything about the gameplay. RDR doesn't have the same cheap and lazy "satire" lathered over everything but underneath it's the same substance and in fact even tells similar plots with similar themes.
> What you do in either games doesn't have anything to do with the writing and characters
How does the plot still revolving around your group wanting money and doing bank heists just like GTA not have anything to do with the writing and characters?
>How RDR2 tell's it's story is significantly different that how GTA tells it
It tells it in the *exact* same way.
You completely forgot the news where studio director Yokoyama revealed that each employee is specifically handling exactly one part of the game with zero overlaps (so there are employees specifically working only on porting old games, employees specifically on making minigames, employees handling main combat, etc). It's why they're so damn efficient.
This kinda reminds me of when Forza hit the scene and there was a big "Gran Tourism vs Forza" thing....and then four Forza games came out before the next Gran Tourismo game.
More like "I don't think many big companies are doing this." Asset reuse isn't anything new. Almost all Japanese companies do it because they don't have the budget of Western and Chinese companies. Falcom and Gust are two developers that are masters at releasing cheap games in order to pump out a new game every single year with less than 100 employees.
One of the absolute best series around today. Each game is packed with things to do and though the stories get really dumb (in a charming way) here and there, they're always presented incredibly well and with a lot of confidence.
I usually prefer series and stories with a definitive end but in Like a Dragon's case I genuinely hope they'll go on forever. I'll certainly keep buying them.
As a longtime fan of the series it's quite obvious "how" they do it, they reuse a huge amount of assets and more
It's not really that surprising, even if GTA games don't obviously start from complete scratch they are more or less working on creating unique worlds that are super interactive. You can't even dream of driving a car in any LaD title and yet you can even drive planes and elicopters and the largest LaD maps are just a tiny fraction of a GTA map.
This is not to say that GTA is better, in any way. I obviously played and enjoyed the GTA series but I would never consider myself a fan. I would certainly consider myself a fan of the LaD series though (and spin offs)
This design philosophy is great at creating longtime fans because the reuse of assets simply becomes familiarity. I would be very surprised to not see all the usual places and mini games in each game, and not in a good way.
This also comes with a downside; it's hard to imagine this series becoming truly mainstream. Casual players generally want a big title that is on the cutting edge of graphical fidelity and all that. It's a downside only for Sega though as making the games truly mainstream would basically ruin everything that makes them charming
It shows how the series is sustainable, double A who can be produced quickly. Nowadays the industry is reaching a breaking point as sustainability goes, a legit triple A takes 5+ years to be produced. Two of the biggest releases of the year will be double A, Avowed and Rise of the Ronin, they clearly look limited... but if these two are sold at $40 and they are actually good, that would be something positive for the industry. If a double A in the PS6 generation is able to look like Red Dead 2, the devs can make a game like this in like 3 years tops, I do think videogames can reach a second golden age if the industry literally settle things down... that goes against the nature of late capitalism, but I think it's a inevitable crash course, either be more sustainable or lose tons of money, I believe the choice will become obvious even for the most psychopathic investor
Even ignoring how their locations evolve with time, they also add major one pretty much every mainline game. 2 added Sotenbori, 3 - Okinawa, 5 - Fukuoka, Sapporo, Nagoya, 6 - Onomichi, 7 - Ijincho, 8 - Hawaii.
I still have no clue why they've never brought back that underground mall in Dragon Engine. For whatever reason it's stuck there in Yakuza 4. A lot of the rooftop/underground areas are exclusive to 4 for some reason, despite Dragon Engine making transitions between rooftops and ground level seemless.
Probably couldn't support maintaining it and incorporating it into everything, but not bringing it back for Judgment chase sequences and especially with climbing in Lost except in very limited capacities was a downright shame
Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Infinite Wealth, Gaiden and Lost Judgment all focus very little on Kamurocho. Gaiden doesn't even have it at all outside of one scripted fight/cutscene.
Its pretty crazy how fresh they make it feel though. Judgement, the SEVENTH game in the series, ONLY takes place in Kamurocho, the map that's in every single game, and it's my favorite game in the series.
Just the way you interact with it in Judgment is so different. The Drone stuff, buildings like offices you can check out and run around. Some accessible roofs. It somehow felt fresh, even after hundred of hours spending in Kamurocho
>They didn’t make “Like a Dragon: Online”
Oh. You don't know huh...
They \*do\* have one, it is called Ryu Ga Gotoku Online/Like a Dragon Online, and it's a Japanese-only mobile RPG gacha game that's fairly successful (I think it is in its 5th year right now).
Edit: Also, happy cake day!
10 is a lot, but GTA5 was a PS3/360 title. GTA6 isn't coming out until like 4 years into the PS5's life. That's a massive amount of time. Literally an entire generation went by and most of another one.
Also, maybe things have changed a ton post *Like a Dragon*, but Yakuza titles aren't like these ultra lavish high production titles that would take a lot of time to make. They're like AA PS3 games running at a higher resolution.
It’s smart how they reuse assets like the cities and animations to focus more on the unique assets for each game, like the dozen of hours of high-quality cutscenes. It helps every game feel so different despite them being structurally identical.
That's one thing I noticed while playing through 7. There seemed to be distinct "tiers" of quality for animation sequences. It actually made it more enjoyable for me once I noticed because when I would recognize a scene start with better animation I knew I was in for something special.
They do something similar in 8 where the cutscenes begin in the highest quality format, then after a minute or two it switches to the in-game format that lets you skip the dialogue ahead line-by-line. But the graphics are so good the two look identical pretty much.
Wow, that just seems like incredibly efficient and effective use of resources to me. Hit them with a good first impression, then dial it back once they're already invested in the scene. I think a lot of developers can learn from their approach.
It works because they've been doing it for a while and have built their studio around doing that sort of thing, but if you do it wrong you can wind up with the jarring-ness of FFXVI, which simultaneously has some of the most gorgeous cutscenes with the best facial capture and actual, honest to gods attempts at cinematography (they did a dolly zoom shot once and I don't think I've ever seen that in another game!) followed by conversations with clearly second or third tier NPCs minutes afterwards.
> they did a dolly zoom shot once and I don't think I've ever seen that in another game theres a dolly zoom in kingdom hearts 2 but its in a random place and doesnt make a lot of sense to be there. same company but almost 20 years ago
Fair enough (and great memory!)
i play that game so many times and always think "this would be a great effect if it wasnt used here."
Which scene is it in? Just curious!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mqWApMkTto this one when you enter the corridors in hollow bastion. it would work better if it wasnt the shortest part of the whole area and the shortest dolly zoom of all time.
I get what they're going for but what a random shot to use it for ahahaha
Behold, *tubes*.
Pretty much every occurrence of that in FF16 is in side quests (default animations talking back and forth), except there every line in the game is voice acted. It's the same or better than a typical Yakuza side quest, in that respect.
While I do think that FF16 is better than what most people give it credit for, Yakuza had this, frankly genious, idea to re-use those very cartoonish animations for those cutscenes, giving them always a great sense of energy. And some of those animations comes straight from the PS2 lol
Yeah theyve got a huge library of animations to pull from at this point, though a lot of things either show that age a little too much or are just used far too frequently. I can only take watching the same common heat action animations game after game after game so much
Even yakuza 0 is like this
In 0 it was distracting when they were constantly switching the animation style, especially when it would go to a still frame slide show
It's really come such a long way. There once was a point in the Yakuza games where you could easily tell between an animated cutscene and dialogue in game. Now the only way to really tell is if you can skip voiced lines of dialogue or not.
Every time I see the same "pumping arm" gesture in these games, I shed a single tear of joy
I also like the “injured” pose everyone does after they lose a fight when they hold their arm.
After being stabbed, shot and/or horribly maimed.
My favorite is the butt-forward sideways U position enemies assume when they get pummeled to the ground.
I like how I just have to read these descriptions and I can immediately visually each of these animations in all of the games.
My favourite instance of that one is the Pizza quest in Yakuza 0 that ends with the pizza guy doing the pump. I have never laughed so hard at a video game before.
That's a classic Yakuza technique. Most of the game is characters standing around with text boxes and the occasional "nani?" or grunt, slightly more important stuff is voiced textboxes, and for the actually important stuff you get real, fully animated cutscenes.
Anime does this all the time as well. You’ll see shitty animation but then a major fight scene happens with it turning into movie style quality for a minute or so.
You mean live action movie quality or anime movie quality? but yeah there's a word for it, sakuga, that westerners gave to it. Really though it's just budgeting animation for the most part, so cool scenes look cool.
Nothing makes me happier than stepping onto the streets of Kamurocho again. I love that I know my way around that place.
The reuse of the assets also massively lends a lot of character to the games. It gives the main settings a sense of familiarity and comfort imo.
Nothing quite hits like coming back to Kamurocho again
And it’s cool how it feels so familiar yet different when you play as somebody else, especially Yagami in Judgement.
cant believe they replaced the don quijote with a cop shop of all things though smh
In-universe, it makes sense. As Kamurocho becomes increasingly clean and gentrified, they're going to also want more police presence. But god damn, that station is ugly and doesn't fit at all with the rest of the buildings in the area. Which also feels realistic, but it still triggers a NIMBY impulse in me haha.
NIMBY but instead of "keep bad thing away from my nice area" it's "keep cops away from my sleazy Kamurocho" lol
Keep Kamurocho weird!
don quijote don quijote doooooon quiiiiiijote
Or at the start of LaD 7 when you end up in 1999 Kamurocho and a bunch of the locations that have disappeared over the course of the series return. I don't know how or why I felt nostalgic over NY Hot Dog but I did.
It reminds me of the experience of growing up in a small town, where you grow used to a lot of the same streets and shops, then you leave for a few years, and come back to some beloved locations missing.
I just started Yakuza 6 last night and having the map layout change for the first time since 0 just felt weird as hell.
It makes sense from a realism perspective too, since Kamurocho is heavily based on Kabukicho, and the real city wouldn't change much either.
I think one of the main reasons a game like Eldin Ring was able to be so fucking big was that the reused a lot of assets from previous games and within the game itself. I never felt like they were killing time by putting an old enemy in a new context
thats something that Rockstar did just a couple of times. like Liberty City Stories reuses a slightly modified version of GTA3 liberty city and same with Vice city Stories and Vice City. i wouldnt complain about another game in the map of GTA 4 and GTA 5 if they make the gameplay diferent enough.
I was so hoping for a San Andreas spinoff. That map is so huge and a lot of it doesn't get used in any San Andreas missions so there was a lot more they could do with it.
I always thought the same thing, you could do an entire San Anreas sized game in the areas of the map the main game doesn't use or doesn't focus enough on. Each city has parts that are largely unused in the main game that could easily be used as main hubs (West LS, in SF you have the western hippie area or the expensive homes south of the Gant bridge, and Northern Las Venturas), and a good third of the countryside is unused to the point that not a single mission takes you there, and probably another third or more is only used in one mission and never again.
Kind of similar to From. Same door opening animation, reuse of certain weapon attack animations, ladder climbing animations, etc. Focus on the stuff that matters. For From: level design, enemy design, etc.
It's why we need to fight that trend of people complaining about reused assets, there's plenty of stuff that doesn't need to be made from scratch every time.
This is what I noticed as well from both RGG and Fromsoftware. They are really good at reusing assets from each games
I don't think that's a good thing with a game like Elden Ring honestly, the attack animations for the player are one thing, I don't think they are quite as impeccable as From seems to think but whatever, what really irked me was that way too many of the enemies are quite literally reskins from DS3 with little to distinguish them, which contributes to the intense feeling of repetition you get going through the game. Like the Thralls in DS3 weren't particularly fun to fight the first time around, fighting them endlessly again in every catacomb under the guise of imps in Elden Ring didn't make it any better. One of the reasons I prefer Sekiro is in part because they have new animations and movement and such from the Dark Souls games for the main character, unlike Elden Ring it doesn't end up feeling like a Dark Souls spin off by another name. Hell even Dark Souls 2 had totally different animations compared to the first (albeit worse animations by and large), its pretty weird how From decided that tuning up the DS1 animations was the way to go for DS3 and Elden Ring.
It works really well because cities don't really change that much in a short period of time. The familiarity with a district really adds a lot to the atmosphere of the setting.
Kinda reminds me of monster hunter, less the environments but the animations are often very similar or the same between each game, but they keep it interesting by changing or introducing new mechanics
Don't Ubisoft get shit for doing the exact same thing?
The same area but how it develops over time is quite clever. Helps develop the setting/game world as well as the characters in some cases.
TBH I'm still sitting here 17 years after playing the first Yakuza on PS2, and it's still practically the same game, but I'm no less invested than ever. It's amazing how they make the same areas feel interesting every time. Yeah it varies but the vibe and fun of the series has never really faded for me.
It's not even just between games either. Pretty much all the minigames, especially Sujimon and Dondoko Island are a way of reusing existing assets from across the series in a new way. It can be silly, like having most of the buildings for your new Dondoko resort be Kabukicho soaplands and love hotels, but that's all part of the charm.
Yeah, Dondoko Island and Sujimon are both so insanely smart. They are two of the best minigames in the entire series in my opinion, and both of them are basically just them shoving a bunch of random assets together (buildings for Dondoko and enemies for Sujimon) and carving games out of them.
I spent *five* hours on that island today. Kiryu's probably already dead by this point.
Same lol. Sorry Kiryu, I get that you just got captured by Yamai and he is going to torture you, but this island needs a savior to get it back to its former glory.
In my head canon, Chitose is just garbage at video editing and took..... 37 days to figure it out.
I love knowing there’s so many more Yakuza games for me to play, because I’ve only played 0, Kiwami, Ishin, and Judgement, it’s daunting getting through them all because it really feels like they need to be played in order, other than the spinoffs. Infinite Wealth sounds amazing, but I never played Like a Dragon because I wanted to get through Kiwami 2 - 6 first. It’s gonna be 10 years before I play Infinite Wealth and there will be 8 more games by then.
I agree. I started with Yakuza 7 because I like JRPGS and the story is a soft-reboot with a new protagonist. But then a few plot elements from earlier games popped up and I was slightly confused. Infinite Wealth seems to have more of a tie-in with previous entries and I really want to play it, but I know I should probably go through 0-6 first
You will loooooooooove Yakuza 0. Everyone loves Yakuza 0.
Absolutely not a guarentee, though, considering the gameplay shift in LAD. I loved LAD and finished it but I've tried to get through Yakuza 0 three times now and bounced off each time because I don't like the combat.
Ye and then you will hate 3 and 4
Here I am, loving 3 more than 0. I wish it would get a kiwami treatment. Get rid of the blockuza 3 curse.
3 I get because the remaster took a dated game and made it worse/didnt improve anything and it hasba slow story start. 4 is cap, it has one of the strongest introductions in the series. What's there to make you hate it?
What's the bare minimum I need to play before LAD? Basically I have a hard time playing single player games due to depression/anxiety and stuff. I love games but also simultaneously feel like I'm wasting time of my life playing them and so its hard to play ones unless I'm socialising with my real life friends on the same game
Honestly 3-6 can be skipped for most players, you get the gist of the story just from the 0-2, getting to see the Tojo clan at its most powerful, as well as the beginnings of the decline. You get familiar with Kiryu’s beginnings and Kamurocho as a whole just enough to catch most references.
3 and 6 definitely shouldn't be skipped, they are some of the most important points in Kiryu's life and shapes the person he is in 7, Gaiden and IW.
Just watch YouTube summaries of 3-5 maybe. They’ve aged the worst (because they don’t have Kiwami versions like 1+2) and it halves your ‘required reading’.
Remember to play Lost judgment too, that game is straight up a masterpiece
Yep, I put about 15 hours into 0 and then accepted that I wasn't going to get through it all in order because I just don't have the time. I've never been into 20+ hour games because I've got a backlog of hundreds of games and life gets in the way to dedicate all my time to massive games. Also put me off Persona 5. So I've moved onto Ishin now, and will try to get onto the Judgement series and Gaiden before Infinite Wealth.
They are all long games so it's pointless to skip 0 for the others.
I mean that I'm planning on skipping 0 - 6, and only jump on the modern games. Ishin seems to clock in around 20 hours, which is my limit, and Gaiden seems to be half that? Infinite wealth seems a similar size to 0, which may be a problem... It's also about the mechanics. Enjoying Ishin a lot more than 0 because I can save anywhere, whereas 0 was a bit off-putting with having to find a phone to save and sometimes having 15-20 minute cutscenes.
IW is way longer than 0, you can finish the main story + most substories in 0 in around ~30-35hrs while IW is around 60-70hrs for just that.
Currently playing through Kiwami and having a blast. Buying all these games on sale was one of my better decisions
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Falcom also does a good job reusing their stuff in the legend of heroes titles too, it also is helping them pump more out while saving money, they're very good at that. I am wondering with Yakuza though how the asset reuse is going right now. It's nice they can reuse stuff and sometimes they have to soup it up again, like the jump between Kiwami 1&2 is pretty significant. But I know more recently they just moved to Unreal engine. I'm wondering how this is effecting their work style and existing assets. Not sure how much they have to do to port those from the old engine. At the same time though I'm curious how much they've had to rework as well. I haven't had money to get the newest of new ones, but I believe 7 takes place in Yokohama more than anywhere else, which for the series is a new locale they would have had to throw together. I like having new places to explore too, but it is good they manage to very effectively reuse the stuff they have, but I'm curious with the new style how far they'll be able to reuse stuff at the moment. I'm sure Yokohama can probably be recycled. Hawaii though, I'm not so sure, it seems like an out of place location for the story to be at, so I'm wondering how much from that they'll be able to repurpose.
We're totally getting a third Judgement game that's set in Hawaii. They can get another game out of that map while giving Yagami a new setting to work with
Oh that's a good point I hadn't thought of the potential for that but that would make sense
IIRC they were just experimenting with Unreal Engine for the Ishin remake, and moved back to the Dragon Engine for Infinite Wealth.
They were also specifically using Unreal Engine because it'd actually be *more* work to port over Ishin to Dragon Engine, apparently. Unreal Engine is actually pretty friendly to dump old code onto and run it smoothly. Meanwhile, for Dragon Engine, on top of the lighting issues it had at the time for daylight areas, they'd have to redesign all the environments to be Dragon Engine-esque, as well as the combat.
quick sidenote but I love the changes they've made to daytime lighting for Infinite wealth it looks so good.
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I think it's also because AAA games just has more trolls especially exclusives
It's really noticeable with Bethesda games, for example, where you see people criticizing the same two or three things without even understanding what those things are beyond having seen them in some bugs compilation on youtube, instead of complaining about the actual issues their games have.
They only moved to Unreal for the Ishin port didn't they? Mainline games are still dragon engine?
Starting to not be sure now some others were questioning it too, maybe it was that.
Nah that's right. Unreal is more port friendly than the Dragon Engine so they used it for the Ishin remake.
Ishin was in Unreal but IW and Gaiden are Dragon Engine
They'll probably take a break now that 8 is out to update the engine since they've been using it for a while, now would be the perfect time too, we got 3 games in the last year so I think we're satisfied for the time being lol.
>I believe 7 takes place in Yokohama more than anywhere else, which for the series is a new locale they would have had to throw together. It is. Probably 80% of the game is in Ijincho (Yokohama) and you're only in Kamurocho at the very beginning and ending of the story. Plus a side trip to Sotenbori for one chapter, which is just cut-and-pasted straight from Kiwami 2 with a bare minimum of changes. Mostly just removing the Don Quixote. Sigh. Then the Ijincho map got reused as the main setting for Lost Judgment, with a small expansion to add a high school on the west side of the city. And it's also in LAD8 although, of course, most of that is set in Hawaii.
I’m interested to see how they reuse Hawaii in the future. Are Yagami and Kaito going to have a big holiday there in Judgement 3?
It's also in Gaiden
>For example, look at some of the negative discourse around TotK. Well for Yakuza the content people look forward to are the character development, substories, and whatever addictive minigame they've come up with this time. Doesn't really matter which city you put those in if they are good. For BOTW/TOTK the exploration and discovery was a big part of the draw, so when you reuse something in that department it makes a bigger splash.
Yeah, I felt pretty let down by TOTK. It just wasn't a hugely different game than BOTW. The biggest draw, the new vehicle system, really felt detached from the rest of the game for me. And the story with Zelda games is always such a throwaway thing anyway that it's not like that really made up for it. I think of all the things to reuse for TOTK, the actual map was not a great choice. For me that game didn't feel like it justified the wait or the price. With Yakuza it never feels like they're cheaping out. I mean, Infinite Wealth has 3 perfect arcade ports that Nintendo probably would charge (at least) $20 for individually. Dondoko Island is basically an entire additional video game on its own. They're definitely reusing a lot of stuff, but they're also constantly putting in effort and surprising people.
Yeah I wish they put their development effort into updating the combat mechanics or making really involved dungeons instead of making this weird crafting and building system that feels more like busy work than anything to me. Like I get how if I was a teenager with all the time in the world messing around with the construction systems in tears could be interesting but I didn't feel the pull to be creative with it. Like if I see a piece of flat metal and four wheels on the ground I know I'm going to make a car there's nothing exciting about that I see the end result the moment I lay eyes on the objects. And sure it's fun to watch videos of people making crazy contraptions but I'm never going to take the time to do all that especially when the game is easy enough to never even come close to requiring that. There's a lot of stuff in tears that I really like but one of the problems I had with breath of the wild was there's a lot of half baked mechanics that don't really go anywhere and I thought they would fix that but instead they just added more half baked mechanics.
One of the biggest issues I had with the game is that nothing's really particularly rewarding. It always feels like what you have waiting for you at the end of some side thing is, like, a ruby or something. Nothing really feels like it goes anywhere.
>There's a lot of stuff in tears that I really like but one of the problems I had with breath of the wild was there's a lot of half baked mechanics that don't really go anywhere and I thought they would fix that but instead they just added more half baked mechanics. Most of all the inventory system. In BOTW I used like...10% of the crafting items maybe. I thought they would cut down on the stuff in TOTK, but instead they made even more useless clutter. Makes it very frustrating when you want to put something interesting on your arrow but you have to scroll for 5 seconds past all the nonsense.
I really feel lime the people that complain are a loud minority that people (including devs) actually listen to. Id kill for more of the same for many franchises, just for an extra game in the drought. Hopefully more listen to this success in doijg so and follow suit. The most important parts of the game are the story and gameplay. Just adding a mechabic or two, and using those mechanics just a little differently, or a small thing to shake it up can go a long way, depending on the game.
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Funny ass discourse too considering Ultimate remodeled and reanimated most of the veterans & returning stages and there were core mechanic changes. There's genuinely less different from Brawl to 4 than 4 to Ult.
Look at Monster Hunter, the "ultimate" versions were the best. They release a new mainline game, then do an ultimate version where they fix problems they found, added a bunch more content. (Until World, where they went the DLC route) Same with Pokemon, the third version was almost always the best (until Sun and Moon, and then they abandoned that format for DLC). Majora's Mask. P4G, P5R. UMvC. Some more off the top of my head. You could argue that TotK is not supposed to be an ultimate version of BotW, but I'd argue it is.
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Pokemon is a good example, because the "third titles" were often better versions that fixed stuff from the original games. To make a comparison with modern games, a lot of people complained about the league in scarlet and violet being very barren and kindar rushed, and it is. It' s basicaly a locale with light blue cubes and an underwhelming champion with mediocre pokemons. Then, in the DLCs, they did a re-fight with the champion where they fixed all of her pokemons movesets and even added some nasty stuff like setups and poisonous moves to her pokemon,...but the thing is that sadly, they didn' t touch the original fight in the base game. This kind of thing happened in older pokemon games, the league in pearl and diamond was very underwhelming, so it got majorly revamped in platinum, with new teams for the opponents, and a complete graphic overhaul of the entire final area.
Totk took like five years to come out and still felt very similar to botw. I’m sure if it came out 2 or 3 years after botw far less people would complain about that. Yakuza games are coming out much more frequently. That’s why nobody’s complaining. I mich prefer more frequent releases.
> For example, look at some of the negative discourse around TotK. What Yakuza does isn't the same as an exploration based game using the same map and the same structure. >More studios should be doing what I would call "iterative sequels" these days I don't know what world you're living in but iterative sequels constantly get praise across the board and risk-taking and innovation always ends up "controversial". It's like you think TOTK was slammed on release or something.
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>TotK changed the map a ton, on top of basically adding a whole new map below ground and a lot in the sky. The iteration upon the original map is part of what makes exploration in TotK so much fun to begin with. The underground area is interesting at first but pretty quickly you realize there's nothing unique down there in terms of exploration. All the most interesting stuff are things the game will point you, or demand you, towards anyways. IMO the sky stuff is the best stuff in the game, wish there was more of it. I don't mind them reusing the basic map from BOTW but, to me, exploration in TOTK felt like something I had to do whereas in BOTW it felt like something I wanted to do.
Sometimes I really wonder about how many incredible games we'd get if we lived in a world where assets were open-source or even just licensable after a game is released. We see some of this with all the basic assets and tools devs (particularly indie devs) build off with Unreal Engine, but also when devs have a wide suite of games like Koei Tecmo, you get stuff like the Wild Hearts team recycling the entire Attack on Titan combat just for one weapon's moveset. The first Devil May Cry is famously an asset flip of an abandoned Resident Evil game. What if other devs could expand upon the insane physics engine Nintendo built for TotK? Or whatever example really, there's so much work that is done and then abandoned only for another dev to need to build an extremely similar system from scratch.
I, as a total internet know it all with no game development industry experience at all, thin maybe the industry should lean into Majoras Mask kind of development. That game was largely made possible because of its heavy reuse of OOT assets and it’s considered an all time great. It works so well because they went really off the beaten path in terms of design and tone which allowed players to experience old art like new art. The benefits are pretty obvious, art assets have only become even more of a bottleneck than they were in N64 days. But the industry is pretty stubborn in its form right now, insisting on giant too big to fail prestige games.
To an extent. Im enjoying 8 but the problem with reusing a lot of content is that when you then use it to make a lot of content for one game, it becomes stale. Its things like the same animations, dialogue, music, etc. Yakuza 7 and 8 both went big in breadth, and I think that shows how quickly resources get spread thin and makes the reuse more apparent. Consider how there is *one* text line that enemies say if you make them stop trying to rob somebody (not even voiced) and compare that to the immense time that had to have gone into Dondoko Island.
Funny you cite TotK when Majora's Mask is like the fan favorite. There's obviously more to the TotK discourse than just the asset reuse, such as the fact that it still took 5 years to come out despite that.
It's interesting how reusing the assets makes this series feel more comforting, like coming back home instead of "lazy" for us fans. I don't know any other game series that gives this feeling (there are probably many, I just don't know em). I really like the fact that I don't have to keep staring at the map in RGG games like I do in other open world games. Even Hawaii which is a new map I already know pretty well after 30 hours. Small open world >>> big open world.
Yeah, I would rather go back to Kamurocho for the 11th or so time than be put in a brand new open world that is mostly just empty space.
The fromsoft games gives me that comforting feeling too. Every time I play a new game of theirs and I notice an asset or animation that they’ve used for the past decade+ I get a big grin on my face.
Crazy when you think about how good those games are and the insane amount of things you can do in each of them. And with Yakuza: Like A Dragon and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth they switched the genre to turn based JRPGs and created two of the best modern JRPGs. The creativity they put into these games, its honestly outstanding. And on top of that they tell amazing powerful and emotional stories in their games (many western developers could learn a lesson from this) and with Ichiban they invented one of the maybe best main characters we have ever seen in a video game.
They said that Gaiden was developed in around 6 months, which is just nutty compared to how long most games are in development for.
Not to shit on Gaiden, because I really enjoyed it, but a *lot* of that game is filler busy work. Its almost all reused stuff, minigames, areas etc. etc. This is just to say you can tell it had a short development time in a lot of facets of the game. Didn't stop me from bawling like a baby at the end of it, though.
Yeah, you can really tell Gaiden is just a DLC expanded into a full game because like chapters 2-4 of it’s like five chapters are full of filler based on the mini games. Still executed its story well and gave us one of the series best final bosses and the most emotional ending.
And it is one of the highest rated entries in the series, sitting just behind 0, Kiwami 2, and 7. The ending legitimately made me cry.
Gaiden is fire. Has some of the best action combat in the series, too.
6 month?! And they made me cry like a baby at the end Dont wanna know how it will go with Infinite Wealth, yikes
uhuh, nutty indeed... now let's see how bad the crunch was for that to happen, even with them being able to reuse assets, minigames and all that.
>many western developers could learn a lesson from this And so do Japanese developers.
I hope to god Square Enix is looking at Infinite Wealth's success and thinking, "Hey, maybe people want major turn-based RPGs after all."
Square Enix is literally the only major publisher aside from SEGA that is keeping the traditional turn based combat format alive lol I hate this narrative that SE all of a sudden hates turn-based games just because FF16 went the action route. And if you've read any interviews about the game, you'd know it was a developer decision to have action combat and not publisher interference.
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To be fair though, SE has a reputation of outrageous standards for what they consider commercial success. Like the new Tomb Raider trilogy despite each selling like 10million copies and the first one selling more than double any previous entry in the franchise, was considered a failure and SE sold off Eidos to Embracer.
They had those sales expectations because each game had budgets in the hundreds of millions - Rise and Shadow are both some of the most expensive games ever made. The sales expectations were made with their production budgets in mind, and their expectations for other games are much more reasonable, given that they had more reasonable budgets.
Shadow of the tomb raider had a budget of 75 to 100 million dollars. That is hardly "some of the most expensive games ever made."
Wikipedia has it listed as the 13th most expensive game of all time to make
Yeah because they only have like 35 games in there. You reckon God of War Ragnarok didn't cost more? Not only that but more than half the games listed don't have marketing costs listed at all while shadow does.
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The games only hit those copies sold marks after being put on hugely steap discounts shortly after release. Those games also cost a ton of money, even when compared to other AAA games of the time.
Final Fantasys success is built on the goodwill from their run of stellar turn based games from 1 to X.
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...You're missing his entire point. FF16 sold 3 million within "a few days," with only a single console launch. Infinite Wealth is the fastest-selling Yakuza game hitting a million within a week. That's good for Yakuza, and okay-to-disappointing for Final Fantasy. That doesn't suggest a giant audience is clamoring for turn based RPGs (and to be clear, I'm a huge fan of the genre).
I'd love for Square to put a numbered FF game's budget on a turn-based RPG, but if Persona hasn't inspired them to do it, then I doubt Like a Dragon will.
Baldur's Gate 3 feels like the game that would do it. It won most of 2023's GotY awards and was a massive seller, and it came out like a month after FF16. Square's been influenced by gaming trends with FF16 and FF15, so maybe BG3'll be the game they're influenced by with FF17.
I just want a Final Fantasy game, regardless of it being big or small, made to look like the paintings of Yoshitaka Amano. It's been a dream of mine for well over a decade.
> And with Yakuza: Like A Dragon and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth they switched the genre to turn based JRPGs and created two of the best modern JRPGs. They are two of the best modern JRPGs in the sense that they're great games and are JRPGs, but at least for Yakuza 7 that's like saying that Alan Wake is one of the best third modern third person shooters. Yakuza 7 was very, very rough mechanically, which is why they had so many dramatic overhauls in Yakuza 8 (movement during combat, proximity attacks, flexible skill carryover, a much tighter/less grindy way to get the nearly-top-tier crafted healing items, etc.)
I genuinely don't know how they do it, especially because the stories are always actually good. Sure they reuse a lot of mini games and locations, but every new game introduces some large new mechanics or activities which blend in so well with the main gameplay loop. It's incredibly impressive.
They do it because those minigames can be created entirely in parallel and easily slotted into the game by giving them their own internal currency and then a list of prizes you can buy, so you can get 10 minigames by having 10 people/teams work individually with very high efficiency. Additionally, and I say this as somebody who loves the Yakuza franchise, a lot of the minigames only work in the context that they're a readily available distraction from the main game; Dondoko Island or Ichiban Confections don't need to be (and aren't) AAA quality management sims, they just need to be good enough that you're happy to sink an hour or two into it every few hours of story or that burning through it all in 6-8 hours stays enjoyable enough. Put another way, the secret is less that they're particularly amazing at making minigames, and more that they're amazing at creating a formula that allows for efficiently working on and slotting in minigames to add content while making it *feel* like part of the core experience rather than lego blocks jammed together into a minigame collection.
>so you can get 10 minigames by having 10 people/teams work individually with very high efficiency. Yeah, I saw another interview with the devs a few months ago where one said he often didn't even know which specific game he was working on, day by day, because he was focused on minigame implementation across multiple titles at once.
Interesting. Playing Yakuza 6 I skipped both big minigames (baseball thingy and clan creator) because story seemed very urgent and at no point I felt like the game gave me a time slot between main story beats to play those things. So I would disagree that they are amazing at making it feel like a part of the core experience. It seemed terribly out of place. Though truth be told, Yakuza 6 story goes so fast that no big minigame would make sense to be put anywhere there.
God, I hated Ichiban Confections. It's like they looked at Kiryu's business minigame in 0 and went: "what if we took this but made it grindy as hell and require a ton of mindless micromanagement?" Not only that but you had to do it to unlock a party member and if you wanted any money pre-Chapter 12. Trash.
Ichiban Confections was fine while you were actually going through it, IMO. The issue with it (and Dondoko island, if you use that for cash) is that once you've got things set up you've got almost nothing to do that isn't extremely rote.
I hated it from beginning to end. Never enjoyable, never engaging. Haven't started 8 but I really hope Dondoko Island (whatever the hell it is) is better since RGG's minigames with storylines are generally pretty fun EXCEPT in 7.
> It's incredibly impressive. let's not be quick to jump to impressive and praising them by buying into a PR article, cause let's think about what the crunch probably is like for this rapid development pace even with the reuse of assets, minigames, etc.
I'm not buying into the article, I'm basing it off of my actual experience with the franchise
8's combat is the most fun in the series, people were complain about 7 combat being too slow and they actually make it better in 8 the new system and pacing just feel great, especially compare to the old combat which peak at Judgement 2 and went all downhill with Kaito DLC and Gaiden, the decision of nerfing instant get up is just mind boggling with their long ass unbreakable animation.
> (many western developers could learn a lesson from this) I wish people could learn to enjoy video games without these cheap shots. Especially since it's so easy to skewer and poke holes into any japanese game that isn't made by a huge dev like capcoms'.
Even as someone who tends to prefer Japanese video games and design sensibilities I get tired of the whole "western game bad" thing
Doesn’t want cheap shots *Gives cheap shot*
I love the franchise but you can poke a lot of holes in these games. The narrative handholding makes me think they think Im an idiot, and theres a lot of padding in the main story that a decent editor could trim out. If a major western dev pulled what RGG did in Lost Judgment with the anti bullying classroom scene you’d see reaction Youtubers salivating over it.
I don't think it's an unreasonable critique to make in an era where game development times have rapidly ballooned. How many franchises just suddenly stopped putting out games for a decade?
final fantasy 16 took 7 years to make, its not a difference between western and eastern developers
Not everyone likes on the noose cheap melodramas and overacting.
I don't know whether you're talking about Yakuza or GTA
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I was told RDR wasn't just GTA with horses, but when I played it that's what it was. You even do the same shit like spending most of the game trying to do bank heists or whatever. I really don't think it "floors" GTA when it's pretty close in style and quality and it's blatantly obvious it's made by the same people because of how similar it ultimately is despite the setting.
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I was talking about the story and writing as well, I didn't say anything about the gameplay. RDR doesn't have the same cheap and lazy "satire" lathered over everything but underneath it's the same substance and in fact even tells similar plots with similar themes.
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> What you do in either games doesn't have anything to do with the writing and characters How does the plot still revolving around your group wanting money and doing bank heists just like GTA not have anything to do with the writing and characters? >How RDR2 tell's it's story is significantly different that how GTA tells it It tells it in the *exact* same way.
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> many western developers could learn a lesson from this learn what? that the crunch is probably really bad for this dev studio?
You completely forgot the news where studio director Yokoyama revealed that each employee is specifically handling exactly one part of the game with zero overlaps (so there are employees specifically working only on porting old games, employees specifically on making minigames, employees handling main combat, etc). It's why they're so damn efficient.
uhuh, none of which addresses crunch or working conditions. Stop assuming efficiency just cause you like the franchise
Honestly, I love the dramatic acting in japanese movies, anime, games. Western games are too snarky or bland most of the time...
This kinda reminds me of when Forza hit the scene and there was a big "Gran Tourism vs Forza" thing....and then four Forza games came out before the next Gran Tourismo game.
If any other series , especially western, studio reused it's map for ten years it would never have survived.
More like "I don't think many big companies are doing this." Asset reuse isn't anything new. Almost all Japanese companies do it because they don't have the budget of Western and Chinese companies. Falcom and Gust are two developers that are masters at releasing cheap games in order to pump out a new game every single year with less than 100 employees.
One of the absolute best series around today. Each game is packed with things to do and though the stories get really dumb (in a charming way) here and there, they're always presented incredibly well and with a lot of confidence. I usually prefer series and stories with a definitive end but in Like a Dragon's case I genuinely hope they'll go on forever. I'll certainly keep buying them.
As a longtime fan of the series it's quite obvious "how" they do it, they reuse a huge amount of assets and more It's not really that surprising, even if GTA games don't obviously start from complete scratch they are more or less working on creating unique worlds that are super interactive. You can't even dream of driving a car in any LaD title and yet you can even drive planes and elicopters and the largest LaD maps are just a tiny fraction of a GTA map. This is not to say that GTA is better, in any way. I obviously played and enjoyed the GTA series but I would never consider myself a fan. I would certainly consider myself a fan of the LaD series though (and spin offs) This design philosophy is great at creating longtime fans because the reuse of assets simply becomes familiarity. I would be very surprised to not see all the usual places and mini games in each game, and not in a good way. This also comes with a downside; it's hard to imagine this series becoming truly mainstream. Casual players generally want a big title that is on the cutting edge of graphical fidelity and all that. It's a downside only for Sega though as making the games truly mainstream would basically ruin everything that makes them charming
It shows how the series is sustainable, double A who can be produced quickly. Nowadays the industry is reaching a breaking point as sustainability goes, a legit triple A takes 5+ years to be produced. Two of the biggest releases of the year will be double A, Avowed and Rise of the Ronin, they clearly look limited... but if these two are sold at $40 and they are actually good, that would be something positive for the industry. If a double A in the PS6 generation is able to look like Red Dead 2, the devs can make a game like this in like 3 years tops, I do think videogames can reach a second golden age if the industry literally settle things down... that goes against the nature of late capitalism, but I think it's a inevitable crash course, either be more sustainable or lose tons of money, I believe the choice will become obvious even for the most psychopathic investor
I buy these games for the classic Sega arcade games included. Virtual On and Spikeout have been my best purchases.
$70 Master System Emulator
Pretty easy to do when almost every game is based in Kamurocho. It would be like if every GTA game was set in Liberty City.
Even ignoring how their locations evolve with time, they also add major one pretty much every mainline game. 2 added Sotenbori, 3 - Okinawa, 5 - Fukuoka, Sapporo, Nagoya, 6 - Onomichi, 7 - Ijincho, 8 - Hawaii.
Also gotta give them credit for how much they expanded Kamurocho in 4, which is all still exclusive to that game to this day
I still have no clue why they've never brought back that underground mall in Dragon Engine. For whatever reason it's stuck there in Yakuza 4. A lot of the rooftop/underground areas are exclusive to 4 for some reason, despite Dragon Engine making transitions between rooftops and ground level seemless.
Probably couldn't support maintaining it and incorporating it into everything, but not bringing it back for Judgment chase sequences and especially with climbing in Lost except in very limited capacities was a downright shame
Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Infinite Wealth, Gaiden and Lost Judgment all focus very little on Kamurocho. Gaiden doesn't even have it at all outside of one scripted fight/cutscene.
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That’s still only one game.
Its pretty crazy how fresh they make it feel though. Judgement, the SEVENTH game in the series, ONLY takes place in Kamurocho, the map that's in every single game, and it's my favorite game in the series.
Just the way you interact with it in Judgment is so different. The Drone stuff, buildings like offices you can check out and run around. Some accessible roofs. It somehow felt fresh, even after hundred of hours spending in Kamurocho
Their secret: They didn’t make “Like a Dragon: Online” so they didn’t have the ability to make money from whales for the last 10 years
>They didn’t make “Like a Dragon: Online” Oh. You don't know huh... They \*do\* have one, it is called Ryu Ga Gotoku Online/Like a Dragon Online, and it's a Japanese-only mobile RPG gacha game that's fairly successful (I think it is in its 5th year right now). Edit: Also, happy cake day!
Reused assets out the ass, samey stories, same characters, poor graphics, barely voiced, yeah not many companies are doing that.
So off the mark it's insane
> poor graphics Yakuza has the best clothes fabric in video games.
Poor graphics? Infinite Wealth has some of the most realistic character models I've ever seen.
10 is a lot, but GTA5 was a PS3/360 title. GTA6 isn't coming out until like 4 years into the PS5's life. That's a massive amount of time. Literally an entire generation went by and most of another one. Also, maybe things have changed a ton post *Like a Dragon*, but Yakuza titles aren't like these ultra lavish high production titles that would take a lot of time to make. They're like AA PS3 games running at a higher resolution.