When you think of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, your mind likely jumps to the Like a Dragon (formerly known as ) series. Sure, it does other stuff – 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Monkey Ball, for example, and some remasters of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Virtua Fighter games – but considering the studio has released a Yakuza game nearly every year since 2005, it’s very much known for it more than anything else. It’s what it does, it’s what iꦐt’s good at, and it’s what it’s best known for.

RGG Making Something New Is A Big Surprise

That might be why it was such a big surprise to see RGG announce what seems to be a completely new IP at last year. At the time, it was called Project Century, but it’s since been re-revealed as . Considering its codename and the fact that both trailers show the same protagonist three decades apart, I think 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:my initial theory about it being a time-tra🥂vel game might actually be right.

This might be the first time a theory I🅘’ve posted on this website is correct, which is very exciting for me, as I’ve gotten quite used to being wrong.

Let me preface this by saying that I’m actually quite excited to see what RGG is cooking up. We haven’t seen the studio make anything outside of its established IP, spin-offs notwithstanding, since 2018’s Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, which itself was based on an existing manga franchise, received middling reviews, but was fairly successful in Japan. The last original game before that was 2012’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Binary Domain, which received mixed to positive reviews and underperformed commercially, but is consid🐬ered by some to be a cult class💜ic.

Granted, that track record isn’t exactly promising. Yakuza is still by far the studio’s most critically and commercially successful IP, and diversions from what it’s proven to be good at haven’t really paid off. That said, RGG now has more experience and far more cultural clout, especially after the critical and commercial success of 2024’s . I also generally believe that studios should be allowed to use money from their successful franchises to branch out and experiment with different types of games, and Stranger Than Heaven does look different.

I know, I know, what 🎐a controversial take for me to have!

Can RGG Pull Off Drama Without Humour To Balance It Out?

As of right now, it’s hard to pin down exactly what the new game is about or how it plays. It looks like it might be a take on a detective game, having drawn aesthetic co🧜mparisons to RGG’s Judgment and Rockstar’s L.A. Noire, but it’s also got Yakuza’s brutal beat-em-up gameplay. It also seeming⭕ly has survival and simulation elements to boot – the protagonist has hunger and thirst meters, and items can cause consequences when you use them (smoking a cigarette apparently makes people furious at you). You can even make decisions during the game – maybe during combat? It’s unclear – as to whether to show enemies mercy or not.

Overall, it seems like Stranger Than Heaven is much darker in tone than any of the Yakuza games are, and that’s where my co♛ncern lies. As the Yakuza studio, my perception of RGG’s expertise lies in how it balances comedy and drama. A plot summary of any Yakuza entry will portray it as a self-serious, melodramatic game about underworld crime syndicates, unconscionable violence, personal redemption, and Japanese societal issues. Actually playing one will reveal that it’s full of riotous, campy comedy, often bordering on the absurd. The pleasure of the serie🅰s is in that juxtaposition.

But without that humour, the drama would feel heavy, self-indulgent, perhaps even conventional, which is the worst offence I can imagine from a studio as brazenly creative as RGG. It’s unfair to say that Stranger Than Heaven will be any of those things, considering it’s an unfinished game without even a release window, that’s likely in a different genre and tryi🧔ng to achieve something completely different.

But I do wonder. The studio hasn’t attempted anything similar in many years, and it’s hard to imagine a game coming out 🔯of it that pulls off m🧜elodrama without relying on its tried and true tactics. If RGG doesn’t stick to what it’s good at, I hope it redefines what it’s good at altogether and proves it can do serious stories as well as it can do anything else.