Stranger Than Heaven director says RGG ‘intentionally’ forgot about Yakuza to create ‘something new’ — ‘Every single aspect of it, we started thinking about it from scratch, just to suit the style of Stranger Than Heaven’

Complete stranger Than Heaven director Mikinobu Abe has actually discussed why the upcoming role-playing action video game was established as an entirely brand-new experience from RGG Studio’s Yakuza franchise.

In an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Abe stated approaching Complete stranger Than Heaven was “a big task” and a “huge challenge for us,” Understood “from the very beginning that we wanted to make this experience different from the previous games.”

Unlike the Like a Dragon video games, which generally happen in one area and timeframe, Complete stranger Than Heaven shifts to a historic timeline by narrating throughout 5 unique periods and cities covering 50 years.

It’s an enthusiastic choice for RGG, however Abe stated the group purposefully forgot whatever it understood from making the Yakuza series to develop something brand-new.

“While we were developing Stranger Than Heaven, there was no conversation whatsoever about what Yakuza or Like A Dragon was like,” Abe stated. “We intentionally forgot what it was like in our previous games and started from scratch. We were doubting every single pixel of what we had in Yakuza.”

This consisted of whatever from the video game’s map, the UI, and how RGG wished to approach the world; Abe stated it even used to the story and cutscenes, and the group “never compared” Complete stranger Than Heaven to its previous titles.

“Every single aspect of it, we started thinking about it from scratch, just to suit the style of Stranger Than Heaven,” he included. “We were never trying to make this different because we never compared it with our previous games, so in the end, it became something new.”