Sega announced yesterday that a demo for Ryu Ga Gotoku (Yakuza) 4 will be released with next weeks’ PlayStation store update. This will precede the western relesae of the previous game by a week – once again putting the two games in different regions at each others heels.
The RGG4 demo will for now only be available on the Japanese PlayStation store starting March 5th – a couple weeks before that game’s release in Japan. It will start out the story of one of the new characters.
In the main part of the demo, players will take the role of a loan shark in series hotspot Kamurocho named Shun Akiyama (pictured above) and play through the beginning of his story. Like the Yakuza 3 demo recently released on western PlayStation stores, this one will have a few minigames.
The Hostess Club JeweL – different from the one that didn’t make it into the western Yakuza 3 demo, will be included along with Karaoke. The arcade in the demo will include the UFO Catcher game that has been in every Yakuza game, something called Answer x Answer, and the sequel to the Boxcelios shooter that’s in the Yakuza 3 demo.
Totally new in the RGG4 demo however will be the ability to visit a hot spring and play table tennis with a hostess. Aside from Akiyama’s story, the RGG4 demo will also include a bit of the game’s battle mode which will let players try out all four of the full game’s playable characters including series protagonist Kazuma Kiriyu.
For non Japanese PlayStation 3 owners, getting the demo only requires a Japanese PlayStation Network account. Sega lists the demo as being 1.78 Gigabytes in size.
In all ways, RGG4 is coming right on top of the western release of Yakuza 3. Yakuza 3 will be released on March 9th in North America – a week before RGG4’s March 18th launch in Japan.
Sega hasn’t announced any plans to launch RGG4 outside of Japan. The franchise’s future in western territories has been on shaky financial ground from the beginning.
Yakuza 2 took two years to be released in North America and the spinoff Kenzan was never localized. After only recently being confirmed for any kind of English localization, Sega Europe’s blog announced that content will be cut from the western release of Yakuza 3 because they couldn’t afford to localize it all. These diminishing returns could give RGG4 an even worse chance for English localization.
