Wasn’t sure where to put this random comment, but this seems as good a place as any — I am just amazed at the productivity of the teams working on the Like a Dragon / Yakuza franchise.
I’m not a fan of the series necessarily although I did enjoy my 20-ish hours with Yakuza 0 before I abandoned it. But with the accolades of Infinite Wealth and the building hype of Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, I feel like there’s been an enormous run of continuous releases that boggles the mind.
It prompted me to make an accounting and if I’m calculating correctly, there’s been 11 major releases in the series in the last 10 years.
That’s including spinoffs like Judgement and full remakes like Kiwami, Kiwami 2, and Ishin. If you include the remastered collection in 2020 of Y3, Y4, Y5 and also include Fist of the North Star (which I guess is technically a spinoff too, but seems less tethered to the series) then that’s a grand total of 15 new console releases on PS4 and PS5 in the last 10 years.
That’s more than one game per year, 1.5 games a year to be exact. Even though a portion of these are remaster or remakes, that’s just an amazing clip to sustain for one studio.