“Ever since the very first Yakuza on PS2, the Like A Dragon series has always tried to capture the cultural zeitgeist of Japan, reflecting and satirising whatever’s trending around when the game comes out. This means that the way people speak in Like A Dragon is constantly evolving to match the times,” says Dan Sunstrum, senior translator at Ryu Ga Gotoku’s localisation team. Keeping things current is, says Sunstrum, “a challenge in some ways but also means we’re justified in using modern English slang to match, whereas such modernisms might feel out of place in a game set in a completely fictional world.”

Sunstrum uses an example from the studio’s latest, RPS Bestest Best winning RPG Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, where permed protagonist Ichiban Kasuga meets a dating app designer. “The app’s creator goes on a mini-rant about ungrateful, entitled users, complaining how when anything goes wrong they’re quick to demand wabi-ishi,” slang for free premium currency. “This would have been a tricky word to localise, but it was made easy by the fact that fans of gacha games had already done it for us: they refer to them as ‘apologems’, and that’s what we ended up using in the game.”

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