14 DAY TRIAL // The creator of the Yakuza series has announced that the fifth main game in the franchise is now officially in development at a newly created development studio and that the creators are also working on a new handheld installment.
Yakuza 5 was announced by Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu and series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi has said that a whole new studio is responsible for it, called Ryu ga Gotoku Studio in Japanese and Yakuza Studio in English.
Neither the team working on the video game nor SEGA, the publisher, have offered any clear indication of what the new Yakuza title will offer, but it's likely that concepts like the detailed representation of Tokyo will be kept while a number of gameplay features, like the combat and conversations, might see some changes.
Yakuza 5 currently does not have a launch date and the creators are not talking about the platforms on which it will be released.
The Yakuza series is getting a lot of attention from SEGA and a new portable game is also worked on, called Kurohyō: Ryū ga Gotoku Shinshō, which translates as Black Panther: Yakuza Chapter.
The game will apparently use the same concepts as the previous mobile Yakuza titles and will be launched in Japan during the spring of next year.
The Yakuza series was initially launched on the PlayStation 2 and has been a huge hit on the Japanese market but has only gained a niche following in the West, in part because the game has received poor translations and has been edited to remove some content.
When Yakuza 4: Off the End was launched, with a plot which involved zombies invading Tokyo and a number of characters drawn from the series joining forces to fight them off, a lot of fans presumed that it would be the last game in the series, but apparently the series is too important for SEGA to abandon.