While everyone is thinking about Grand Theft Auto V right now, there's another prominent game series that portrays the world of crime in a completely different setting, and that's the Yakuza franchise. The next chapter of the series, Yakuza Ishin, will have a large cast, but only a lot of big burly dudes have been shown so far, which is pretty uncharacteristic considering how much the promotion of Yakuza games is normally focused on their beautiful ladies.

Will Yakuza Ishin still feature the series' peculiar "dazzling ladies"? The game's Producer Masayoshi Yokoyama solved the mystery for us while answering exactly that question as part of an interview on Dengeki Online:

They'll be there, in a form that will be different from any of the [Yakuza] games so far. Yakuza Kenzan! was set in a fictional version of Gion surrounded by walls, and that was the focus of the game. So we created a playground focused on the fun of a red-light district.

However, in this game the place that used to be fictional is the actual Kyoto, and the district called Gion actually existed there. Its role and location have changed, so to reflect the Kyoto of the Bakumatsu period (the end of the Edo Period) the way to have fun will also change.

So there you have it. Yakuza Ishin will still have its ladies and its pleasurable activities, but they'll be different from what we're used to, probably more historically accurate. To be sure about that we'll have to wait for more information, but knowing the Yakuza team, I'm quite sure they have some surprises up their collective sleeve.

(As there's no official screenshot of the ladies of Yakuza Ishin yet, the picture at the top of this article belongs to Yakuza Kenzan!)