"In terms of how it was positioned within the series, Kenzan! is a spin-off product, while 3 is an official title with a number and everything," Sega R&D creative officer Toshihiro Nagoshi noted in an interview with Japan's Weekly Famitsu magazine this week. "In other words, 3 depicts the story of what happened after 2. All the characters who were living at the end of 2 will appear here as well, and favorite characters like Haruka and Goro Majima will be back."
Work on Yakuza 3 began almost immediately after Kenzan! was completed, and while this means there isn't much to show about the new PlayStation 3 title yet, Nagoshi and producer Masayoshi Kikuchi still managed to reveal a few surprises in the interview. First off, while the game covers the continued adventures of mobster elite Kazuma Kiryu and centered around the Tokyo look-a-like district of Kamurocho, a new environment will also be added to Yakuza 3 -- the tropical resort island of Okinawa. "Everyone is interested the most in where the game's set," Kikuchi said. "We get a lot of comments that Kyushu would be good, that Hokkaido would be good, that Nagoya would be good. Every city has its charms, but given that we're making a new title, I wanted to add something new to the game. So it's still centered around Kamurocho, but for the 'other' town, we wanted to do something different from 1 and 2 while still giving people what they wanted... and as we built the story, Okinawa fit the bill perfectly." Nagoshi agrees: "Okinawa has its own unique atmosphere and taste, and it's perfectly normal to see foreigners strolling around it. It's got its own sense of depth you can't find in the big city, and it's also got its darker side. People mainly have a sunny and bright image of Okinawa, but when we started to consider the other side of the coin, we decided that there's a lot more to explore here instead of recreating a city from some other region."
Yakuza 3 doesn't have a release date in Japan, and a U.S. release probably won't happen until at least 2009 (Yakuza 2 itself isn't due out in America until September). Still, while there's quite a wait ahead for fans of the series, Nagoshi is hopeful that gamers are excited. "The PlayStation 3 doesn't allow you to cut corners, so in some ways it's pretty scary," he says. "The more you can do graphically, the more people point it out when something isn't right. Things get better only if you put more time into them, so the buzzword in development is 'We've just got to do this!' All of us on the staff have the idea that we don't want to turn on backs on what we've built up so far. It feels less like work and more like we're nurturing something very important here. If we wound up dropping the ball, I think we'd be stabbing ourselves in the back."
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