Next Yakuza Spin-Off Has A Playable Sega Master System

The Yakuza games have long featured playable versions of classic Sega games, but they’ve normally come in the form of arcade classics. The upcoming Lost Judgment, though, is taking things back a little further in time.

While the arcade cabinets have been a sneaky way to preserve old arcade games, and even a surprise home to entire Xbox 360 ports, Judgment’s sequel is dropping a vintage Master System in Yagami’s office to replace the crappy pinball machine from the first game. You can see it in action below (4:06 if the video doesn’t skip straight to that part).

That first menu screen you see isn’t a game selector, it’s an options screen where you can do stuff like read the manual and, interestingly, change the region of the game, presumably between the Japanese and Western versions. You can also pause the game from here, because if you’ve never used an original Master System before, its pause button was bizarrely located on the console itself, and not on the controller!

The first game we see briefly in the video is Penguin Land (aka Doki Doki Penguin Land Uchū Daibōken) before actor Takuya Kimura (who plays Yagami in the games, providing both his voice and facial model) settles in for some Alex Kidd.

Lost Judgment is the upcoming sequel to 2019’s Judgment, a game I liked very much because, well, it was a lot like Yakuza, only slightly different in ways that still made it excellent.

Now, in 2024, it’s got a bit more to differentiate itself, since it will retain the Yakuza series’ traditional real-time action combat system that the main series has now ditched in favour of turn-based battles.

Lost Judgment is due out on September 2024 on pS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. And no, I don’t know why they’re not also bringing it to PC either.