Yakuza Fan fixes the localization errors of the PS2 original

It’s easy to forget 2022 now that it feels like it we get a new one or remastered yakuza Play every six monthsthat the series has been MIA of the West Coast for a very long time, due in large part to the disastrous decisions Sega made to release the original game in 2006.

The whole point of yakuza series is that it’s Japanese as hell, from the convenience stores to the revamped voice acting, but for the series’ debut in North America and Europe, Sega made the bizarre decision to essentially flip the entire experience onto its axis through its localization .

voice actors like Michael Madsen, Mark Hamill and Eliza Dushku were brought in (at the expense of the Japanese audio track, which was cut entirely), the tone of the script was changed to be a bit more street, and the whole vibe of the game’s marketing was great Grand Theft Auto

-meets-GoodfellasAll of this did the actual game – which, as we now know, is actually an hour-long soap opera punctuated by throwing bikes in the guy’s face – a huge disservice.

It didn’t fare nearly as well in the west as it did in Japan, and when Yakuza 2 suffered a similar fate (although avoiding most of these problems, like keeping the Japanese tone), it seemed for a long time – during spin-offs and Yakuza 3 had great success in their home market but were never released abroad – that the West screwed it up, and yakuza would be lost to us forever.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, and the decision to more faithfully localize the titles has paid off. Also the first two yakuza Games that were originally so divisive in the West have been revised and re-released

With tremendous success. But for some looking back to the game’s original 2006 release on PS2, that’s still not enough.

And so we have now Sylwahans Yakuza restored Project, which, as the name suggests, is trying to take the original PlayStation 2 game – which one could easily argue since the original is the better way to consume it – and fix it. Not in terms of general graphics or gameplay, we already got that kiwami

but to undo the damage that the original localization order did to the game’s intended experience (I want to be clear here that it’s the orders from above yakuza more gangster are to blame here, not the work of individual actors or localization staff).

“I started mine yakuza Journey with the PS2 Original”, Sylwahan says, “and that’s what I fell in love with, jerky localization and stuff. But even if this one has reached lovable/meme status after 15+ years, I would have liked something less “out there” so that was my goal.

So they set about making changes like removing the PS2 game’s English dub and replacing it with the original Japanese audio track (there’s no room for either, a problem the official release also suffered from), and a cleaning up some visual markers like chapter title cards and moving the subtitle position to make it easier to read.

However, the main work comes in the form of the game’s subtitles. yakuza has around 20,000 lines of dialogue, and this project has edited “around 50%” of it, doing everything from “removing excessive vulgarity” to restoring original character names to small grammatical changes like ensuring “consistent use of honorifics” .

Here’s a trailer showing the changes in action:

The project will hopefully be released this week.