I'm about 1/3 of the way through, and loving it. I was dreading the localization, as I've heard how laughably bad it is, but I find that's not the case at all. I mean, there are a lot of F-bombs dropped all over the place, which I guess is not very Japanese, but then the Japanese way of subtly insulting your enemy might not carry a lot of weight in the West. Either way, disregarding the actual script, the specific voice performances are top notch, by every character I've come across so far; I'd say on par with Persona 3/4. Fun fact: Majima is voiced by Mark Hamill, and he absolutely kills it. "Kazuma is my friend! I'm the only one who gets to kill him!" Very Joker like, not surprisingly.

Love the game. The only thing that was frustrating me was the stiff and inflexible fighting system, especially when you're surrounded and can't change directions mid-combo. Thankfully I've unlocked a backwards attack that have made the combat scenarios a lot more manageable.

Anyway, just wanted to pipe up and let anybody on the fence know that they shouldn't let rumors about "bad voice acting" keep them from this game.

I bought this game for Michael Madsen.

I mean - so far he's had a very tiny role. Does Shimano get more screen time later in the game?

@joques: I absolutely loved the dub of the first Yakuza game. It's so over the top and ridiculous I played the entire game with a huge grin on my face. The street thugs especially made me laugh with their creative usage of "fuck you fucker" and the like.

I don't think people ever said anything bad about the English VO. Its just that it was expensive to do and no one bought it.

What this dude said. When people complain about dubs it is usually in the context of foreign films, not video games. With a film you can actually see the difference in lip movement and english-dub voice actors have to change the speed of their normal speaking voice, add weird pauses, and speak with affectations, all to minimize the difference in lip movement from the source material. This takes you out of the experience because your brain sees this as something false, sort of like an uncanny valley situation.

Having played Yakuza 2 first, it was just real hard for me to go back to the first one. But I usually have the same issue with anime too, whatever language I hear it in first usually causes the dub or subtitle version afterward to be less enjoyable.

I thought the dub for this game was bad but I got over it at some point.

I guess YMMV; I have seen a lot of hate towards the dub.

I've played Yakuza 1,2 and 4 now.

The dub in 1 is serviceable, but the delivery felt really stilted and choppy to me (voices are good though). In comparison to 2 and 4, where those just felt more organic. That's often a problem I have in older animes, where the tech/knowledge around dubbing was a lot less. Nowadays dubs are fantastic, but older stuff is hit n miss. Plus, Sega wanted to save money bringing these over due to how they were selling (I'd bet), as they used some massive names at the time to dub characters (Mike Madsen, Eliza Dushku, Mark Hamill, etc).