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I’m still seeing people misunderstanding what Shin Ryu ga Gotoku is in general, so I want to try and clear things up a bit. When Ryu ga Gotoku Studio first announced the new series a year ago, things got a bit garbled and confused, even in Japan. The problem in the west is that that initial confusion kind of stuck, and when better information came out, it either got overlooked, or I don’t know. And it’s confused even more by people replacing “Ryu ga Gotoku” in the titles with “Yakuza”. So please allow me to explain.

 

Some of this information comes from articles in the latest issue of Famitsu Weekly (which I’ll be posting soon), some of it is in interviews I’ve translated before, and some of it is information I’ve just picked up over the last year. All from Japanese sources.

Trust me, this is how it is.

新・龍が如く始動　龍が如くONLINE

The text above is what the image at the top of this post says. In English it says New Ryu ga Gotoku begins, Ryu ga Gotoku Online. The dot between “shin” and “ryu ga gotoku” denotes a space, a separation between words, and means that “new” refers to “ryu ga gotoku” as a whole, and not just to “ryu”. So it’s not “like a new dragon”. It’s “new Like a Dragon”. Or “new Yakuza”.

Shin Ryu ga Gotoku is the overall name for the new Ryu ga Gotoku series. Also referred to as the Shin Ryu ga Gotoku Project. In English, you could call it the New Yakuza Project, or even just the new Yakuza series.

Ryu ga Gotoku Online is the first game in the Shin Ryu ga Gotoku Project.

Kasuga Ichiban is the protagonist of the new series. He’s the lead character in Ryu ga Gotoku Online, and in the next console game. In English, he’ll be called Ichiban Kasuga, but I’m sticking with Japanese character names in Japanese order.

The next console game does not have a title yet. Famitsu says it has the working title Shin Ryu ga Gotoku. So it might be called New Yakuza in the west, or it might not. But it won’t be Ryu ga Gotoku 7 or Yakuza 7 – Yokoyama, the series’ chief producer, says the numbered series is over.

Shin Yakuza: I’ve seen a lot of people using this phrase, but it really only adds to the confusion. I get they’re just using “Yakuza” as a translation of “Ryu ga Gotoku”, but then they end up using “Shin Yakuza” to refer only to the next console game, and treating it as a completely separate thing from “Yakuza Online”, which it really isn’t. It’s just saying “New Yakuza”, after all. Just think of it as “the new Yakuza series” or the “New Yakuza Project”.

The story: The Ryu ga Gotoku series has always proceeded in line with real time, and the new Ryu ga Gotoku series is no different. What is different is that Ryu ga Gotoku Online and the next console game will cover the same time period – or the same part of the story, at least. The backstory is the same, at least some of the characters are the same, but the stories “branch off along the way”. Yokoyama’s being cagey about the details, of course, but he’s said that the day before Ichiban agrees to go to prison for Arakawa, different events happen in each game, and the consequences change things in Ichiban’s future. Ryu Online will show one version, the console game will show another. At least for now, it seems they’re both going to be considered equally “canon”, as it were. It’s a bold move, but I think I like it. Though it’s also occurred to me that it could be something as simple as Ichiban doing something that means he gets a longer prison sentence in the console game, so that he can get out in 2019 – or whenever they decide to release it.