What we don’t understand is why SEGA and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio don’t port the original PS2 game to the new platform, as it seems to us that the Japanese publisher wants to erase the past around the franchise…

Yakuza, the first installment of SEGA’s critically acclaimed action series, gets an extreme remake in Yakuza Kiwami. To save his best friend, Kazuma Kiryu takes the fall for a crime he didn’t commit and ends up serving a 10-year prison sentence. Upon his release, Kiryu finds himself exiled from his yakuza family and alone in a world he no longer recognizes.

Events take a turn for the worse when 10 billion yen disappears from the vault of the Tojo Clan, Kiryu’s former yakuza family, sparking a war in the red-light district of Kamurocho. Together with a mysterious girl named Haruka, Kiryu must fight to survive and uncover the truth hidden amidst the chaos surrounding them.

So it’s Yakuza Kiwami coming to a new platform. Originally released for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3, it was released in Japan on January 21, 2016 and in the West on August 29, 2017, but the PS3 version was not localized. It was released on PC (on Steam) on February 19, 2019, on Xbox One on April 21, 2020, and on Amazon Luna on December 22, 2022. What is the new target platform? Not the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series (which will retain backwards compatibility), but the Nintendo Switch. (Why didn’t SEGA wait until its successor was announced? It would simply be easier to run on it…)

The Big N’s hybrid platform will only get Yakuza Kiwami digitally, so there won’t be a retail version. It’ll only be available via the Nintendo eShop for $20. The release date isn’t too far away either: it’ll be coming to Nintendo Switch on October 24.

Source: Gematsu