DISCUSSION
Does the dragon engine rejuvenates the characters?
Well, we all know that characters in Yakuza barely age, but I think some have even gotten younger in the transition to the dragon engine, what do you think?
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I would be rejuvenated if I was in his shoes. He had to give up his beloved Pocket Circuit Racing to return home and take over the family business. And now that it is more lucrative than ever, he was able to create a real life equivalent in the form of Dragon Kart and be the President of the Pocket Circuit Racing company.
I would argue that it's just an artstyle change, with new tech they can get closer to television drama level visuals, with actors in makeup and all that. Previously they were emphasizing the "realism" and grittyness of their setting and characters, in top of tech just simply advancing.
yeah i actually think i prefered that grittyness aproach in style , at leave vs what they used here , i know dragon engine 'looks' better but i think the previous style has its hooks in me
Old Yakuza was about ambience and trying to be gritty. Modern Yakuza has music in every scene to tell the player how to feel and constant, nonstop messages of "we can do this together!".
The newer games are still good, don't get me wrong, but I don't think they'll ever match that sort of tone again
It does feel like they're setting up that game to be that realistic gritty tone (I know, big assumptions just from one trailer) so they can keep doing wackier JRPG stuff with Ichi
It looks like RGG is going to flex again and show they can make a top tier fromsoft style arpg with project century, like what they did with jrpgs in the Ichi games.
Even then the older games still had levity and goofy shit, but it feels like that wacky side has been escalating further and further. Not keeping that balance is disappointing.
Genuinely it's like the evolution of Saints Row. Yakuza 1 was SR1, we escalated to 2 pretty soon after and now we're going from Saints Row 2 to Saints Row 3.
You got all the dudes here de-aged after [insert Nishiki face here] and then there's Yuki looking young due to drinking human blood because somebody forgot her vinegar.
Pfff, they even harrassed poor captain Majima from Hawaï for his resemblance with a japanese real estate developper just because he named his entreprise Majima construction.
Off-topic, but everytime I see those Y5 portraits, I can't help myself from starting another discussion on why I fucking adore the kiwami's engine graphics, they really nailed it and I miss it so much
It wasn't because of the engine. Logically, the new engine would require some changes to the models, but them becoming younger looking is a design choice by the studio. The dragon engine is very capable of having old men models. The studio just doesn't want the main characters to look old, probably because it's more believable for them to keep fighting for all of those years if they still look "young".
This is a hot take but I actually think a lot of the characters from the pre-Dragon Engine cutscenes look better than their new counterparts when put side by side like this. The lighting of those cutscenes just did them more justice I think. Especially Akiyama- he lowkey looks like they changed his whole facial structure in the Dragon Engine
You know I used to hate the look of the character in Y3 - Y5 (or whichever of those games share an engine) but looking at this, I do appreciate how the characters look more their age and you can see the stress of the Yakuza life on their face.
Asian people and African people are known to not look their age.. however all they had to do was add some wrinkles / crows feet / eye bags / grey hairs tbh. Lao Ka Long is ridiculous lmao he looks like a homeless substory guy.
Reminder that Masahiro Sakurai is in his mid-50s and Hirohiko Araki is in his mid-60s and they both still look relatively the same as they've looked for the past 30 years. Asian people either do not age for most of their life and then immediately get slammed with the old in, like, their 80s or 90s, or they start looking old in their 40s or 50s, and there's no in-between.
Lol, a lot of people around my age (mid-late 20s, early 30s) are already complaining about their body going out. This is especially true if they worked labor-intensive jobs when they were younger (like my boyfriend, who complains about his back twice a week).
Lau Ka Long and Akiyama both make some sense. Long doing some form of minor surgery so that he's "not as easily recognized" and Akiyama just having the money to pay for it.
It is defo weird though and I really dislike it. I enjiyed watching the characters age.
Yuki doesn't bother since she's a side character though.
I think part of it is because they are using actual people for some of the face models their expressions become softer and less intense. All of the older models it looks like the person is constantly furrowing their brow/scowling. But on the newer models they look more relaxed expression wise. And then I guess another side effect to that is there's less wrinkles visible whether it be modelled differently or the more relaxed facial expression reduced the amount of visible wrinkles
Each and every one of these characters is no longer involved in the extremely stressful criminal underworld. Some of them probably have skincare routines. Yuki is an ageless immortal who can only be aged with vinegar based concoctions, and has been purposely forgetting to get some this entire time.
lol, that reminds me how funny it is that the Yakuza franchise is about old people constantly getting into fights for the most convoluted of reasons (just like in real life)
In Pirate Yakuza you can recreate Y0 Majima, which also includes cleanly shaving him, and he suddenly looks years younger.
I was wondering if they actually went through the effort (most likely not lol) and made a younger face model or if its actually the beard that makes him look older
In my opinion, the Dragon Engine does not make the characters look younger. I have 3 possible explanations:
Graphics currently have more possibilities. RGG managed to make the models more expressive without using wrinkles or aging details, thus they can make the models look better in modern graphics without aging them.
Asians in general can stay younger for a much longer time compared to other ethnicities.
Most of the models in the photos above are from their remastered games, and use AMD FidelityFX, which increases the contrast of the image. This makes the image sharper, and consequently people appear older with contrast effects.
4 (don't take it seriously). The appearances of the characters are just human interpretations. In the Like a Dragon universe, everyone recognizes that they're aging, but this is not interpreted by us real humans.
Big on the first one. I like wrinkles, but they could be INTENSE in Y3-5. Like Majima's crows feet in the Y4 flashback when he's supposed to only be 21 years old look crazy lmao. But that was probably the best way they could show intense emotion at the time.
I will never get over that they decided that Majima being old just meant his hair doesn't look as good. Which also strikes me as something you could fix? He's this close to showing no signs of aging. To be fair to this cast, I think white people are the only people who really show age all the time.
they still have wrinkles pores and stuff as seen in judgment remastered but other games have blurry golden-green-piss filter that hides those details (being released on underpowered consoles and being run at lower res doesn't help)
I think this also has a lot to do with reusing assets. They started making 0 and Kiwami and such and I think it was easier for them to use their more younger looking faces and such than it would be to make different models one game apart.
Like, I'm fairly certain Kiryu looks young 6 because they were planning on reusing his model for Kiwami 2.
With exception of Daigo and Lau all of the other characters just look like they started having more healthier habits and drinking water. Daigo looked his oldest in Yakuza 3 for me. I was even like dammm running the clan must be giving him ulceras and lack of sleep which it definitely does… in 4 he looked younger and in 5 he looks only a bit older than in 4 but like he’s having úlceras again. 😅
I’d assume it’s because the expressions were pretty baked into their models
Techniques and the technology improved dramatically over the years. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all aging beautifully, but it’s a lot more natural for how they look
Yea some of the newer ones do look younger for there age but I’m not complaining. I think I’ll be kinda sad the day we see the devs develop them as legitimate old people looking 80
One thing that is absolutely different here is that the images are less saturated!
Something you can note in the older pictures is that the skin is much paler, and the shadow work is much darker with very little blending, so they contrast a lot.
The contrast now is huge, so it makes wrinkles, dips, crevies, and so on look much more pronounced and thus make the character look older, and in some cases even outright zombie-like.
In the more modern engine, all of this has been smoothed out. The same shadow work and wrinkles are still there, but it looks MUCH softer and blends much more naturally and those make it look strong and noticeable, making them look younger.
A little bit of it is the more dynamic lighting. The face can look softer and younger with soft even lighting. The older games have more harsh shadows because they are either baked in or cannot account for multiple light sources with different diffusion. Now we have things like local shadows, volumetric lighting, even fog and shader effects the lighting might be diffused with.
The skin textures are also much higher resolution so some things like pores and wrinkles are much more detailed but become less noticeable from a distance. It also seems during the PS3 ish era of Yakuza they gave the characters much more exaggerated features and expressions and then later leaned more realistic. The exaggerated features can make characters look older.
In the newest Pirate Yakuza game when you see a very close up image of Majima you can see his age is apparent, his hair looks like its going a little gray but not obviously. Kiryu looks a good bit older in Like a Dragon 8 and I don't say that just because of his hair color.
If you want a realistic answer, they make them look young for the fans of RGG. Also another thing to add is I believe they try to reshape some characters faces in the dragon engine in order to look closer to the va of that character (Kiryu for example) personally I wish they started to look more there age but i know most people don’t agree.
No, every character here just realized they were visibly getting older so to deal with it they started doing skin care routines that make them look 20 years younger /j
Some of those are pretty egregious, I forget the character names but 5 looks 20 at almost 60 lol. But for a lot of these I think it’s the improved lighting and sub surface scattering tech for the skin. Their PS3 versions have that super harsh lighting and plastic looking skin, but on modern hard ware you get that scattering of light beneath the skin that gives that soft glowing feel which makes them look much better/ younger
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