Sega’s Yakuza series is one that you’ve almost certainly heard of, whether you’ve dived into the world of Kiryu-Chan or not. This long-running action RPG series recently blew up in the West after years of being a mainly Japanese audience-focused title. For years, many English-speaking gamers were barely aware of the franchise’s existence. Now, as seen with the release of games like Yakuza: Like a Dragon, the series has become one of Sega’s global juggernauts.
That newfound popularity doesn’t mean that Western fans have gotten their hands on all there is to offer. There are two PSP Yakuza titles, (Black Panther: Like a Dragon New Chapter) and Kurohyō 2: Ryū ga Gotoku Ashura Hen (Black Panther 2: Like a Dragon Ashura Chapter), that were both released in Japan exclusively, with no official English translation in sight.
That was the case until John “AugmentedSmoke” (who asked Digital Trends not to use his last name) and his team, Team K4L, began chasing the goal of translating these titles for Yakuza’s new audience. That’s not an easy task when it comes to video games, which are a complicated tangle of dialogue and assets.
“There is definitely an art to it, which I think a lot of people don’t realize,” John explained when I spoke to him about the project. He explained why he’s putting the work into the Yakuza spinoff and talked about his fan-localization journey and what’s next for the team.
I got into working on fan translations pretty much for the sole reason of giving my friends the experience to enjoy games that I had already fallen in love with, but yet was out of their reach due to a language barrier.
This project started in February 2021 and just had its release recently on January 7, 2022. Usually, projects like this take a lot longer, but we’ve been lucky in that the talent and effort of our team has really sped up our progress.
Game preservation is extremely important to me and translation projects are definitely a big part of that. The fact that eventually people will be able to pick up this game at any time and enjoy it makes me extremely happy as it wasn’t exactly the bestselling game at its official Japanese release. Now, it has a second chance of people getting enjoyment from it.
There are quite a lot of technical issues that you go through when trying to translate a game like this. I would almost describe it as having the game trying to work against you at some points. It’s definitely not as easy as just inserting the English text into the files and calling it a day. You have to take into account the art assets, technical limitations, and then all the difficult parts of translating Japanese into English, as some things just do not make sense in a direct translation.
There is definitely an art to it, which, I think, a lot of people don’t realize.
The fan patch for Kurohyou 1 (which was incomplete, but still great) was finally released and a lot of my friends played it and some of them absolutely loved it. Initially, I decided that I was going to just write a vague outline of the game’s plot, then it became me editing English subtitles into the cutscene via video editing, and finally it eventually snowballed until it turned into what it is now.
There has been more interest than I was ever expecting and Yakuza’s newfound Western popularity definitely has something to do with that, I believe. Regarding an official localization, I would absolutely love it and would even help Sega in whatever way possible to make it happen.
Unfortunately, with it being a 10-year-old PSP game, I don’t feel hugely confident it’ll happen. But it would be a dream come true if it did.
Our next project is definitely doing a complete Kurohyou 1 translation, including minigames and other side content. There are definitely other things we are discussing, but so far we’ve only properly decided on following up with Kurohyou 1. There will be more projects after that though for sure!
You can keep up with Team K4L and its ongoing/future projects on its official website and via Twitter.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.