Stranger Than Heaven looks like a true magnum opus

As anyone who's taken so much as a brief look at the approximately ten million articles I've written about the Yakuza series, I'm a fan of RGG Studio's Yakuza games.

That said, I appreciate that the formula hasn't really changed since the very first game. You always play as a scowling guy in a disco suit trudging through the same shockingly detailed Japanese city doing (mostly) the same kind of stiff beat-'em-up combat in between karaoke breaks. For some, myself included, it's comfort food. Others have rightly pointed out that to outsiders, one game isn't much different from another, and the series as a whole has kind of stagnated.

Stranger Than Heaven, the studio's next game, looks like exactly the kind of evolution the Yakuza formula has been begging for. While the aesthetics will be immediately familiar to Yakuza players, and the game even takes place in the same universe, Stranger Than Heaven makes its ambition clear just from the pitch: following the life of a single man through a story spanning fifty years and five entire cities.

(And yes, that is Snoop Dogg.) More than just its scope, this is the first RGG game I can think of that looks truly next-gen.

Combat is more like Sleeping Dogs than Yakuza, placing an emphasis on reactivity and interaction with the environment in a way that looks as brutally bone-crunching as it does slick and cinematic — I have literally never seen melee combat look this good or flow this well in any game ever. Cities look alive, with crowds of people going about their early-20th-century business as protagonist Mako slips between streetcars and shogi players. All the intricate detail you'd expect from Yakuza's Kamurocho and more is here (as is Kamurocho itself as the game's final playable city, sporting a fresh 1960s makeover). We know where all the budget from Yakuza Kiwami 3 went now.

Yakuza has always been about grounding players with an immersive, street-level experience, far from the Michael Bay excesses of Grand Theft Auto. It's ironic that shedding the Yakuza name might be what lets RGG finally deliver on that promise.