It looks as though one of the major announcements at next week’s RGG Summit will be Yakuza Kiwami 3, if a now-deleted bit of text on the official Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio website is to be believed.
As spotted by Redditor blubiboy98, a news listing for Yakuza Kiwami 3 (written in Japanese kanji, of course) appeared on the RGG website and was quickly deleted, but not before it was screenshotted by several users on social media platform X.
With the studio’s annual developer presentation due to air next week, it’s almost certain that Yakuza Kiwami 3 will be announced during that show, assuming that this listing wasn’t some kind of elaborate mistake or prank.
It would make sense for RGG to approach Yakuza 3 for the next installment in its Kiwami remake series; the game is now the oldest mainline Yakuza-slash-Like a Dragon title not to have been remade.
It’s not actually the oldest game in the franchise that hasn’t been remade, though; that honor goes to Ryu ga Gotoku Kenzan!, a spinoff that recasts Kazuma Kiryu as legendary historical figure Miyamoto Musashi.
If 2023’s Like a Dragon Ishin! is anything to go by, though, that game may well get itself a reimagining for modern systems as well, and that would arguably be even more valuable than a Yakuza 3 remake, since Kenzan! has never been released in the West.
Of course, it’s worth bearing in mind that all of this should be taken with a pinch of salt; RGG hasn’t officially confirmed the Yakuza 3 remake yet, so there’s still a chance (albeit a slim one) that the project will be absent from next week’s summit.
If Yakuza 3 does get remade, it may well debut as Like a Dragon Kiwami 3, since the series officially changed its name to Like a Dragon to match its Japanese moniker back in 2022. That’s why more recent titles, including the Prime Video TV series, have sported that name.
In any case, we’ll have to wait until next week’s RGG Summit to find out whether Yakuza Kiwami 3 is happening, as well as what else the studio has in store for us. Stay tuned for more.
