Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi will step down from his role of Chief Creative Officer at SEGA, and will take up a new position of Creative Director. The news has been announced in a press release put out by SEGASammy Holdings, the parent company of the famous gaming division.
His resume covers more than the Yakuza series. He is responsible for numerous classics in SEGA’s long illustrious gaming history, such as Super Monkey Ball, Daytona USA, Binary Domain, and Virtua Strikers among others.
Nagoshi isn’t the only change within SEGA’s ranks. His move comes as a part of a wider suite of changes and restructurings within the gaming company. This change has largely been seen as a positive for fans of the Yakuza series, as this move will put him back closer to when he was actively helping develop games within SEGA.
The most recent game in the crazy Yakuza series, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, was released not too long ago, and it turns out that it’s really good. It’s the first in the series to experiment with a slightly more traditional combat system than its action-focused predecessors, choosing to have a hybrid-turn-based approach instead.
Nagoshi hasn’t been as hands-on with the series since 2012’s Yakuza 5, serving as an Executive Producer for the series since then. The series has found a lot more popularity in the West in recent years. Yakuza 0 back in 2016 was the first in four Yakuza games released within two years, during which the profile of the series took off as more people became aware of the… unique style of the series. Some of the Yakuza games have made their way onto PC, specifically Steam, for the first time, and recently, Microsoft announced that a number of Yakuza games would see their way onto Xbox Game Pass. Not a niche series anymore.