Movement To Remove Voice Actor Who Has Admitted To Sexual Assault Has Yakuza Fans At Breaking Point

For over 20 years, Like A Dragon has been a video game saga of earnest, positive masculinity wrapped in a tacky suit, a story about men who protect the vulnerable even if it means tearing said suits clean from the lapel to brandish the unshakable values inked on their backs. The values of its developer, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, garnered it decades' worth of goodwill. But lately, its fandom feels that RGG Studio has lost its way in the lead up to the release of Yakuza Kiwami 3, especially after the studio’s refusal to dismiss a voice actor who has openly admitted to sexual assault.

Yakuza Kiwami 3 is the latest remake in the Yakuza series. Despite being the remake of a game plagued with the sentiment of being “the bad one,” teeming with promise to change fans' minds with a new coat of paint, the vibes around this remake have been rancid, not least because of the widespread calls to remove the voice actor Teruyuki Kagawa. 

Since last November, Yakuza fans have been steadfast in an online movement, posting comments on Kiwami 3’s promotional social media posts, demanding that RGG Studio remove actor Teruyuki Kagawa from the cast as one of the game’s big bads, Goh Hamazaki. As detailed by Polygon, the #RemoveKagawa movement stems from accusations that the actor sexually harassed two women and an alleged third victim in 2019. He later admitted to forcibly kissing, groping, and removing the bra of one of the women. Polygon also notes that a second accuser of Kagawa alleges she never received an apology from Kagawa. Yet despite the stark controversy, Sega and RGG Studio have not addressed the movement in any capacity—a deafening silence when put to the backdrop of the game in full promotion rollout on social media. However, fans have said that  allegedly RGG Studio and Sega have removed comments from YouTube livestreams calling for Kagawa's removal. 

In a January interview with Japanese news site GAME Watch (which was independently translated by IGN) Yakuza Kiwami 3 director Ryosuke Horii justified RGG Studio decision to cast Kagawa as Hamazaki because they felt he'd be believable as a creep.

"Hamazaki is a sleazy, persistent, and militant yakuza, right? Since he isn't an explosive character like Kanda, when we tried to think of someone who makes you go, 'This guy's a creep,' naturally it was Kagawa—that was the main factor," Hori said. "Kagawa's acting is fun to watch. Even when he's chopping a pig's feet off with a chef's knife, it has a slimy feel. That feeling permeates his performance, so it brings a freshness to the scene and made it feel really fun."

Although RGG Studio believes fans will get a kick out of seeing Kagawa's portrayal Hamazaki, speaking to a swath of longtime Yakuza fans and writers, the vibes are pretty sour, with many feeling they’re on the cusp of asking whether they can still support the series anymore.

One person firmly done with contemporary Yakuza games is game critic Ashley Schofield. While writing her Kiwami 3 review, she told me she’s had to mull over how much space to give to voicing her pessimism about the state of RGG Studio in her review.

“And I get to the bottom, I'm like, also, you shouldn't fucking buy this game. I don't give a shit how good it is, I don't give a shit how bad it is, you just should not buy this game,” Schofield said. “I think Kagawa is the single worst choice—and it is a deliberate, knowing choice— that RGG has ever made. It is just incomprehensible and unforgivable.”

“There's the ongoing joke, and it's not even entirely a joke, of people saying Kiryu would beat Kagawa to death in the street, and they're right,” she added. “There's a real dissonance between what these games have traditionally stood for, and what is currently happening now. There's this idea that RGG doesn't really know what their games are about. It’s fucking crazy.”

“In a word, it’s grief,” Yakuza/Like A Dragon Wiki “Chairman” Masu told me. “If you’re a longtime fan or even if you can see yourself becoming one, if the series has resonated with you, it’s hard to come to terms with the idea that maybe its driving principle of chivalry is just a power fantasy to be packaged and sold and not a sincerely-held belief. And if you’re a survivor like I am, it’s even harder to lose faith in creators you hoped were in your corner when most of the world isn’t. A lot of us are being forced to close a chapter in our lives [that] we never wanted to close.”

“Despite everything that happened regarding [Kagawa] and how big a situation it was when the scandal broke, to longtime fans, I think it feels like a betrayal of what they've seen the series to stand for, championing, being a better person, being a good person,” Yakuza video essayist GC Vazquez said. “It feels like the people making [Yakuza Kiwami 3] aren't holding themselves to the ideals they promote in the games or the things that the audience sees in those games.”

Masu piggybacked on that same sentiment, saying he, alongside other fans who have added “Remove Kagawa” into their Twitter names, has expended their energy into the movement as a bargain with RGG Studio: “Lose Kagawa or lose our loyalty.” 

“We fail, we despair. But I don’t think we’ll ever accept Kagawa’s presence,” Masu said. “We accept the fact of the matter, that RGG Studio wants him there and don’t plan to address why, but Kagawa and his apologists will never be welcome.”

The outcry has gotten so bad among fans that it prompted longtime GamesFAQS guides and walkthrough writer Scott Zdankiewicz to release a statement announcing he doesn’t plan on covering Kiwami 3 because of RGG Studio and Sega’s radio silence on #RemoveKagawa. 

“We tend to be a community that's more optimistic even when it comes to things that might not be in our best interest, but this is one of those things that's soured the mood and really hushed a lot of voices,” Zdankiewicz said, regarding the temperature of the Yakuza fandom amid RGG Studio’s radio silence. 

“The complete lack of comment on it from the studio is what really strikes me the most—how they’ve willingly ignored it, and there’s backlash on both the Western side of the fandom and the Japanese side as well,” former Inverse writer Hayes Madsen said. “The dissonance of hiring a dude who admitted and apologized to assaulting a hostess, playing a role in a game that has literal narrative elements about how women in Japan are mistreated, not that Yakuza has always been the best about how it treats its women. But Yakuza 3 specifically has stories like that about standing up for women and trying to push men to be better, and the dissonance is what really makes it bad in this situation.”

While many a fan has also notedYakuza Kiwami 3’s being an ugly remake, lambasting it for its low-resolution alleyways, Zdankiewicz cautions fans to keep things focused on the real task at hand: “The issue of Kagawa and the idea of celebrating a sexual harasser as a face and voice that's going to be present in the series for many years to come.”

Although it's evident that RGG Studio isn’t removing Kagawa, what particularly bothers Yakuza fans is the inconsistency from the developers, who have removed actors for what fans argue is far less. Key among them was RGG Studio replacing Judgment’s Kyohei Hamura face and voice actor following Pierre Taki’s arrest for cocaine use months ahead of the Yakuza spin-off’s release in 2019.

“It’s a double standard. When you recast the guy who gets caught doing drugs a month before the game comes out in the West—you make the effort to totally recast him, do all the lines—in such a small amount of time, but you don’t do it for the confirmed, self-admitting sex criminal with more time than you had for the other situation, it tells me you don’t condone drug usage, but you’ll hand-wave sexual assault,” Vazquez said. “Whatever I take away from the series, any positive interpretation I can have about its treatment of other people, its treatment of women, it's difficult to justify that.”

The #RemoveKagawa movement is just the newest drop in an already swelling tide of lost goodwill. For many fans, it’s another sign that RGG Studio has drifted from the scrappy, heartfelt team they once rooted for and into the posture of an old man chasing easy money. 

Once upon a time, RGG Studio was praised for cranking out annual releases by smartly reusing environments and animations—because each new entry still felt like it was pushing the story, the world, and the characters forward. That momentum culminated in the symbolic handoff from longtime series protagonist Kiryu to Kasuga Ichiban in Yakuza: Like A Dragon. 

But since then, whether out of hesitation with a new protagonist or a desire to lean harder into Western popularity, Ichiban has been sidelined into preorder‑bonus roles in smaller Kiryu‑centric spin‑offs, or as a duo act where he shared the spotlight with Kiryu—a character RGG Studio has killed off twice. While earlier titles like Like A Dragon: Gaiden and Infinite Wealth landed anywhere from decent to alright, others—like the Majima‑focused Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii—is giving a studio spinning its wheels.

Not just that, but players are getting less with each new installment. The pattern is hard to miss: locking New Game Plus behind a paywall in Infinite Wealth, or planning to delist the standalone Yakuza 3 on PC ahead of Kiwami 3’s release—moves that nudge players toward pricier editions or full collections. Each choice deepens the sense that the studio is nickel‑and‑diming the very audience that kept the series afloat.

Longtime guides, writers, and reviewers for the Yakuza series feel the fandom is at an impasse with the developers. An impasse not helped by the fandom’s wary sense that the developers have created a disappointing double standard, leaving a bad taste in fans’ mouths, alongside the growing feeling that the once-adored annual recycled-asset developer has been spinning its wheels while losing touch with what makes Yakuza Yakuza. 

“That asset reuse and pumping things out as fast as they did, I think people were willing to be on board with that when the games were really doing interesting things narratively and were really being compelling,” Madsen said. “You look at [Yakuza: Like A Dragon], which is maybe the most narratively compelling game in the series, in my opinion, and when they had that spark to it, it was a little better. But you can see the pieces start to fall apart with Infinite Wealth, then Yakuza 0: The Director’s Cut, and the Kiwami games. It just feels like over time, the wheels started to fall off more and more.”

Madsen argued that the vibes feel a bit off with Yakuza, partially because the series has gotten too popular for its own good. Viral prankster Druski is doing ads for the games, despite the Black culture stimulus package influencer likely knowing zero to shit about the series while giving it a mainstream push. 

“The series’ explosion of popularity has been detrimental to it to a degree where Sega sees it as a cash cow. Every game sells more and more, so they’re like, ‘Well, this works, so we’re just going to keep doing this.’ People like what RGG Studio does, and they get all this positive PR over how fast they put games out, and their development process really fed into that,” Madsen said. “That may change in the future based on reception to Kiwami 3 and other recent stuff, but I think Yakuza has been a victim of its own success.”

Madsen likened Yakuza’s current conundrum to the cast in fellow Sega series Persona 5, where games like Royal blew up in popularity and created beloved characters in its wake, which Sega went on to reuse ad nauseam despite their stories having ended. 

Vazquez admitted to being a little cynical about his sentiments toward the series since Gaiden, saying the annual release of the games has made it so continuity isn’t respected, stakes don’t matter, and whatever happens to recognizable characters won’t last the length of the series like they used to because storytelling doesn’t matter, generating a profit does. 

“I saw somebody mention that RGG Studio is trying to build up to some Avengers: Endgame moment with its characters. In [Yakuza: Like A Dragon], they brought back a ton of characters we thought were dead,” Vazquez said. “Infinite Wealth kept doing that. Gaiden kept doing that. It doesn’t feel like the series has its identity anymore. It feels more like they’re trying to ape off of some other recognizable thing or do something that’s popular with some other franchise. To me, that just feels very boring, for one, but also very uninteresting in regards to what Like A Dragon historically is and what I like about it.”

“[RGG Studio] have nothing to lose from keeping Yakuza 3 Remastered up for sale. In fact, it being widely available [is] was what gave them the confidence to go in such a radically different direction with the remake in the first place, because it meant they wouldn’t be competing experiences. To renege on that shows a lack of faith in both games,” Masu said. “Sega and RGG Studio’s recent business practices overall seem to suggest they think what they stand to gain in a few extra bucks will make up for what they stand to lose in player agency and goodwill, but I don’t think it’s going to pay off for them.”

Two guiding ideas from longtime studio head Toshihiro Nagoshi and Horii, come to mind for Masu when he thinks back on his years with Yakuza, and they feel especially relevant during the #RemoveTagawa movement. One is Nagoshi’s long‑held belief that Kiryu should never harm women. Nagoshi departed RGG Studio in 2021 to found his own development studio. The other is Horii’s reminder that there’s no value in making games that wound their audience or push them away. 

“By siding with Kagawa over the women and survivors in the community, they are perpetuating societal indifference to the violence they’ve condemned in and out of their games. They are hurting and driving away the most vulnerable members of their audience, as well as anyone who stands with us,” Masu continued. “They are betraying RGG’s earliest fans, Shinjuku hostesses who appreciated how the games represented their occupation, and are they going against the wishes of the hostess Kagawa victimized, who doesn’t want to see his face everywhere.”

“I've realized that I don't think I'm gonna buy another game from this studio, which is an insane thing for me to feel, considering that, and I am not exaggerating here, [Yakuza: Like A Dragon], for various reasons, literally saved my life. I would not be here if I had not played Yakuza 7 in November of 2020. This series is very important to me,” Schofield told me while showing me her Yakuza-inspired tattoos over Zoom. “I sometimes feel like I just kind of have to cauterize the wound and accept whatever I felt about it in the past six years from 2020 onwards is never coming back. It's only getting worse, and I can't in good faith support and feel anything about this series or this studio anymore.”