While April Fool's Day is tomorrow, the Yakuza developers at Ryu ga Gotoku Studio decided to kick off the festives with a brand new -- and very fake -- trailer for their next title today. They do so in style through a mock development video showing a turn-based RPG Yakuza starring Yakuza Online hero Kasuga Ichiban:

Of course if you're familiar with the fast-paced action mechanics of the franchise, this style ends up looking as hilarious as you would imagine. A tense and time sensitive scenario, in this case a woman being protected from a group of thugs, being slowed down to allow for the battle system to load up. This is of course coupled with the genre staple of having the camera pan dramatically around the fighters as the "party" prepares for battle -- complete with HP gauges and visible damage outputs.

One of my favorite parts by far is watching Ayaka attack enemies with two special abilities. The first is a super effective charm attack and the second is an extremely damaging special move that involves her swinging her purse around and nailing an enemy in the face.

After some tomfoolery involving more special attacks, we come across a boss fight in which Kasuga tries and fails to inflict more than three damage before the boss attacks and devastates him in a single attack. The team takes him down after Ayaka revives Kasuga and him and another party member use a team-up attack to the nail the boss in the face with a bat, instantly defeating him. The post battle naturally ends with the cliche gained experience screen as the party celebrates their hard earned victory.

The amount of time and effort that clearly went into this April Fool's joke is amazing and makes for a very entertaining mock trailer. Although it's more than likely that the scenario, abilities, and the infrastructure used for this gameplay and setting shown in the trailer is based on development work for the upcoming PS4 Yakuza title, which will be starring the same protagonist as in Yakuza Online. Personally, I hope that there's an excellent chance this JRPG-type battle will end up as a side mission in a future Yakuza title.

Yakuza Online, which surpassed 500,000 pre-registrations in Japan, released as a free-to-play mobile card game. Sega's CCO Toshihiro Nagoshi recently expressed his wishes for Yakuza Online to come to the West.