Anonymous Portugal

Outlet Automaton Media recently launched an interview they conducted with Masayoshi Yokoyama and Hiroyuki Sakamoto about the ongoing Yakuza / Like a Dragon franchise.
Firstly, it was revealed that the same team is used for multiple projects, including Like a Dragon Gaiden and Like a Dragon 8. The same general roles are carried over between games for optimization, such as with similarly operated minigames. This one-team system has been retained since the days of the original Yakuza and Yakuza 2.

Yokoyama did admit that this structure has caused some confusion, with him sharing an example of how, during voice recordings for Like a Dragon Gaiden, Like a Dragon 8, and Like a Dragon Ishin, he wasn’t even entirely sure which game they were recording for at a given time.

Yokoyama went on to say that Like a Dragon Gaiden could have simply been a thirty-minute interlude for Like a Dragon 8. However, the team decided it’d be more “interesting” to have it be its own game, resulting in a development process that only lasted half a year.

Yokoyama specifically said the following:

I’m the one who first went, “Let’s make it.” I said, “If you’re going to make an episode about Kiryu’s past, it’s going to be much quicker to make a game about it.” From there on, we first considered making it as DLC, but then decided it was engaging enough for a physical edition. But, for a physical edition, we needed more content, so we decided to add some. This is how things escalated.