Yakuza Ishin came to PS3 & PS4 to do right by fans, just not western ones

Please understand

Yakuza Ishin, released in concert with the PS4 in Japan as the best selling (not-bundled) software, is probably never releasing outside of Japan. SEGA sidestepped localizing Yakuza 5 to put all its efforts towards developing Ishin, and it’ll likely go that way for the next title, until the Yakuza series is lost to us all (who don’t speak Japanese).

But we can live vicariously through this Edge feature on Yakuza Ishin. We can enjoy screenshots of chintzy karaoke minigames we’ll never play. Or hear tell of a bathhouse brawl full of naked men with clouds of steam obscuring their junk, like a cartoon Eastern Promises.

And we can enjoy Yakuza Studio head Toshihiro Nagoshi commitment to the fans — just not the Western fans — in not trying to push the PS4 in order to have a PS3/PS4 release. “PS4 is cheaper than hardware used to be, but it’s still not cheap, so I decided we’d be letting our fans down if we didn’t also release a PS3 version.”

Yakuza: Ishin on PS4 is historical in both content and execution [Edge]