Judgment is the next game from SEGA's talented Yakuza Studio. The title seems to essentially be a Yakuza spin-off in which you play a private investigator named Takayuki Yagami. It's looking pretty great, as you can see in the above new trailer, but a PlayStation Blog post highlights an impressive feature that might fly under the radar.

The localisation team does sterling work on the Yakuza series, and for Judgment, it seems to have put some extra work in. Localisation producer Scott Strichart writes about how the game includes not one, but two English scripts. One for the Japanese audio, and another for the English audio. Strichart explains the benefits of this approach: "Essentially, we took a base translation and then pushed it out into two different directions for Japanese audio and English audio. The Japanese audio got our traditional “Yakuza” pass, listening intently to each line and crafting the dialog to suit it. The English script was written for actors to perform it, with more of a focus on making sure it sounded like things people would actually say in English. Sometimes, the two versions are totally the same! Others, it’s totally different."

He continues: "Both languages ebb and flow differently by nature, and this allowed us to play to each one’s strengths, rather than let the English be hampered by Japanese sentence structure, or the Japanese to have dubtitles that are clearly not what the speaker is saying, even to the untrained ear."

The result is two translations that are slightly different, but offer optimal dialogue for your chosen audio track. It's a lot of extra work, and if the previous Yakuza games are anything to go by, we should be in for a treat either way.

[source blog.eu.playstation.com]