SegaShiro: Pure SEGA HARDCORE!

It is official – Yakuza 3 is coming to West with some cuts and alterations. The main sections being axed are the hostess bars and trivia quiz sections. The community team members are trying to do damage control letting gamers know that the cuts are superficial and the main cinematic focus is intact and the title now better fits a Western demographic.

However, the feeling from the fan collective that begged for the title is that the hostess bars were an integral part of the Japanese game experience. Many fans responded with outrage – gamers were avowing to cancel their orders and others raging against SEGA. Kotaku charged SEGA with underestimating their consumers.

What do I think? I wonder if there is a money issue at work in this situation…would SEGA have had to pay royalties for the likeness of all the leading ladies in the hostess clubs? Did contract negotiation fall through? Or did SEGA save a ton of cash but not translating those sections of branching dialogue?

Perhaps it is a different type of resource problem – perhaps SEGA only gave the western localization team a tight and limited budget to work with because of the poor sales of the earlier titles. IGN has trumpeted that the strippers are still in the game but strippers don’t really talk.

RubyEclipse cryptically writes:

“We wanted to confirm that there is some content in the Japanese version of Yakuza 3 that didn’t make it over to upcoming Western version, mostly involving the Hostess Clubs and the Japanese History trivia sections…Ultimately, the choice that had to be made was either no Yakuza 3 in the west, or a version of the game that was almost exactly the same, but with a little less trivia. That said, our teams also understand that many of you guys love games like Yakuza because of that experience, and rest assured that we’ll continue fighting on your behalf to make sure that going forward, we can provide as close to the full experience as possible – no matter how foreign.”

Check out the full SEGA blog post: here.

Fans don’t seem to ming the Answer X Answer Arcade machine cut but many are worried that Mahjong and Shogi will be cut as well. Sound off! What do you think? I still want to play the game but it is unfortunate that the experience of the title has been subject to strange edits.

_{[Source: SEGA]}

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