12 Jul, 2021
0It looks like Lost Judgment will be the final game in the Yakuza spin-off series. Recently announced for a September release, SEGA had already started showing off new gameplay features for Takayuki Yagami’s detective mysteries in Yokohama and Kamurocho. Lost Judgment is slated for release on consoles, though there had been rumors and clues pointing to a possible PC port as well. Yakuza fan site The Tojo Dojo noticed the more official clues leading to a PC release, with SEGA having included Windows 10 and Steam on their list of platforms for Lost Judgment this fall.
However, it looks like SEGA’s commitment to PC has caused a rift with the agency behind the game’s main protagonist. Takuya Kimura is Yagami’s Japanese voice actor. Kimura is widely-known throughout Japan from his boy band days. But his band’s talent agency, Johnny & Associates, refuses to allow Kimura’s likeness anywhere near the PC. This runs in stark contrast to SEGA’s more recent embrace of the PC as a platform, with ports of the mainline Yakuza games arriving to Steam in recent years. Although Kimura himself has expressed a desire for Lost Judgment to head to PC, it doesn’t look like his talent agency will allow that to happen. With neither SEGA nor Johnny’s willing to compromise, Lost Judgment will be only the second and final game in the young franchise.
Despite the bad news, this doesn’t come as a surprise to longtime fans of the series. We had one clue early on about Kimura’s talent agency causing friction behind-the-scenes. The Yakuza games are known for their varied mini-games like karaoke, darts, pool, and arcade games of older SEGA titles. But even though Judgment continues that tradition, karaoke is noticeably absent from the first game in the series, again due to similar conflicts.
Based on their decision, it doesn’t seem like SEGA will find another way to continue the series without Takuya Kimura. So fans will just have to settle for enjoying Lost Judgment this fall, without much hope for a third game in the franchise.
Lost Judgment is set for release on September 21, 2021 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S|X.
