The Producer of Gaming’s Quirkiest Series Shares His Secret Sauce

Sometimes, the most influential pieces of entertainment take time to catch on, starting from humble beginnings before becoming real powerhouses. It took years of proselytizing fans for Blade Runner to cement its place as one of the great sci-fi films. Seinfeld didn’t become a Top 10 TV show until its fifth season, and now it’s seen as perhaps the most pivotal sitcom ever created. The Yakuza franchise, also known as Like a Dragon, feels like gaming’s Seinfeld — a series that blends the absurd and the serious, and is now hitting its biggest stride 20 years later. Between becoming one of Sega’s best-selling series and a live-action Amazon Prime adaptation, Yakuza has hit its golden age. If you look at the consistency of the team that created it, it was all part of the plan.

Yakuza, which debuted on the PS2 in 2005, centers around a legendary criminal named Kazuma Kiryu, diving into how he and the city he lives in change over the decades. His is a small world and the game feels intimate and quirky, like virtual toy boxes, where you can sit back and explore the streets of real Japanese cities, buy a coffee from the vending machine, hit a few balls at the batting cage, and then mercilessly beat a gang of arrogant thugs into the ground. These are games that are just as beloved for their zany humor and minigames as they are for their gripping character-driven stories.

The team at Ryu Ga Gotoku has managed to grow a sizable audience for Yakuza, without expanding the game’s virtual boundaries. A big part of this is due to the leadership of Hiroyuki Sakamoto, currently the chief producer, who’s been with the franchise since its 2005 debut and worked in various roles, including director and producer, on the franchise.

Sakamoto brings a refreshingly unique vision to the series that he comes by honestly — with a unique resume that includes everything from Super Monkey Ball to Binary Domain. Like Yakuza itself, it’s hard to pin down what constitutes Sakamoto’s special sauce. What we do know is from intimate storytelling to hilarious puzzles, an expanding roster of complex characters to lengthy sidequests, gamers are flocking to it. “Even though times have changed, we still cherish that spirit of service,” Sakamoto tells Inverse. That much is very clear.

NO MONKEYING AROUND

Sakamoto joined Sega five years before the debut of the Yakuza franchise, working on the team known as “Amusement Vision” when he was just 23 years old. His first role was working as an assistant planner on the Dreamcast version of the beloved arcade game Daytona USA (2000), a high-octane slot car racer that set a new standard for arcade racers, both in terms of graphics and gameplay. After that, he’d go on to help Toshihiro Nagoshi (the creator of Yakuza) develop Super Monkey Ball (2001), the incredibly successful series of platformers that delivered over two dozen spinoffs, including last year’s Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble. Soon after, he worked as director on Nintendo’s cult-classic racer F-Zero GX (2003).

With experience working on some very big hits, Sakamoto had the opportunity to try something completely different. In 2005, Sakamoto landed the role as the director of the overseas version of Yakuza, a new kind of game on the PlayStation 2 that was looking to compete with some of the biggest names out there. This was the exact same year that saw the first Shadow of the Colossus and Dragon Quest VIII. Yakuza needed to carve out its own identity, and the genuine sense of earnestness in its dramatic story and engrossing world is exactly what helped it do that. The game notoriously cast Mark Hamill as the deranged one-eyed yakuza Goro Majima, who became a quick fan-favorite and put this quirky franchise on the map.

At this point, Amusement Vision became known as Sega’s New Entertainment R&D Division, and from then on, its focus would be squarely on the Yakuza and Super Monkey Ball franchises. Sakamoto was an integral force in driving the creative design and expansion of the Yakuza franchise, from directing the Bakamatsu-era Samurai spinoff Ryu Ga Gotoku: Ishin, to producing the franchise’s big pivot into turn-based RPGs with Yakuza 7.

Over the next 15 years, Sakamoto and the studio behind Yakuza pumped out six Yakuza games, two remakes, and seven spinoffs, with little to no break, and even more astoundingly, no reduction in quality. Then, since 2020, we’ve seen the release of five Yakuza games and the spinoff Lost Judgment, almost all of which Sakamoto has worked on.

If all we do is remakes, there is a lack of freshness, so of course the priority is to create new works.

It’s a secret recipe that the studio has created, combining smart asset reuse with Sakamoto’s clear and effective planning that always puts the story first. “Basically, we start development by asking ourselves, ‘What kind of drama do we want to create?’” Sakamoto tells Inverse, “Once that outline is finalized, we start to work on the outline of the game content. And once that’s complete, the team discusses how to prepare resources for the game.” It might sound kind of like an obvious way to make a good game, but in an industry that’s obsessed with audience analysis, marketing trends, and monetizing … everything, it’s downright refreshing. And it works.

BUCKING THE TRENDS, LIKE A PIRATE

The recent release of Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is a perfect example of this vision in practice. The outline for that game was solidified behind the scenes when development on 2024’s Infinite Wealth was mostly complete. Infinite Wealth moved the series from Japan to Hawaii. Pirate Yakuza used the same setting and similar assets, meaning there was almost no time gap between the projects, with the development team seamlessly moving from one to the other. And the fact that Yakuza games tell continuous stories is a major factor.

“In short, it’s important to be able to set up a situation where output is always directed toward a product,” Sakamoto says, “However, this is only feasible in Like a Dragon because it is a series. For new IPs, this is not the case.”

That mentality of concise development has also played into the industry’s recent obsession with remakes, with which Yakuza has had its own fair share of success. Sakamoto directed the Kiwami remakes of Yakuza 1 and 2, which updated the classic PS2 games with modern engines, overhauled combat systems, and new story elements. Those games are easily some of the best remake work Sega has done, but even so, Sakamoto is wary of too many remakes making things stagnate.

“There is a possibility that we will continue to do remakes in the future. I think the reason they’re increasing in the industry as a whole is because there are many advantages to the production time, ability to brush-up quality, and reduces the risk of developing from scratch,” Sakamoto says, “On the other hand, if all we do is remakes, there is a lack of freshness, so of course the priority is to create new works.”

While Sakamoto’s focus has largely been on Yakuza, he did also work as lead game designer on the 2021 release Binary Domain, a cult classic sci-fi shooter about robots who can pass as humans.

Binary Domain was the first game developed under the new Ryu Ga Gotoku name, and only the second shooter ever made by the studio — with the first being 2011’s Yakuza: Dead Souls. Sakamoto served as lead game designer on Binary Domain, a game that implemented a unique gimmick where players could connect a microphone to issue audio commands directly to their AI allies, and speak to choose conversation options. Despite the more gritty sci-fi shooter feel, it retained the charmingly complex characters the Yakuza games have become known for.

When asked if RGG Studio could make something like that again, Sakamoto says, “I’m constantly thinking about making new games, my ideas are not always based on the Like a Dragon series, and I also give production advice to other IPs produced in the same division.”

KNOWING YOUR LIMITS

The Yakuza series's sharp rise in popularity has given it massive worldwide appeal, and while Sakamoto says this hasn’t changed the studio's approach from the “old days,” it has put more of an emphasis on the localization process.

“In the past, our approach was to release the original Japanese version first and then the localization six months to a year later, but now we are using simultaneous worldwide release as our standard, so it is important to be creative in the production process,” Sakamoto says, “I think our desire to do a good job with localization and have users around the world understand and enjoy how our content has taken shape. If I may venture to say, I would like to have some more people from overseas involved in the casting to make it even more exciting.”

The success of Yakuza’s localization is an especially notable fact considering the rather notorious English version of the first PS2 game, which cast Mark Hamill as Kiryu’s iconic frenemy Goro Majima, and dropped an F-bomb nearly every other line.

While Sakamoto’s approach to Yakuza has stayed the same all these years, it’s hard not to see how video games have grown and changed in the past two decades. The commitment to Yakuza’s unique identity is undoubtedly what has driven it to success, but Sakamoto says he and the team have toyed with other game styles in the past, including MMO-like ideas. But a commitment to storytelling is why these haven’t materialized.

“A limited world is quite important to the identity of the Yakuza series,” Sakamoto says. “Since the Like a Dragon series has been based in a downtown area and the drama of people who live there, we have been conscious of constructing the kind of setting and attractive characters we want to provide. If we had an open world, it would change the density of the drama, which is our specialty, and the game would have a different feel.”

In Sakamoto’s mind, the evolving technology around games will also inevitably change the way the studio has to make them — with one of those factors being the rise of artificial intelligence. But there’s a real wariness about how it could be implemented, and Sakamoto thinks the industry as a whole needs to be careful of that.

“The adoption of AI … will dramatically change production methods. That said, we’re still in the process of verifying which, if any, categories we might adopt,” Sakamoto says. “We must take responsible steps to ensure we can efficiently develop our games while respecting our development team and the kind of creative input that AI cannot replicate. We must balance the two.”

As technology advances and the needs of players evolve, so too will the way video games are made — but what’s truly astounding about Yakuza is how it retains the same rebellious spirit that’s been present since the very first game.

This is a series that went from fans having to create a petition in 2013 for Yakuza 5 to get an English release, to Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut being prominently featured in the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct. The fact that Yakuza is aggressively still doing its own thing, amidst that meteoric rise, is impressive.

Yakuza’s mix of crime drama, wild minigames, and bone-crunching combat is infectious — and fans clearly can’t get enough of it. But that breadth of experience all comes down to a core philosophy that Sakamoto has been running on since the very first game: providing real value for players. And that’s likely what’ll keep the series going for many more years to come. It’s a winning secret Sakamoto and Ryu Ga Gotoku stumbled upon 20 years ago.

“When we created the original Yakuza … we packed it with minigames and substories,” he says. “At that time, we realized how good the play value was, and we’ve continued to do so ever since. We said that anyone who buys this one piece of software would feel a sense of satisfaction.” That refreshingly simple vision in this day and age could seem downright radical — if it weren't so effective.