Should Yakuza be in the RPG timeslot? (Patreon)
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So hear me out. I don't think Yakuza is an RPG. You don't really make story or character decisions, and even the extent to which the protagonist can be customized can be pretty limited.
But should we treat it like one anyway, for logistical reasons? For starters, these games are loooooong. Part of the reason for the shift over to the 1-hour RPG timeslot was so that something like Pillars of Eternity could be played through in four months instead of eight (it still took 107 double-length episodes).
Right now we have the double-length RPG slot, the Let's Try slot, the Patreon slot, the miscellaneous slot (Yakuza currently lives here), and then the Puzzle/Indie slot. Here's the lengths of the four Yakuza playthroughs so far:
Yakuza 0: 79 episodes
Yakuza Kiwami: 71 episodes
Yakuza Kiwami 2: 90 episodes
Judgment: 122 (!!!) episodes
There games are, uh, girthy. And I've still got Yakuza 3, 4, 5, Dead Souls, 6, the samurai spin-offs if they ever get translated, and the upcoming Yakuza 7. They certainly seem like they would benefit from taking half as long to finish.
And I can't help but notice how similar a Yakuza playthrough is, functionally, to an RPG playthrough. There's a main quest and side quests, and most of the playthrough is spent with me exploring an open area to engage in the text-heavy stories of random NPCs on the street. A Yakuza playthrough has a lot in common with, for example, the current Outer Worlds playthrough. The moment to moment gameplay is so similar because they contain 80% of the same structural DNA, missing only the bit that's most crucial to their respective genre classification.
So maybe Yakuza is better served by the RPG slot. But are RPG fans in the audience served by this kind of change?
After all, there's a long line of very long games that are all waiting for their chance at that timeslot. There's the more recent games like Greedfall, the Wasteland 1 Remake and the upcoming Wasteland 3, but then there's the to-do list of the Witcher, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Planescape, Pillars of Eternity, KOTOR, etc franchises. Then again, in the miscellaneous timeslot the Yakuza games offer the same opportunity cost, only for twice as long.
(I still need to decide whether souls-likes like The Surge 2, Blasphemous, and Code Vein fit the RPG slot. I'm inclined to think that their faster pace works fine for 30 minute episodes)
This is why I'm making a poll. I want to know whether viewers view Yakuza as an acceptable substitute for RPGs in the hour-long 11:00 AM PST timeslot. Is it a similar enough viewing experience? Or should it stay in miscellaneous, where the games last 2-4 months and probably be played about once a year as a result?