Sega Sets Yakuza: Of the End with a Release Date in Japan

After the earthquake that hit Japan, many games had gotten cancelled and forunately got delayed. One of which being Yakuza: Of the End (Ryu Ga Gotoku). Luckily, SEGA has now put a release date, which is June 9th for the land of the rising sun.

Please note that Sega has not yet announced any plans to localize the game for the West.

Yakuza + Zombies = Yay or Nay?

The wildly popular (in Japan) game series Yakuza is getting a new installment and... wait for it... zombies! Yep, that's about the level of enthusiasm I had when I heard this news. Now the Yakuza series is one of my favorite set of games ever, I absolutely adore them. The absolutely bizarre (yet able to be incredibly serious) story is a main platform of the series and I suppose zombies are strange.

Yakuza: Of The End, takes the fun beat 'em up gameplay of the former games and adds the undead hoards. Yakuza producer Masayoshi Kikuchi is reassuring in the fact that a zombie apocalypse doesn't equal the end of the Yakuza franchise and that in fact it was his idea to add the undead to the game series.

"We don't want to stop the Yakuza franchise. In terms of making entertainment, we're deadly serious," Kikuchi said of the bizarre addition. "We want to have the ability to branch out and create new game experiences [with Yakuza.] We've done it in the past with Yakuza Kenzan, a samurai themed game. Making differently themed games is our challenge to create new types of entertainment."

The series lead Toshihiro Nagoshi commented a while back that the protagonist Kazuma Kiryu would at one point travel into outer space and fight zombies. At least one of these is true.

"For all we know, Kiriyu might become a kindergarten teacher in the next game," Kikuchi joked.

"We want to continually challenge [ourselves] to make improvements to the series," he added. "We want to spread the Yakuza franchise into different genres." Kikuchi hasn't said if "Of The End" will be part of the stories cannon or not.

Now as I stated the Yakuza games are among my favorite of all time, even so though I feel we may be reaching the drowning point with zombies. Now I love zombies as well, the original "Night of the Living Dead" holds a special place in my heart for helping shape who I am today, but I do feel that (at least in video games) we are becoming over saturated. It seems that every game coming out needs to include zombies weather it makes sense or not. Games like Dead Rising or Left 4 Dead are fine, I can get behind those but things like the CoD Nazi Zombies (which apparently I stand alone for in hating it) or Infection mode in the Halo series or countless other game have no reason to add the shuffling spooks.

So what do you people think, are there too many zombies? When is enough, enough? While you all ponder this I'll go back to counting the days until Yakuza 4 gets it's U.S. release.

Source: Kotaku