Pirate Yakuza’s Majima Beard Has More Polygons Than His Whole Yakuza 4 Model

Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii is finally here, continuing RGG Studio’s run of somehow releasing well-received games in the same series with very little development time between them. If you weren’t already impressed enough with Pirate Yakuza arriving just a year after Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, maybe a closer look at Goro Majima’s beard in his latest outing will have you marveling at RGG’s work like the rest of us.

Yakuza fan MangBloodrage shared a close-up of the mesh used for Majima’s beard in Pirate Yakuza this week. Possibly a somewhat unimpressive image all by itself since it’s just a bunch of rendered video game hairs in the shape of a bear. However, Mangbloodrage highlights just how detailed Majima’s beard is for his high-seas adventure compared to one of the Mad Dog’s previous outings.

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We see Majima at his lowest, but then get to witness him rise to his finest.

Apparently, Majima’s Pirate Yakuza beard is made up of 24,726 faces, or polygons. Polygons are those things Cloud was made of in Final Fantasy 7. They’re still a thing, but video games have come so far that they aren’t as obvious as they used to be. That Majima’s beard uses 24,700 of them is impressive in Yakuza terms as RGG used as many to build his facial hair in Pirate Yakuza as it did to create his entire body in Yakuza 4.

Majima Has A Very Detailed Bears In Pirate Yakuza

More Detailed Than His Whole Body Was 15 Years Ago

According to MangBloodrage, Majima consisted of 21,360 faces in Yakuza 4. That means video games, and RGG’s work, in particular, has come so far in the 15 years since Yakuza 4 was released that they can now make Majima’s chin as detailed as his entire body used to be. While RGG reuses assets and settings to enable such quick turnarounds on its games, this is evidence that it’s not been using the time it frees up to kick back, as if any of you would have been thinking that anyway.

One of the replies to MangBloodrage’s beard post points out that technically means you could have a smaller Majima hiding in Pirate Majima’s beard. Somewhat surprisingly, not all of the replies are positive. Some have questioned why this is necessary, and that so much detail in things like this, which will likely go unnoticed by the majority of people who play, could hamper the game’s performance.

I say until there are widespread complaints about Pirate Yakuza’s performance, that’s not something anyone needs to be worried about. I can’t imagine RGG is a studio that would sacrifice how a game plays for how it looks. Games also need to look better as new entries are released. If RGG was still using Yakuza 4’s Majima model in Pirate Yakuza, there would be a lot more complaints than the ones about his beard being too detailed.

Released

February 21, 2025

ESRB

Mature 17+ // Blood, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Alcohol

Developer(s)

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio