Sega’s surprise announcement of a remake of Like a Dragon: Ishin a few days ago took Yakuza fans by storm, particularly those who didn’t expect the spin-off game to ever see a Western release. The original game, released in 2014 for PS3 and PS4, was a hit in Japan, but an international release was deemed too risky until recent hits like Ghost of Tsushima and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice helped proved there is a Western appetite for games more focused on Japanese history.
Fans of the more recent Yakuza games, including Yakuza: Like a Dragon, may be in for a shock, though, as producer Masahiro Yokoyama revealed in an interview with Tojo Dojo that Ishin would only feature Japanese voice acting, rather than an additional English dub. Interestingly, it appears that the decision was less a cost-saving one and more a practical and aesthetic one. For one thing, previous Yakuza games, like Yakuza 0, had only Japanese audio and still sold well. Indeed, Yokoyama elaborated, “the fans overseas who’ve been playing since that era still play the games like that even now,” even with the English dubs in more recent games.
On top of that, there was a practical element to the choice. Translating modern Japanese to English and other languages is usually a more straightforward procedure than the era-appropriate dialogue that Ishin features. “The specialized vocabulary and the way people talked during the Bakumatsu era [in which the game is set] would make the lines incredibly long, so it just wouldn’t work,” Yokoyama explained. While subtitles would be appropriately translated, recording an English dub and matching it with suitable facial expressions would likely see problems springing up, such as animation issues or skewing the pacing of scenes.
On the plus side, there doesn’t seem to be an indication that this will be the party line indefinitely, so any future Yakuza games may well come with a full English dub for fans who don’t fancy using subtitles. The unique elements of Like a Dragon: Ishin appear to have been the catalyst for this decision, rather than a more general move away from foreign-language dubs.
