of Like a Dragon The series has achieved international success thanks to its compelling storylines, open-world gameplay, and willingness to embrace mature themes such as crime, violence, and sex.
However, given the franchise's popularity, getting Sega to agree to include such a theme in the series proved to be a much tougher proposition.
During a recent episode of Weekly Ochiai, Toshihiro Nagoshi, former chief creative officer at Sega and creator of the Yazkua/Like a Dragon series, spoke about his fight to include sex workers in games.
Since it's a prostitution-related place, it's obviously impossible to visually express what's going on inside, so I decided to have the scene fade out after the characters enter the store and meet the women, and then have the whole screen turn pink.
One would think that this would be enough to appease Sega, but it had the opposite effect.
Eventually this was brought up as an issue and I asked why and they said it was because pink is a color that people associate with sex. This escalated into a fight and I said “You may think pink is sexual, but that's just your opinion. There are loads of pink things out there and you get turned on every time you see it?” It was a pretty funny fight.
However, I didn't try to force it on them as a joke, but rather I had carefully considered it based on my own morals and values and decided that it was acceptable. That's why I stubbornly fought it until the end.
