There are times in which you wonder how people manage to line up an unparalleled chain of blunders on the same product or franchise. This is one of such times.

Today Sega managed to put the final icing on the cake of blunders, clumsy translations, excessively late release dates and silly excuses that characterized the Ryu Ga Gotoku (Yakuza) saga in the west.

They’re going to release the game without english voice acting (that for many may be a blessing, mind you, but still it doesn’t help giving the game any kind of mass appeal).
They’re releasing the game with no marketing and promotion to speak of.
They are going to release the game more than a year after it’s release in Japan, and only one week before the japanese release of it’s sequel, managing, in the meanwhile, to nail exactly the same release date of Final Fantasy XIII, that will of course completely obliterate Yakuza 3 visibility-wise.

Could that be enough for the marketing geniuses that Sega happened to find in a random pack of potato chips? Not really.
In a recent interview with IGN (also reported by Kotaku), an unnamed “Sega Representative” said that certain elements that are peculiar of the Japanese culture wouldn’t “resonate” (uh?!) with the western audience and as such they have been arbitrarily removed. Read more