Then came the Yakuza series and the rest is history.īut now we come full circle. After his work was done for the first three VF games, he continued to work on other games such as Scud Race, Shenmue, Super Monkey Ball, and Nintendo’s F-Zero AX and GX. Daisuke Sato also worked on Virtua Fighter 3 as a Character Designer, even though he became a frequent collaborator with Nagoshi starting with Scud Race first. And lastly, he had two roles while developing VF3 he was responsible for the Character Modeling Direction and he was also the Supervisor. During the development of VF2, he was the Stage Designer. Nagoshi served as a CG Designer for the first Virtua Fighter game, as he became part of something great while working with Yu Suzuki in the AM2 division. Then in 1992, he worked on a couple of games for the Model 1 hardware, starting with Virtua Racing in which he was the chief designer for the game. His work contributed to several games such as G-LOC: Air Raid Battle and a console game like Rent-A-Hero. When Nagoshi joined SEGA back in 1989, he worked under the AM2 division.

But did you know that Toshihiro Nagoshi actually had some involvement with Virtua Fighter in the past during his 30-year career? It is true that VF2 and VF5FS have been part of the minigames that can be found in Club SEGA arcades in the main games, let alone having a two-player version of them in the main menu. Side note: Yakuza: Like A Dragon is a fun game, you should play it.īut I know what you’re thinking: “VK, what’s the connection between Virtua Fighter and Yakuza? We know about how VF2 and VF5FS are included in the Yakuza games!”

And just recently, Yakuza: Like A Dragon was released for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC, and PS4, while a PS5 port is on the way in March. There’s also two films that were released in Japan, but… we don’t talk about that. Since then, the franchise has spawned over a total of 18 releases, with 13 of them released in the West, 8 spinoffs, and two remakes.

It has a combination of crime drama yakuza films, action adventure, open-world sandbox, and action RPG elements all mixed into one, with a hint of some Japanese humor and culture included. On December 8, 2005, Yakuza (known as Ryu Ga Gotoku in Japan) was released for the PlayStation 2. Crazy, right? 15 years since Yakuza debuted as one of SEGA’s IPs from the mid-2000s. We all know December is Virtua Fighter month, but this month is also the 15th Anniversary of the Yakuza franchise.

Yakuza 6 virtua fighter 5