I just played through Yakuza 1 after having already playing 3, 4 and 5. Yakuza 1 is the only game in the series that was dubbed into English, and it's terrible. It's the most faux-mature, edgiest, "This ain'cher grampaw's Grand Theft Auto!"-est localization I've ever heard. It released within a month of that 'Ow the Edge' Shadow the Hedgehog game, to give you an idea of where Sega's priorities were at the time. Every sentence has at least one "fuck" in it, and not in a natural way; it's more like all the characters are mad their moms won't let them say it at home.
American Kiryu isn't terrible, and Michael Madsen always does good work in video games, but everyone else is just the worst. The white-hot 2005-era star power of Eliza Dushku and Rachael Leigh Cook, standing in voiceover booths for the first time in their lives, did not produce the desired effect. Even Mark Hamill is a bit rubbish as Majima. And for some reason they decided to leave all the Yakuza-specific jargon like 'aniki' and 'oyabun' untranslated, so you get to hear all their awful pronunciations. You can hear moments when I'm pretty sure the sound editors just chopped up lines to match them up to the Japanese lip sync, leaving huge awkward pauses. Getting to go back to the Japanese cast when I moved on to Yakuza 2 was such a relief.
