"Nagoshi's Departure RUINED Yakuza"

It aint the same cuh

Almost 100k!

People said Nagoshi left because this IP is falling? What a joke.

After LJ launch,.Nagoshi took Hosokawa, Saito, other staff and left RGG studio. They created their studio which was 100% subsidized by Tencent. They left nearly 3 yrs and they literally accomplished nothing. Go check their website. Literally only new year message and short radio as news. No projects at all. Nagoshi took the Chinese money and what has he done so far?


Then you have RGG with new games everyyear with global launch on all platforms with dub available.

People gave Nagoshi all the praises and ignored the other staff behind the scenes.

Storywise 4-8 all have flaws.

OMG YOU'RE ARAB?!?! HABIBI!

So happy to see another Yakuza fan! Subscribed!

the guy who created Karoeke mini game is a literal hero

With Nagoshi and Saito, the series truly felt like it was made for men. It was serious, with a perfect balance of humor and wacky stuff that made it to this day my favorite series of all time.
After there departure, the series has taken a turn in the wrong direction.
Infinite Wealth is the perfect example of this. It's become some ridiculous over the top wacky game with ridiculous things throughout the game that really take away from the whole "Yakuza" feel that the other games had. I personally found Infinite Wealth to be the worst in the series and it's a game I never want to touch again.

Yeah, people forget that Yokoyama was the main writer in all RGG games except Judgment. Also he was the lead game designer of both Jet Set Radio games ;)

Damn bro if you are saying this I know we're in bad times it's sad. I love this game and have so many great memories with this franchise shame it has become this now and dont got me started on The Tv show. 🤠💔

This video is why I don’t participate in fandom or gaming circles in general. It’s full of hypercynical mǒrónș that have no scope of game design and don’t produce anything to have their own proof of concept (modding, etc). 😂
“Hinjaku hinjaku!”

I understand that one person can't make or break a game (tho when Nagoshi left, some other people left with him). It may be just a coincidence, but you cannot deny that there was a shift in tone during Yakuza 7. Judge Eyes felt like a return to the old days and felt kinda like Kurohyou 1 in tone. Sadly after/during Yakuza 7 I've stopped enjoying the games. I'm glad that so many people love the series now, but I hope someone would make a game with a similar "feeling" that the older games had.

Hello my man DevilLeon7, know this isnt the topic of the video, but could you tell me if there is any requirement for substory 71 besides beating chapter 7 and 88% memoir completion? cuz i got both but still nothing
and great vid as always ❤️

I seriously don't care much about Nagoshi leaving. My issues came before that. I recently caught up to Yakuza Like A Dragon. I took my time. I played Yakuza 0, Kiwami and Kiwami 2 pretty close, then drop the series while playing Yakuza 3 (The pacing and the jank killed it for me), then, last year, I watched a retrospective about Yakuza 3 to get the story without playing it and jumped to 4, then 5 and finally 6. Which I enjoyed all but to different levels (not a huge fan of the fighting mechanics of Kiwami 2 and 6). Then I tried to play Like A Dragon, and had to drop it. And it was just the game play, I hated the new pacing caused by the slower battles and the decision making. I like RPGs, but I hated Like a Dragon. I couldn't explore the city at my own pace because I had to be careful not to encounter some overleveled NPC that I had to run from, when that has never been a problem (not even with mr shakedown). I uninstalled it and went to Judgment, I had to scratch the Yakuza itch and it provided that and more (though fuck not having karaoke). So yeah, I'm sad that Kiryu is back in the series because I got closure with 6 and now I might have to watch some cinematics video or something to be able to play "the man who lost his name" and then again watch another video for infinite wealth to be able to play Pirate.

Woah that dudes head is huge!

In fact, I think this debate is endless. Even if the game gets better with much better quality, the naysayers who think the series is ruined will not stop blaming Yokoyama and the current developers and will swear at everything that comes out.
Just looking at the comments in this video, there seem to be a lot of people distorting facts with futile logic, but I'm surprised that there are people who think it's no big deal that infinite wealth has sold 1 million copies. The series has almost never achieved more than 1 million copies in a single piece since the release of Y1. The best-selling works are JUDGMENT and like a dragon, and the other works may have sold less than 1 million copies in a single sale alone. Under these circumstances, the fact that infinite wealth achieved more than 1 million sales in a week after its release is a fact that cannot be ignored and is a big achievement in the series. Opponents are ignoring this sales because they don't like infinite wealth.
Also, their outrageous response to the pirate majima game. Even though it's a traditional action game that many users respected, rather than a turn-based battle, the game even accuses it of being terrible, even though the demo version hasn't been released yet. They try to recklessly judge the game in a way that it's already the worst.
I gave up trying to convince them. What logic should I use to convince people who already have only one decision in their head?

Yakuza did definitely noticably change. But I don't necessarily find it a bad thing

People forget that Masayoshi Yokoyama was the one involved in storytelling from the beginning. Even when Nagoshi was the general director, there were weird gimmicks such as the giant squid of infinite wealth and shark fights, and people talk as if Yokoyama was the one who started all the weird things after Nagoshi left.
Yokoyama has just moved from story writer to general manager and continues to maintain the studio as Nagoshi originally did.
And the RPG battle people hate wasn't led by Yokoyama. lol Nagoshi took the initiative.

Why do fans of this series have distorted memories?

"Nagoshi's Departure RUINED Yakuza"
''Nagoshi's Employement RUINED Sakura Wars'' :D

ayoo an arab fan ! love from iraq bro !

Infinite Wealth was far better in every regard compared to Like a Dragon.
Also, of course Yakuza wouldn't sell as much in 2010, when Yakuza was barely widespread until the last 8 years or so due to far more people getting into anime and eastern games

I don't see how anything changed after Nagoshi left. The games have pretty much felt the same. One could argue the tone has slowly veered away from being a full on Yakuza story though I guess that has more to do with the yakuza's diminishing presence in reality.

The series feels soulless after 6.
Dont really care if no one agrees. The dragon engine got rid of Kiryu's style and got rod of the great canned animations. The graphics made kiryu look like a marshmallow. Then when they figured out dragon engine they made it turn based.
It just feels so soulless. In 10 years this series will be so westernized it will be divorced from what it was in the masterpieces that were 4 and 5 and 0.

Nagoshi left and now we’re finally getting a new Majima game. Are those 2 facts related? No clue. But I couldn’t be happier :D

Man, I just want the mainline games to be brawlers again

He made a game for men and everyone bought it, the west makes games for women and gays and no one buys them. Making good games always ages well. Ticking boxes does not.

I think you’ve nailed it in that the hate is very much displaced.

Granted, I love the series because of the writing and the environment that they provide. It’s gives depth to the series as a whole and having elements of each game clicking together is a bonus.

Now while I have strong opinions about Yakuza 3, I won’t hold it against Nagoshi. He’s only one man and the whole decision to make the game what it became was a collaborative effort that we as players never will have the privilege of knowing what took place and what compromises had to be made for it to be released.

In the end, I couldn’t agree with you more. Either love the series for what it is or don’t. No one can tell you how to live your life. But what the community shouldn’t do is take it out on one person because of one feature they didn’t like.

BTW, as a Hawaii-born native, I made a bunch of my friends buy Infinite Wealth and to many of them, it was an amazing introduction into the series, so much so that they’re now playing through older titles as a result.

I loved the video, i wish more people could take a similar level headed approach as you but i know that wont happen 😅, as for your mystery man who pushed for the yearly sequels, hes not really a mystery it was Masayoshi Kikuchi as he said it in an interview from the 10th anniversary book. Watch part 8 of "forging a dragon" for more details as yakuzafan does a much more through job than me

If anything, I haven't seen a franchise with such intricate and convoluted stories and characters well defined by their personalities, maintain the same level of quality after it's creator left. I remember worrying for the franchise when Nagoshi left, nowadays I don't even think about it and most of the time forget he's not working there anymore. That's not a shot at Nagoshi, it's just to say how cohesive that team is and how they all seem to understand what this franchise is and who those characters are.

I flat out didn't even finish Y8 and I have no plans to. It's just so inferior to everything that came before it and I feel the series is in decline.

Nagoshi will forever be the man and og creator of the series....but since the ps3 era thanks to many others its also itroduced as many key amd core lelmentes that made the series what it is today,think of karaoke for example


the only problem I had with Nagoshi management,keyword here,is him shunnim perfectly fine platolforms to expand the series public like switch,which now fibally has been regarde as eligble for the series curiously after his departure

also dlc policies have been pretty scummy goin tbh,with core elements of the games behind a paywall atday one,this is a problem os SEGA as whole see ATLUS products featuring it now too

anyways the series still healthy and sealin the high seas in all regards,just hope judgement series will continue and less confusing branding decision,next like a drsgon need to have a 3 tbh lol

100% agree that Nagoshi either gets worshipped or shit on for the games he was there for. Theres no middle ground lol. People don't realize that massive teams work on these games.

I've played every single Yakuza game (That includes dead souls lol). My top 3 are Yakuza 0, LAD 7, and Kiwami 2... but I need to make this crystal clear... I ADORE every single yakuza game (And yes that includes dead souls).

There's simply nothing like these games available anywhere else. I love the characters and I love campy soap-opera storylines. I've never had more fun in a game than I have with this series.

there are three cardinal sins the games committed as far as I'm concerned, and they were all shareholder bullshit...

1. Locking Newgame+ behind DLC (FUCK them for this. I actually waited a year to play infinite wealth and almost dropped the series in protest. I received the game as a gift recently or I probably still wouldn't have played it... which is painful because as stated previously, I loved LAD7 and adore ichiban)

2. Denuvo. It tanks the efficiency of how their games run and as shown repeatedly in study after study, piracy doesn't actually hurt a games sales. In fact it adds longevity because it brings players who wouldn't have purchased the game to begin with into the franchise. Piracy is all about access/price-point. Quality products don't lose money to piracy. (Oh and Denuvo IS crackable, it just takes longer. Its not worth it for how hard it tanks the playability of their game across systems)

Hell... I know PLENTY of people who pirated the first three games (And zero) only to buy them so they could replay it and earn achievements on their gaming platforms.

3. they need to stop it with so much fucking DLC... They need to add cosmetic unlocks within the game AND have some optional DLC. I'd have NO ISSUE dropping double the price on the game for extra shit if its worth it AND I dont feel fucked over by them just cutting shit out of the game to charge extra for.

It’s true like a dragon is not as good as the original Yakuza I’ll say it Ichiban is a horrible protagonist his first game was almost the same as Kiryu’s first game

I mean, I kinda feel the same way. I really liked LAD2, but Gaiden: Man w/o Name was a pure cash grab and lame. I also am not looking forward to Majima Pirate Game. Lost Judgement is god tier though.

Objectively they ran out of ideas after Judgement..and new games really don't have anything special, that Yakuza flare in them.

An Yakuza x John Wick crossover would be interesting or even making them face the most famous mafia, the italian one.

The truth is the series is the best it’s ever been without him but no one ready for that topic

Even speaking of Nagoshi he still isn’t that impressive, I’m sure he didn’t care much about dumb shit like Majima Everywhere, and Kashiwagi and LKL coming back to life. That last one set a bad precedent that they doubled down on. I don’t even like the direction they’re going in but Nagoshi has thought of dumb shit too.

I think the only thing that is "ruining" Yakuza games is their legacy. Kiryu has been around almost without character development since after Yakuza 3 and we are running out of foils for him. Characters that died return for no good reason because we gotta have our fanservice. We are at 11 games that share a narrative. At this point, we either say goodbye to some beloved characters.

My concern is that we just get on the wrong track. The trash pirates in infinite wealth were silly, but it is the kind of sidestory silliness that we get to expect - but the next game seems to be centered around golden age of piracy stuff in the modern area and starring Majima - who may always be a delight, but whose story also is already told.

Yakuza is Yakuza if you have melodrama, silliness and a gritty crime story next to each other.

On the matter of Nagoshi saying that he was making games for Japanese men I think that the tends to be a disconnect with some people when the matter of intended audience is brought up. You can make something for an intended audience and still draw in a wider audience than expected. The best example of this would be the brony boom in the 2010. Just because someone isn’t part of a set group doesn’t mean that it won’t draw in people who aren’t of that group. Let’s say I started an authentic Chinese restaurant. Family style service, 15 types of dim sum, spicy food that actually makes people sweat, whatever. This might be founded on the idea of making authentic food for Chinese people to enjoy outside of their own home but it will also draw people who also enjoy authentic Chinese food with its hard to pronounce name and unusual ingredients. Now let’s say that the chef changes and wants to bring in a “wider audience” he stops using some of the more uncommon ingredients, he starts cooking things in a more American style, he tones down the spices for people with sensitive tongues. By the end of it the authentic restaurant it’s just PF Chang’s under a different name and all the people that were there for authenticity leave and it becomes just another option in a area that has 4 other Chinese restaurants with the exact same menu. By making games with a specific group in mind he is able specialize in a way that makes it stand out. It’s the same reason that souls games stand above the crowd of souls like and that the game that is considered the best of them, Bloodborn, is the most narrow and specialized of them all.

I just want to see the fans who hate the turn based be treated fairly and given proper new games

the direction for the story of lad 8 was worst... but then again yakuza 3 exist 😂

What piss me off about RGG is that the games are too long, recycled to hell, waste your time with fetch quests, they look the same sometimes and they release them so fast you cannot finish them in time before the next one. They never fix fundamental issues and add new issues overtime. They admitted the story was completly made up too especially these days.
Somehow, Sega can do this with RGG but all of their other IP and dev team couldn't release a single game for decades, too. It's like they're their only developer. Even stuff like the new VF5 remaster was done by RGGS, AND IT LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE YAKUZA. They also basically produced the new Sakura Wars game, but since they can only do action games and make up silly plots, it didn't feel like SW either and nobody liked it. All these issues were happening under nagoshi btw.

yakuza was always ass 💔

حبيبي والله احلى بحرين و احلى ناس

When RGG releases the Shinada Gaiden in the near future, you'll see these haters stop bitching and actually enjoy it.
I'm serious, a game like that will totally sell ten Yakuzillion copies.

Nagoshi had the same plastic surgery procedure as Joe Biden

Yeah, this video pretty much hits the nail on the head. I believe that what is happening to the Like A Dragon series now is what happened to another big SEGA franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog, around ten to fifteen years ago. Where fans mainly complained about the series supposedly going downhill, when it was really just not what those fans wanted, and they used any excuse they could find to justify their hatred. In other words, to these people, Nagoshi’s departure was a scapegoat more than anything.


Maybe I’m looking too deep into this, but then again, you have a vocal minority that is gaining more exposure thanks to online discourse, bashing the newer games in the series for being too different from what they are used to, and using their growing dissatisfaction to gaslight others into thinking that anything new from the series is terrible. What it really boils down to is not being able to accept change. The ironic thing is that if we still had the brawler formula, a lot of these anti-change fans would be complaining that the gameplay loop had gotten too stale.

“This is not a Yakuza game” carries a lot of the same energy as “This is not a Sonic game.”


(I will always find it hilarious that people commonly attribute 0 to Nagoshi despite him not actually being involved in the writing process for the games since 3. Even that is debatable as he mainly provided story concepts. The actual writing was mainly done by Yokoyama and one or two other writers on occasion. I think 1 and 2 had a crime novelist or something like that.)


The fact is, there is no real change in overall quality since Nagoshi left. Yes, the recent Ichiban’s games carry a whole different vibe but that is because they are meant to be different tonally. The story is more absurd and out there because Ichiban himself is an absurd and out there character. Same goes with Majima. Further proving the notion that the games are structured around the protagonist the player is currently in control of.

The Like A Dragon series is not just one thing. (Soapy crime-dramas.) Now free from the shackles of Kiryu, let’s hope for good this time, RGG is now experimenting with all sorts of different plots and gameplay ideas. As long as the games remain fun, I have no problem.

I think it's only okay to say you wish game would go back to the old days. Its just constructive criticism. And longing for the old times.

I know how I can be seen as stubborn and I am very aware of that while I say this (I love turn based combat like persona 5 and final fantasy x) but I really can't digest Ichiban's Dragon quest logic of letting people hit you as a combat mechanism its just feels so goofy for such a important part of the game....At the same time kiwami 2 launching a golden palace as a secret base in the canon story is also goofy but its doesn't linger throughout the whole game and is easily diluted by other things that are good in the story. Yakuza 7 will never do that for me....not even 8 ...even if it has Kiryu in it lol.