Yakuza 4: Voice Actors VS Characters

How real is the latest installment in the Yakuza series? Check out how the characters compare to their voice actors.

2009-11-17 01:10 / Anoop Gantayat / 1 Comment

The Yakuza series gets its sense of reality from a number of things, including its realistic situations and dialogue. But with each installment, Sega has also managed to make the game look more and more realistic, particularly when it comes to character faces.

For part 4, Sega is using face scanning technology to map many of the newcomer voice actors to their in-game counterparts. The capture process looks like this:

That's Mari Yaguchi, the most recent character unveil, acting as our model.

Of course, not all the characters are being made to match their voice actors. Past characters, most notably main character Kazuma Kiryu, already had their facial features set well in advanced of Yakuza 4.

Sega provided a close up look at the characters and their voice counterparts last week. Here's what many of the characters look like next to their real world counterpart. Can you tell who was scanned?

Kuroda Takaya as Kazuma Kiryu

Kouichi Yamadera as Shun Akiyama

Rikiya Koyama as Taiga Saejima

Hiroki Narimiya as Masayoshi Tanimura

Majyu Ozawa as Lily

Kenta Kiritani as Takeshi Kido

Satoshi Tokushige as Daigo Dojima

Jouji Takahashi as Gou Hamazaki

Kenichi Endo as Junji Sugiuchi

Ikki Sawamura as Hiroaki Arai

Kinya Kitaoji as Seishiro Munakata

Hidenari Ugaki as Goro Majima

Rie Kugimiya as Haruka

We don't have any in-game pics of Yaguchi yet, but here's the bikini shot Sega shared last week:

Mari Yaguchi as massage therapist Mari

The Yakuza 4 cast continues to grow, so there will likely be more comparison opportunities to come.

Even though the face scanning technology is a new feature for Yakuza 4, the series has, in the past, managed to make its characters and voice actors resemble one-another. Check out this article about Yakuza 3 to see how that game's characters and voice actors compare.