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#JUDGEMENT GAME PC SERIES#

Supposedly, their issue with PC as a platform is that it’s always connected online (which is weird, because so is every other platform, as is the cloud-based Stadia, which got Judgment Remastered just a few months).

What Johnny’s seems to have an issue with when it comes to Judgment on PC, though, is still not entirely clear, but easily gleaned nonetheless. He used to be part of the former by band Smap, though things fell apart when three of the by band’s members left the agency in 2017, followed by another departure in 2020, with Kimura now being the only ex-Smap client at Johnny’s. They’ve even refused to allow photos of their clients from press conferences to be shared online in the past, while as Kotaku’s recent report on the whole Judgment issue points out, Kimura himself has also been at least tangentially involved in conflicts with the agency in the past. As a 2018 report by Music Times explains, Johnny’s hasn’t really embraced the whole internet thing – which feels weird to say in 2021, but it is what it is – to the extent that they didn’t even have a YouTube channel until 2018. The talent agency is, of course, protective of its clients and its own interests- but a little bit too much, some might say. Undoubtedly, his involvement in the game helped significantly with the game’s popularity and performance in Japan. Kimura is one such star- he’s a big name in Japan who commands a lot of star power, and getting him to provide his likeness, voice, and performance capture for the role of Judgment protagonist Yagami was a big get for RGG Studio. And what exactly is the issue? The agency in question – Johnny and Associates – has a lot of influence in the Japanese entertainment industry, and has a lot of big stars on its list of clients. So of course, Takayuki Kimura’s talent agency throwing a wrench in the works when it comes to PC releases for Judgment is an issue for Sega. The Japanese publisher has said that it wants to do more global simultaneous launches going forward, more multiplatform launches, and that with all of that put together, it expects its bigger games to sell 2-3 million copies each, at the very least. PC has quickly become an important platform for Sega as a company, and sure enough, of late, it’s become clear that they intend to make much smarter decisions with their biggest releases going forward in order to capitalize on the sudden global popularity of their major franchises like Persona, Yakuza, and by extension, Judgment. Of late, Sega has been actively bringing some of its biggest games to PC, which includes not only Persona 4 Golden, but also pretty much every mainline Yakuza game there is, and the commercial performance of every one of those releases ( Persona 4 Golden in particular) has finally shown Sega the thing that fans have been clamouring about for years- that there’s big demand for their games on PC, and that by not bringing their biggest games to the platform, they’re basically leaving money on the table. Exactly what the hell is going on with Judgment?Įssentially, it all comes down to a distribution dispute- Sega wants to sell Judgment on PC, but the talent agency for Kimura doesn’t want that happening. What exactly is the issue here? Sega and RGG Studio both clearly have big things planned for Judgment as a series, so yeah, this report definitely does seem like it’s coming out of nowhere. A recent published by Japanese outlet Nikkan Taishu has suggested that a dispute between Sega and Johnny and Associates, the talent agency for actor Takuya Kimura, who plays the role of Judgment protagonist Takayuki Yagami, has presented a pretty major hurdle for the series, and that as such, Lost Judgment might end up being, well, the last Judgment.īut let’s pause, and go back to the beginning.

And Judgment, too, was unsurprisingly great, enjoying enough critical and commercial success to warrant a sequel, which releases later this year.īut if recent reports are to be believed, the spinoff franchise’s future might not be entirely assured.

#JUDGEMENT GAME PC SERIES#

But even so, developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has one feet planted firmly in the past to appease long-time series veteran, in the form of Judgment, which adopts a formula that hews much more closely to the Kazuma Kiryu era of the Yakuza games. After having spent nearly a decade as a brawler action series, Yakuza recently reinvented itself as a Persona-style turn-based RPG with Like a Dragon, and to say the very least, it was a successful reinvention.

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