Yakuza 4 Remastered mods/Hiroki Narimiya Restoration Patch
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| Developer | Canzah, Slow |
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| Latest version | 1.0 |
| Release date | 2021-02-07 |
Description
The purpose of this patch is to restore Masayoshi Tanimura's original appearance and Japanese voice to the likeness of the actor that portrayed him in the original PS3 release of Yakuza 4, Hiroki Narimiya.
To explain the reason for this patch existing you'll need to understand the history of what happened with production of the game. Originally, famous Japanese actor Hiroki Narimiya portrayed Masayoshi Tanimura, who is one of the playable characters in the game. The game came out on PS3 in March of 2010 in Japan and March of 2011 in the West, many years later in December of 2016, Hiroki Narimiya was accused of inhaling cocaine by tabloid newspaper "Friday", as a result of Narimiya's "friend" selling them a photograph showing Narimiya preparing white powder on table that to uneducated eye could be mistaken for cocaine. This resulted in companies and employers of Narimiya starting to cut ties with him. Narimiya was eventually absolved when he undertook medical tests proving he wasn't taking any drugs and further proved that the powder in question was actually a special form of candy called "Neruneruneru" which comes in form of white powder that needs to be poured into a glass of water, upon which it hardens and creates a candy. Despite this, his career was substantially damaged and the following week Narimiya announced he'd be going into early retirement as a result of the fake allegations.
The game was later re-released on PS4 and XB1 in 2019 and PC in 2021 with Masayoshi Tanimura recast with a new actor, Toshiki Masuda. Whether this was done because SEGA simply decided to play it safe and avoid keeping Hiroki Narimiya or because he declined to license his likeness again is not known. Because we stand against both censorship, we've decided to create a patch for the Western version of the game that would restore Hiroki Narimiya as Masayoshi Tanimura's actor in the game. We have also gone the extra mile and updated the original PS3 textures for Tanimura using the same upscaling method used by the company in charge of PC ports so that his textures would remain at the same high-resolution fidelity as those of other characters.
Additionally, all pre-rendered videos except one have been replaced by the original ones from PS3 as they are higher quality than their PS4/PC counterparts, you can find a comparison between them in the Images section, you will notice that the PS4/PC ones suffer from severe video macroblocking and artifacting issues which is why for this patch we opted to replace the videos with the PS3 ones.
Finally, all features of Yakuza 4 Licensed Music and Uncensor Restoration Patch are incorporated into this patch.
Those of you that might be familiar with our music restoration patches for the PS3 and PS4 Yakuza titles should be right at home with this patch. This video will give you a glimpse of what you can expect after restoring Tanimura's original voice and appearance.
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Screenshots
