Yakuza 7 launches in Japan in January and introduces turn-based combat

Yakuza 7: Whereabouts of Light and Darkness will be released in Japan on January 16, 2020 for the PlayStation 4. It will also be released in the West later that year. A notable change from the previous installments is the introduction of a turn-based combat system.

From the official Japanese Yakuza 7 website, which Gematsu has published a translation of, it appears that there is a new protagonist in the game: Ichiban Kasuga. He is released from prison after eighteen years and has to work his way up. For the first time in the Yakuza series, that doesn’t happen in the setting of Kamurocho, a zone based on a part of Tokyo; in Yakuza 7, the Japanese city of Yokohama is the scene, specifically the area of ​​Isezaki Ijincho. This game world would be three times the size of Kamurocho’s.

The most striking innovation is the addition of a turn-based element to the battles, which is fairly similar to the system of, for example, the game Persona. Sega describes it as a combination of the typical action from the Yakuza series combined with an RPG command system. This means that commands must be given via a kind of pop-up menu. The Japanese Game Watch has on Twitter a short video published on its operation.

Based on a now-deleted Twitter post from Sega, Gematsu reports that the Western version of the game will be released under the title Yakuza: Like a Dragon. That is also the title of a Japanese film released in 2007 that is based on Yakuza released in 2005 for the PlayStation 2. When the new Yakuza game will be released for Europe and the United States is still unknown.