US Yakuza 3 release will feature English voice-overs

Hmm.

That is terrible news!

Can’t you e-mail Sega and ask them nicely to clarify whether the Japanese voicetrack is still in there? (with subs of course)

My pre-order depends on it!

I just sent off an email to Sega, so expect something soon.

Why people seem to care about japenese translation ? i dont understand japenese and i think for the majority of the people who dont understand japenese its a good thing to know that sega will put an english voice over.

I know it brings out a lot of nerd rage when publishers do this, but I know of two people personally who wouldn’t look at Yakuza 2 because of the subtitling.

I think this move will likely help rather than hinder overall sales, although I personally hope both options are there, God knows there shouldn’t be any disc space issues.

I don’t really have a problem with this – I actually thought the dub added to the charm with the first game, though some of it was hilariously bad. But the guy who voiced Kazuma and a couple of others were excellent.

Having said that, I’d much prefer to have both options, because the sequel felt a little more authentic with the original voice track and subtitles. There’s no real excuse NOT to include it.

The English voiceovers in the original game were great, but somehow I don’t think Sega will be investing heavily enough in this one to have Mark Hamill, Michael Madsen and Eliza Dushku amongst the cast.

Precisely. They did the first dub fairly well, then cut it for the second to save cash. And as it turns out, the Japanese track suited the game to the ground. And I’d rather they went with that this time around than to try and do an English dub ‘on the cheap’.

I hope they make all the characters hair blonde and try to pass the game off as being based in the US. It was awesome when that happened in Disaster Report.

I’m ok with it as long as the subtitles are in there… and they don’t cut the hostess sections.

Yes, any sort of content-cutting is obviously completely unacceptable.

Personally, I think we should all just be thankful that this is happening *at all*, whether we end up with dubs or subs.

I got the impression the Sega bloke was just talking about the first game’s dub and there were some crossed wires.

I’m not bothered if they dub it, it would help sales – but I’m far, FAR more likely to buy it if it has a Japanese language option. It’s a Japanese game set in Japan with Japanese gangsters in a Japanese culture – for some reason I think the Japanese language suits it better ;P

Only a month ago they said on the PS blog that there will only be English subtitles, no voiceover.

I wonder do you have to play Yakuza 1 and 2 to understand this.

I’m guessing you won’t get the most out of it if you don’t – the stories all run into each other and many characters repeat throughout the series. I doubt it’d be impossible, though.

Heads up Radioheads: big news coming.

Top of the site in 5.

…weren’t people bitching in the last thread because about the idea of it being dubbed, calling it “lazy” on SEGA’s part? Now they’re bitching for the exact opposite reason?

You can please some people some of the time…

I know I was bitching that it WOULDNT be dubbed.. I will never understand the nerd obsession with loving japanese in Anime and VGs instead of a dub, terrible dubs just arent the norm anymore. The only movie I can think of off hand that I REALLY enjoyed being Subtitled was Letters from Iwo Jima.

I’ve edited “western” to US given the Sega Europe story. We’ll check with Sega US on the American version later.