Yakuza, or Like A Dragon, or whatever you call it, has a lot of fans at TheGamer. The Judgment spinoff series is similarly beloved. Thus, it gives me no pleasure to report that a third Judgment game - which already felt decreasingly likely following years-ago legal issues between Sega and lead voice actor Takuya Kimura's talent agency - is almost certainly never coming.
In fact, there were rumours even before Lost Judgment released in 2021 that a prospective threequel had been internally canceled following those aforementioned legal issues. But the talented folks at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio remained fairly tight-lipped on it all until, of all things, an alleged interaction with a fan... way back in January.
Lost Sequel
Indeed, the interaction occurred a full seven months ago, during a franchise-themed event in Japan. By all visible accounts, the Like A Dragon fandom in the West was largely oblivious to the depressing tweet in question until today. First, here's the tweet:
"Wrapped up for now" might be some cause for vague hope (and it's worth bearing in mind that this is an AI translation, so there might be missing nuance), but I wouldn't recommend clinging to that. "They might show up as special guests in future works, though," the unnamed developer stated in reference to Judgment's fantastic cast of characters. At least there's a decent chance that we'll see more from them in other ways, but this is still a real blow.
And here's popular Western fan account Ryu News Ga Gotoku waking up to the same disappointing news that we did, with a similar seven-month grace period of blind, desperate, hope that Judgment wasn't finished:
I feel that wilted flower emoji, fam. Hopefully, Judgment and Lost Judgment will at least be given Switch 2 ports in the future, so that we can carry Yagami's memorable crime-solving exploits with us wherever we go. At least we're faced with no dearth of other spinoffs, like this year's Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii (which TheGamer's own Meg Pelliccio absolutely loved), and possibly the tantalizingly historic upcoming title, Stranger Than Heaven.
