kabe

So, did Joystiq get "hands-on" with a US version with English voices or did they just play the original Japanese? The voice acting was interestingly not mentioned in this post ...

@42 (sev4pri) - (You call racial stereotyping "celebrating" a culture...??) The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Last Samurai are different from Yakuza in that they were all DESIGNED from the ground up to appeal to an American, predominantly caucasian audience. For example, in the Fast and the Furious, the white American guy defeats the Japanese bad guys and gets the Japanese girl. Yakuza, however, is purely Japanese, and most people who want it want it in its most unadulterated form.

And as for appealing to the widest audience with English, most American GTA players will look at it and say, "Hm, a game with Asian gangsters, really long cutscenes, and loading before fights ... hey, when's the next GTA coming out?" and move on. Some will try it, but many will be turned off because its setting and themes are just not cool to many. (Note: I totally hope I'm wrong about this and it sells well!)

Yakuza in English is like a movie about the Revolutionary War in Japanese; sure, the Japanese audience will understand what's going on, but boy will it look stupid. With games set in fictional worlds, like Suikoden and Dragon Quest, you can dub it in any language at it can come out just as good or better (see Lunar: SSSC), because it's not based on a real place that we have preconceived notions of. But when it takes place in a real culture, it takes away from its intended feeling to have it in a different language.

It's a letdown that they're dubbing it; it's going to take longer to be released and the English voices might be quite detrimental to the overall feel of the game. Most of the people who want this game want the original yakuza Japanese w/subtitles rather than stereotypical gangster Bostonian/Itallian/New Yorker-accented English voices, and for good reason.

Also, Sega doesn't exactly have a great record as far as localization goes (http://media.ps2.ign.com/media/764/764502/vids_1.html -Kazuma: "You like it?" Woman: "Very!" :-/ even though it's an early version, it's still not a good sign), so my worring is almost overriding my excitement for this game right now. I guess all we can hope for now is that the acting is decent...