Chief Director of the beloved Like a Dragon series (formerly known as Yakuza), Ryosuke Horii, was recently interviewed as a part of a Game Informer panel of the various higher-ups at Ryu Ga Gotoku studio, and he revealed that the franchise’s silly Karaoke mini-games weren’t simply added on a whim.
Horii showed off a spreadsheet of every single song he can sing in Karaoke format, and besides the sheet apparently having “meticulous details,” it houses a whopping 7,964 songs. As Game Informer aptly wrote, “Horii’s life’s work is not the Yakuza series. It’s karaoke.”
Ryu Ga Gotoku, or RGG studio, was previously helmed by Toshihiro Nagoshi, and when Horii was being interviewed for a position in the studio, he showed Nagoshi the list in order to prove that he isn’t like other people that have Karaoke as a hobby. According to Horii, he was shortly offered the job after that. He went on to create the Karaoke mini-game for the series, which first appeared in Yakuza 3.
At first, he was met with pushback within the studio, as many considered it too silly an activity for hardened protagonist Kiryu to take part in. However, it was clear Horii was on the money, as Karaoke has, over time, become one of the franchise’s most beloved mini-games and is now considered a staple of the series.
Since then, Horii has gone on to much greater things, having directed the series’ latest entry, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which is responsible for shifting the direction of the franchise into turn-based combat. He is directing the next entry as well, to be called Like a Dragon 8.
Not too long ago, Toshihiro Nagoshi had announced that he was leaving the studio to create a new team under Chinese entity, NetEase, and he stated this was partly due to the NetEase having “a whole lot of money!” This created a vacuum in the Ryu Ga Gotoku studio hierarchy that’s being replaced by new blood. Horii makes clear that things were great under Nagoshi’s leadership, but he believes that these new changes are positive because “it’s good to have new voices coming in.”
Though Horii is the director of the next mainline game, the actual studio head, meaning Nagoshi’s replacement, is one Masayoshi Yokoyama. Yokoyama, a Yakuza writer since its inception, explained how the transition wasn’t sudden, but instead a slow gradual process, and he expresses how not much changed, regarding the studio’s goals. “Just like you write articles, we make Yakuza games,” Yokoyama stated. “We’re continuing doing what we’re always doing.”
