The cast of Yakuza: Dead Souls making love to the camera.

The roster includes series favourites Kazuma Kiryu and Shun Akiyama, in addition to eye-patch equipped eccentric Goro Majima and Ryuji Goda.

"Goro Majima is nuts about zombie movies," revealed SEGA community strategist Kellie Parker on the PlayStation Blog. "He’s so excited to be killing off zombies that when you’re playing as Majima, you’ll be picking fights with zombies, instead of just merely defending yourself. Now that’s bad ass." We tend to agree.

Yakuza: Dead Souls also plays host to Ryuji Goda, who some fans might remember from Yakuza 2. "You probably thought Ryuji Goda was dead after Yakuza 2. But you’d be wrong, and not because he’s a reanimated zombie back to munch your brains," continued Parker, "He’s more interested in cooking you some takoyaki at a street stall. In case mysteriously reappearing from the presumed-dead for some yummy fried octopus is not ridiculous enough for you, you should know that his prosthetic arm can transform into a gatling gun." Fantastic.

We played a good chunk of an import edition of Yakuza: Of The End earlier in the year, and are seriously looking forward to getting some hands-on time with the sub-titled version. The gunplay isn't exactly what you'd expect from a current generation PlayStation 3 title, but Yakuza has always been about its plot and Dead Souls may just be more mad-cap than any of the previous games put together. (No, we didn't think it was possible either.)

Hit the jump for a glimpse of all the characters in action.