Why do the Yakuza series seem so cheaply made "low funded"

[Htiud47]

A few details missing here and there, shortcut animations, skipped voice acting and a few other details.

[Májkrémes kenyér]

Cause the series was not very popular before zero and they made 7 mainline games less than 10 years. In yakuza 6 everything is voice acted and looks amazing with the new engine

[Street]

Originally posted by HitDude47:

A few details missing here and there, shortcut animations, skipped voice acting and a few other details.

Because. Don't like - don't buy.

[Sedgendary]

You have to remember Yakuza originally came out on the PS2, it is also a game of niche appeal so the budget is a lot smaller than a AAA game. Also a lot of people that play these games want more content over presentation so that is where the resources go

[Nish-Ki]

The cutscenes say otherwise. It's pretty well detailed series, even back on PS3.
Y3 was at the time the best looking game out there. Back then encounters where like old school RPGs where the area would load for a fight. Not Dynamic like now.
This game however got a "copy paste" feel to it cause of Y0, It's still really good looking imo

[tadzio]

it's beacuse it is cheaply made, my dude. it's a niche game for a niche market. but the fact that it's cheap BUT it's so good makes it even more impressive; these games have waaaay more polish than 90% of western "triple A" games. it's proof that you don't need hollywood-level budgets to make engaging stories, TONS of content and fun gameplay. embrace the series for what it is!

[Killer Killer]

I wouldn't say it's "Cheaply-made".
But obviously it won't be as flashy as "AAA" games. It still has a charm that makes this game unique to most games on the market.
Yakuza is probably the only open-world game that I've played where I don't feel mad about being restricted to just a small section of a large town.

[lPaladinl]

Originally posted by Dels Kibara - Twitch:

I wouldn't say it's "Cheaply-made".
But obviously it won't be as flashy as "AAA" games. It still has a charm that makes this game unique to most games on the market.
Yakuza is probably the only open-world game that I've played where I don't feel mad about being restricted to just a small section of a large town.

It's literally cheaply made. As in it's a low budget series. Many of the games didn't even sell for $60 retail and were $40 or less. I mean they didn't even bother to try and sell them on PC above $20 now.

The scenes with no dialog? Literally saving money. They use a lot of animation techniques to keep costs low, similar to Anime.

That doesn't mean the game feels 'cheap' as in bad, though. Personally I can see there's a lot of love put into the series and that's honestly why it's so good. They're doing a lot with very little and making the most out of it.

There's also some very impressive details on specific things despite them trying to keep costs low.

[Johnnius]

Originally posted by lPaladinl:

Originally posted by Dels Kibara - Twitch:

I wouldn't say it's "Cheaply-made".
But obviously it won't be as flashy as "AAA" games. It still has a charm that makes this game unique to most games on the market.
Yakuza is probably the only open-world game that I've played where I don't feel mad about being restricted to just a small section of a large town.

It's literally cheaply made. As in it's a low budget series. Many of the games didn't even sell for $60 retail and were $40 or less. I mean they didn't even bother to try and sell them on PC above $20 now.

The scenes with no dialog? Literally saving money. They use a lot of animation techniques to keep costs low, similar to Anime.

That doesn't mean the game feels 'cheap' as in bad, though. Personally I can see there's a lot of love put into the series and that's honestly why it's so good. They're doing a lot with very little and making the most out of it.

There's also some very impressive details on specific things despite them trying to keep costs low.

For me part of the charm is the slight wonkyness and reuse of certain animations, maybe I'm in the minority?

[Tr0w]

It doesn't feel low budget or cheaply made to me, there's far more attention to detail than you'd get in most AAA releases. Take the signs outside shops or the food isles and magazine racks in stores for example, they all look like the real deal while in most games all you'd get is a random blurry image. The voice acting is also leaps and bounds better than most AAA titles, especially Western releases. And the way everything is set in Kamurocho, it's like Dragon Age 2 but if Dragon Age 2 wasn't terrible.

[MeatShake]

It's not being cheap it's called not wasting money. Do you consider Mass Effect "cheap" because they didn't bother to animate every single action and script out every scene and instead used preset animations?

A single animation can take a very long time to produce. Voice acting can require many takes and if you want the game to have multiple languages you either settle for subtitles or increase the VA budget tenfold.

Even AAA titles with massive budgets use similar cost cutting measures. Devs ask themselves "what will a player notice?" "where will their eyes go in this scene?" because they want to only put as much effort as is needed for the average player to be content. If you're gonna play the game with such massive expectations you might just wanna lay in bed, close your eyes, and render every silly detail in your own mind my dude because no company on earth's gonna meet your expectations.

[Annie T. Mood]

>niche
>one of Sega's best-selling franchises today
Hope you all meant niche outside of Japan.

Originally posted by 󠀡Ni-K-Sha:

This game however got a "copy paste" feel to it cause of Y0, It's still really good looking imo

The entire series is also just copying its previous release in some way or another; Kiwami copied 0, 0 copied 5, 5 to 4, and 3 to Kenzan. Don't know much about the PS2 releases.

[Achi]

its not cheaply made. they just make a lot of these games in a short amount of time so they take shortcuts

[LArc7thHeaven]

Read the wikipedia page of yakuza, they had one year development cycle that causes them to cut corners or recycle stuff, but from yakuza 6 onward they ditch the one year development cycle in order to polish / add more content to the game

[Mhmmm]

Because they don't have huge AAA budget, look at the amount of assets they reuse...

[Tr0w]

@Mhmmm The hilarious thing about that though is that i don't really notice it unless i'm going out of my way to notice it. Compared with say, so called Bioware AAA budget games like Anthem or TOR where the same assets, and exact same layouts are glaringly reused over and over and over and over.
All AAA budget means these days though is hundreds of millions spent on Ads/marketting.