During the newest SEGA-Nama broadcast, Toshihiro Nagoshi, the general director of the Yakuza series, has revealed more information about the turn-based combat system of Yakuza 7.

„Since we’ve always done action up until now, doing action again and following the same system would honestly make it hard to come up with something that goes beyond what we already had. We wanted to do something new and fresh. The interface is still in development, so the appearance will change quite a bit. The tempo of battle is not quite the same as selecting multiple commands, then watching the battle unfold based on the actions you selected… More than pure action… it is quite close to the feeling of endlessly watching a battle between several people. It’ll take some getting used to, but there are some tricks here and there, and if you learn them, you can play with the same habit of playing an action game. If what you’re picturing is an old school command RPG, then that’s the wrong impression. This will be completely different. We’re not fans of the slow pace, so it is not our intention in the least to create that sort of thing. There is also an auto-battle feature. The AI is quite intelligent.

There are some crazy developments we can do that go beyond the limits of Heat Actions and such that we can accomplish because we’re making an RPG.

While we considered doing a hybrid of action and command, it would be the same as creating two titles and there wasn’t enough time for that. There is an action-like element where, after selecting a command, you can follow up with a final blow attack through additional button input. If a party member is near an enemy character when you attack, the party member will also join in on the attack. If you didn’t know what it was, you would think you’re playing an action game,” Nagoshi said.

The battles will start where we stand, so even the traffic could play a role, and our location might give us an advantage. The turns’ order depends on the characters’ stats, and thus, we might be interrupted in our attack by another enemy. We can even throw a bicycle at our enemies depending on our characters’ skills and traits, and there might also be attacks where we have to repeatedly press a button. These thoughts were shared by Masayoshi Yokoyama, the chief producer of Yakuza 7, on Twitter.

Yakuza: Like A Dragon (as that’s what this game is!) will launch in Japan on January 16 on PlayStation 4. It’s a question of the localization speed when the West will get the game in 2020, on PlayStation 4.

Source: Gematsu, Gematsu