Edit: Some corrections have been made to this article to accurately convey information found in the official trailer.
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has revealed Project Century.
Sega has revealed a new trailer for the upcoming title. The trailer clearly indicates it is set in the year 1915, but it isn’t quite clear if there will be a direct or tangential connection to the Yakuza / Ryu Ga Gotoku / Like A Dragon games.
It’s the latest expansion of the studio, since their success in bringing their Like A Dragon games to multiple platforms. In this year, they released Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. is set to release before this year’s end. They also recently announced Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, also coming in 2025.
It does look like Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is willing to stretch things further for Project Century, as we see a considerably greater amount of violence than even their Yakuza games. This may reflect the game’s setting, as Japan was in the early years of the Taishō era.
We can’t speculate on the specifics of what kind of story Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio will be telling here, since there really isn’t enough on here to go on. But we can confirm that even that long ago, yakuza organizations, as well as other entirely different criminal organizations, already existed and were quite active in Japan.
We also noticed that the trailer doesn’t have the side missions and mini-games that the Yakuza/Like A Dragon games are known for. That may be to be revealed later, but is it possible that Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is planning to make a completely different game this time?
The protagonist is unnamed, and doesn’t even face the viewer throughout the trailer. We instead are deliberately given a direct view of the protagonist’s jacket, which may have another meaning in relation to the game’s name and themes. After the trailer reveal, Sega did share a new image of the rough and tumble protagonist, fitting an Akira Kurosawa movie about the underbelly of Japanese society. And you can see that image below.
With Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio now emerging as Sega’s big AAA Japan based studio, it seems we should be looking forward to a new generation of games from them, for at least the next few years.
While the Yakuza games haven’t quite gotten as huge as the likes of Grand Theft Auto, they definitely have enough of a fanbase for Sega to grow. We’ll see if that is the direction Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is going for, or if it’s entirely something else. But in the meantime, you can watch the official reveal trailer below.
