Yakuza 7 Announced With Turn-Based Combat

Yakuza+7+Announced+With+Turn-Based+Combat

Just recently, Sega held a press conference in which they answered questions about their newest title, Yakuza 7. However they released a surprising twist: Yakuza 7 is ditching their usual beat-them-up action for turn-based role-playing game mechanics. A screenshot of an encounter from the game’s official website shows JRPG-like headshots of Kasuga and his companions, along with health bars indicating their remaining life.

Yakuza 7: Whereabouts of Light and Darkness, as it’s known in Japan, will bring with it other big changes. Our protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga, is a yakuza who spends 18 years in prison after taking the fall for his boss’s crimes. After being abandoned by his friends and family, even after his own boss, Masumi Arakawa, attempts to murder him — Kasuga finds himself in Yokohama, the setting of Yakuza 7. The presentation has also revealed that the story spans from 2000 to 2019, and the game’s website even has a button that lets you flip between Kasuga’s old and new looks.

Surprisingly enough,  Sega first showed off Yakuza 7’s turn-based battles back in April, in what was widely assumed to be an April Fool’s Day joke. According to The Wall Street Journal’s Takashi Mochizuki, the Yakuza team wanted to try something new and is hoping that fans will welcome the change. That said, the studio is open switching back to the old action combat format for future games. Yakuza 7 is coming to PlayStation 4 in Japan on Jan. 16, 2020. A Western release, under the name Yakuza: Like A Dragon, is set for later in 2020.