The newest title in the Atelier series, Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key, was announced yesterday, and we've now learned new story and gameplay details.

Arriving on February 24, 2023, Atelier Ryza 3 picks up where 2019’s Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout and 2020’s Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy left off, making it the latest title in the Secret series. These games were the first in the Atelier series to maintain the same protagonist and are some of the most popular in the series, with over 1.3 million total copies sold worldwide. These games feature Ryza and her friends going on a great adventure to discover the secrets of the island where they were born after an encounter with alchemy.

This newest game takes place about a year after the events of Atelier Ryza 2. Ryza and friends are sent on a new adventure after the sudden appearance of a strange group of islands just off the coast of their home of Kurken Island. It’s discovered that this mysterious Mainland Kark is having a harmful effect on Kurken Island, leading Ryza and the rest to head there and investigate, only to discover a strange and massive gate. When they approach it to learn more, Ryza hears a mysterious voice in her head that tries to lead her to the “Code of the Universe.” In search of a way to save their island, the characters set off on a grand journey involving keys and the roots of alchemy.

Regarding the subtitle The Alchemist of the End, producer Junzo Hosoi told IGN Japan, “In Atelier Ryza 3, we wanted to depict the end of Ryza's youth, along with exploring fundamental questions such as why alchemy is used in this world, and what Ryza wants from her life as an alchemist. As Ryza grows, we wanted the story to give her an important mission to dedicate herself to.”

Four characters have so far been revealed: Ryza, Klaudia, Tao and Lent. In addition to Ryza’s friends that fans will be familiar with, characters that showed up in the previous game, as well as new characters who are vital to the story will also be making an appearance. Eleven party members, one of the largest rosters ever seen in the series, will be available, and a wide cast of characters will be collected in this grand gathering for the series.

Improvements have also been made on the visual front, especially when it comes to the quality of character graphics and expressions, which are now rich and lively. This should allow players to get even more enjoyment out of their adventure with the game’s charming characters.

There are also major changes when it comes to the game’s systems. Until now, the series has allowed players to explore a number of fields on a single world map. This game, though, has four areas to investigate. Each of these areas contains a single large field, and it seems that exploration on them is possible without any loading time.

Finally, the core system of this game are the keys that can be created in various situations. There are many different types of keys, and players can use them in a host of different situations, whether that’s exploration, synthesis or battle. Different key types and rarities can be created from landmarks and enemies and are used when unlocking treasure chests and barriers, enhancing character abilities, or creating powerful items.

These keys even unlock the core of the game’s story. We'll just have to wait to find out more about where they’ll lead Ryza and friends.

Atelier Ryza 3 will also be making an appearance at Tokyo Game Show 2022. Not only will fans be able to try out a demo at the event, a TGS Atelier Series 25th Anniversary Livestream will be broadcast at 7pm JST (3am Pacific / 6am Eastern / 11am UK) on September 16.

Hiroaki Mabuchi is a freelance writer for IGN Japan. This article was translated by Ko Ransom.

A DDOS attack against Activision Blizzard brought down the company's PC servers for hours, leaving many users unable to play games including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch.

Activision Blizzard first acknowledged the issue in a tweet at 12:15am Pacific on September 14, saying it was investigating an issue affecting its authentication servers that was causing slow or failed login attempts for players.

Around 40 minutes later, however, Activision Blizzard confirmed that its PC servers were down as a result of a DDOS attack. "We continue to actively monitor an ongoing DDOS attack which is affecting latency/connections to our games," it said in a follow-up tweet (below).

We continue to actively monitor an ongoing DDOS attack which is affecting latency/connections to our games.

— Blizzard CS - The Americas (@BlizzardCS) September 14, 2022

The issue is resolved now, with the servers being down for roughly three hours and 30 minutes, at least from when Activision Blizzard first reported the problem. It's not clear who is respnsible for the attack, or if there was a specific motive.

Alongside the previously mentioned games, Hearthstone and Diablo: Immortal were also affected by the server outages.

The publisher has a busy few months on the way, as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Warzone 2, and Overwatch 2 are all due to be released in 2022. A Call of Duty showcase taking place tomorrow, September 15, is expected to shed new light on both upcoming titles.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

A DDOS attack against Activision Blizzard brought down the company's PC servers for hours, leaving many users unable to play games including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch.

Activision Blizzard first acknowledged the issue in a tweet at 12:15am Pacific on September 14, saying it was investigating an issue affecting its authentication servers that was causing slow or failed login attempts for players.

Around 40 minutes later, however, Activision Blizzard confirmed that its PC servers were down as a result of a DDOS attack. "We continue to actively monitor an ongoing DDOS attack which is affecting latency/connections to our games," it said in a follow-up tweet (below).

We continue to actively monitor an ongoing DDOS attack which is affecting latency/connections to our games.

— Blizzard CS - The Americas (@BlizzardCS) September 14, 2022

The issue is resolved now, with the servers being down for roughly three hours and 30 minutes, at least from when Activision Blizzard first reported the problem. It's not clear who is respnsible for the attack, or if there was a specific motive.

Alongside the previously mentioned games, Hearthstone and Diablo: Immortal were also affected by the server outages.

The publisher has a busy few months on the way, as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Warzone 2, and Overwatch 2 are all due to be released in 2022. A Call of Duty showcase taking place tomorrow, September 15, is expected to shed new light on both upcoming titles.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Maze Runner star Jacob Lofland just joined the upcoming Joker: Folie à Deux.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the 26-year-old actor has joined the Joker sequel in an unknown role, but is thought to be playing a key supporting role as an Arkham Asylum inmate and friend of Arthur Fleck (aka The Joker).

Lofland is known for the role of Aris in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials as well as its sequel, Maze Runner: The Death Cure.

Joker 2 stars Joaquin Phoenix returning to the role of Arthur Fleck/The Joker. Meanwhile, Lady Gaga has been cast in the upcoming sequel, with many reporting that she has landed the role of his iconic lover, Harley Quinn. Additionally, Harry Potter star Brendan Gleeson has joined in an unknown role.

At the moment, little is known about the plot of Joker 2, except that it’s widely thought to have a musical aspect. Whether this will be a result of the titular Folie à Deux – a mental condition shared by two or more people – remains to be seen.

Joker was released back in 2019 and told an alternate origin of sorts for Batman’s iconic nemesis. IGN’s Joker review gave the film 10/10 and said: “Joker isn’t just an awesome comic book movie, it’s an awesome movie, period. It offers no easy answers to the unsettling questions it raises about a cruel society in decline. Joaquin Phoenix’s fully committed performance and Todd Phillips’ masterful albeit loose reinvention of the DC source material make Joker a film that should leave comic book fans and non-fans alike disturbed and moved in all the right ways.”

Its placement outside of the main DCEU means that it’s difficult to predict whether or not any of these new castings will portray known DC figures, or whether they’re cast in entirely new roles. Either way, it looks as though Joker 2 is shaping up to be quite an interesting sequel.

Joker: Folie à Deux sees director Todd Phillips return to the helm, also co-writing the script alongside Scott Silver, who wrote the first film.

Want to read more about Joker: Folie à Deux? Check out the Joker: Folie à Deux teaser trailer and delve into what the film’s title could tell us about its plot.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Maze Runner star Jacob Lofland just joined the upcoming Joker: Folie à Deux.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the 26-year-old actor has joined the Joker sequel in an unknown role, but is thought to be playing a key supporting role as an Arkham Asylum inmate and friend of Arthur Fleck (aka The Joker).

Lofland is known for the role of Aris in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials as well as its sequel, Maze Runner: The Death Cure.

Joker 2 stars Joaquin Phoenix returning to the role of Arthur Fleck/The Joker. Meanwhile, Lady Gaga has been cast in the upcoming sequel, with many reporting that she has landed the role of his iconic lover, Harley Quinn. Additionally, Harry Potter star Brendan Gleeson has joined in an unknown role.

At the moment, little is known about the plot of Joker 2, except that it’s widely thought to have a musical aspect. Whether this will be a result of the titular Folie à Deux – a mental condition shared by two or more people – remains to be seen.

Joker was released back in 2019 and told an alternate origin of sorts for Batman’s iconic nemesis. IGN’s Joker review gave the film 10/10 and said: “Joker isn’t just an awesome comic book movie, it’s an awesome movie, period. It offers no easy answers to the unsettling questions it raises about a cruel society in decline. Joaquin Phoenix’s fully committed performance and Todd Phillips’ masterful albeit loose reinvention of the DC source material make Joker a film that should leave comic book fans and non-fans alike disturbed and moved in all the right ways.”

Its placement outside of the main DCEU means that it’s difficult to predict whether or not any of these new castings will portray known DC figures, or whether they’re cast in entirely new roles. Either way, it looks as though Joker 2 is shaping up to be quite an interesting sequel.

Joker: Folie à Deux sees director Todd Phillips return to the helm, also co-writing the script alongside Scott Silver, who wrote the first film.

Want to read more about Joker: Folie à Deux? Check out the Joker: Folie à Deux teaser trailer and delve into what the film’s title could tell us about its plot.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

This isn’t the Harley Quinn you know.

As Gotham Knights creative director Patrick Redding puts it: “She is coming not from a place of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be zany. I'm your manic pixie.’ She doesn't need to be the manic pixie anymore. She has gotten to a point where she knows who she is. She has a very clear sense of what her identity is, and she's going to present herself in this much stronger, developed supervillain way.”

Gotham Knights’ Harley Quinn is a very interesting case study in how to adapt a beloved comic book character. Her look, her voice, and her brand of villainy are immediately recognisable – but her story, and her reason to be is fundamentally altered. It came out of a general philosophy for villains that guided Warner Bros. Games Montréal throughout the design process:

“All of the villains that we've included in Gotham Knights were chosen for a few reasons,” explains Redding. “One, we knew we wanted recognizable members of the rogues gallery, but we also wanted specific villains who had an interesting relationship with Batman, where once you took Batman out of the picture, it would cause that character to question, ‘Well, what's my function now? In a world where I don't have my main nemesis, what do I do next?’”

Where for the likes of Mr. Freeze, that questioning seems to have led him to, well, just commit more bombastic crime, the story behind Gotham Knights’ Harley is more personal, and more interesting. For a start, the team chose to depict an older, wiser Harley than we’ve ever seen in a game before, one no longer led by others’ whims.

“We really did make a conscious choice of allowing her to be a slightly older version of Harley Quinn than we've seen elsewhere, and that informed a lot of choices,” says Redding. “It informed a bunch of the performance choices that were made in shooting cinematics. It informed her fighting style. It informed how she presents herself, how she costumes herself. And as we'll see in some of the middle chapters of the Harley Quinn arc, even how she presents herself to Gotham City.”

Crucially, though, this isn’t a different Harley Quinn – it’s one further down her personal timeline than we’re used to seeing. As Redding puts it, this Harley has “been through two main acts of her story already.”

“We are familiar with her as like the Joker's accomplice and girlfriend, and kind of pathological love interest. And we're familiar with her breaking free from that and finding herself in her Suicide Squad era, where she's kind of semi being coerced into doing the right thing or doing terrible things for good reasons, sort of anti-hero. People love this character [so much] that they kind of want to root for her. So they kind of want to see her doing things that at least ultimately have a positive outcome, even if she does it in an insane and chaotic way.

“For us, we thought, ‘Well, that idea of Harley kind of branching into the direction of good. That's been pretty well-explored in a lot of places.’ So we thought, ‘What happens if we take her the other way?’ What happens if Batman's absence and the rise of his successors inspires Harley to say, ‘Well, why don't I finally get to have my career as a super villain on my own? I have all sorts of ideas. I'm a brilliant psychiatrist. There's all sorts of crazy things that I can do, especially in Gotham City.’”

Effectively, this Harley Quinn’s superpower is self-actualization – after years spent working in the shadow of others, she’s now unleashing the true Harley on Gotham. For the art team, it was a fascinating process to find what this version of the character could look like – as you can tell from the many different concept sketches in the gallery above.

“I don't even know if it's about physically aging her up,” says character art director Jay Evans. “It's more like just a confidence that character has that maybe she didn't have before, in this stage of her life as a supervillain. But on the visual side it was cool because we got to do a fresh take. This hadn't been done.”

Initially, the team simply worked from what we’d seen from Harley before – the same kind of haircut, the same kind of clothes, even having her more closely tie in with Gotham Knights’ unruly Freaks gang, who will ally with her at points. Associate character art director Jianli Wu said that design was fairly far along before the team was told to scrap it try something new:

“The criteria we were given was to make her really fresh, new and iconic. That was one of those keywords I remember from going through that process. And it was very challenging, but also it was such an exciting opportunity for us to go about this character, because [it’s] not often we can deviate that much from her iconic haircut and all that. We were pretty much given, ‘Don't do that. We want something new.’ So that was really liberating from an artist's point of view, and very challenging. It's probably one of the most challenging characters we've designed in the team.”

The result is a Harley that references the past of the character in new ways. Her boss fight costume makes use of the black and red design with diamond accents that was part of her original appearance in Batman: The Animated Series, but pushed further, with the diamond design made more prominent. Her hair and make-up have changed, even her iconic hammer has ‘grown up’.

“This is Harley Quinn, even though from a silhouette or haircut perspective, she's really changed,” says Wu, “which is different from, say, Mr. Freeze. Mr. Freeze, we retained the dome, the goggles and all that. For her, we broke that.”

This constant balance between the Harley we know and the Harley we’ll get to know touched every part of her design, even how she fights.

“We had a very specific vision in mind for Harley,” says game director Geoff Ellenor. “She's more herself than she's ever been in her imagination in our Gotham. She has taken this opportunity to say, ‘I am actually a bad person. This is the version of myself that I want to be. I want the freedom to do whatever I want to Gotham and in Gotham.’ And when we got into designing her combat, we loved the old, ‘I have a big goofy hammer.’ But if you take that into the Gotham Knights aesthetic, it becomes an actual giant heavy block of metal that later in the boss fight has a lot of articulated, sparking, electrical equipment attached to it to make it worse.”

Harley’s not often one for straight up hand-to-hand combat. Indeed, her villainous plot involves providing implants to Gothamites that remove their inhibitions and allow them to live their best lives alongside her – which inevitably leads to them violently attacking you when you try to stop her.

“Her move set is really about moving through this crowd of enemies that she attracts because she has all these devotees just essentially to slow you down and distract you,” continues Ellenor. “And she constantly keeps that hammer in motion and she's very strong, she's very powerful, she's extremely agile, so she can dodge a lot of your moves. And it's always about the player or players trying to get the opportunity to interrupt something Harley is doing and deal damage to her before that big hammer comes back upon you.”

Ultimately, like any gaming boss, Gotham Knights’ Harley Quinn is first and foremost a foil for the player, designed to offer interesting wrinkles of story and gameplay. But the way the team has turned her into that foil is a wonderful way to honor the character herself.

Redding points out that it’s a neat reflection of what the Gotham Knights themselves are going through. These are four sidekicks being forced to grow up and take on a lead hero’s mantle. She’s doing the same for a supervillain. Where Joker was always a mirror to Batman, it seems Harley is aiming to perform the same favor for whoever steps up as a new Dark Knight. Redding sums it up in words that could have come from Harley’s own mouth:

“Hell, if they want to be the new protectors of Gotham City, they're going to need a villain. They're going to need a nemesis – and who better to do it than me?”

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

This isn’t the Harley Quinn you know.

As Gotham Knights creative director Patrick Redding puts it: “She is coming not from a place of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be zany. I'm your manic pixie.’ She doesn't need to be the manic pixie anymore. She has gotten to a point where she knows who she is. She has a very clear sense of what her identity is, and she's going to present herself in this much stronger, developed supervillain way.”

Gotham Knights’ Harley Quinn is a very interesting case study in how to adapt a beloved comic book character. Her look, her voice, and her brand of villainy are immediately recognisable – but her story, and her reason to be is fundamentally altered. It came out of a general philosophy for villains that guided Warner Bros. Games Montréal throughout the design process:

“All of the villains that we've included in Gotham Knights were chosen for a few reasons,” explains Redding. “One, we knew we wanted recognizable members of the rogues gallery, but we also wanted specific villains who had an interesting relationship with Batman, where once you took Batman out of the picture, it would cause that character to question, ‘Well, what's my function now? In a world where I don't have my main nemesis, what do I do next?’”

Where for the likes of Mr. Freeze, that questioning seems to have led him to, well, just commit more bombastic crime, the story behind Gotham Knights’ Harley is more personal, and more interesting. For a start, the team chose to depict an older, wiser Harley than we’ve ever seen in a game before, one no longer led by others’ whims.

“We really did make a conscious choice of allowing her to be a slightly older version of Harley Quinn than we've seen elsewhere, and that informed a lot of choices,” says Redding. “It informed a bunch of the performance choices that were made in shooting cinematics. It informed her fighting style. It informed how she presents herself, how she costumes herself. And as we'll see in some of the middle chapters of the Harley Quinn arc, even how she presents herself to Gotham City.”

Crucially, though, this isn’t a different Harley Quinn – it’s one further down her personal timeline than we’re used to seeing. As Redding puts it, this Harley has “been through two main acts of her story already.”

“We are familiar with her as like the Joker's accomplice and girlfriend, and kind of pathological love interest. And we're familiar with her breaking free from that and finding herself in her Suicide Squad era, where she's kind of semi being coerced into doing the right thing or doing terrible things for good reasons, sort of anti-hero. People love this character [so much] that they kind of want to root for her. So they kind of want to see her doing things that at least ultimately have a positive outcome, even if she does it in an insane and chaotic way.

“For us, we thought, ‘Well, that idea of Harley kind of branching into the direction of good. That's been pretty well-explored in a lot of places.’ So we thought, ‘What happens if we take her the other way?’ What happens if Batman's absence and the rise of his successors inspires Harley to say, ‘Well, why don't I finally get to have my career as a super villain on my own? I have all sorts of ideas. I'm a brilliant psychiatrist. There's all sorts of crazy things that I can do, especially in Gotham City.’”

Effectively, this Harley Quinn’s superpower is self-actualization – after years spent working in the shadow of others, she’s now unleashing the true Harley on Gotham. For the art team, it was a fascinating process to find what this version of the character could look like – as you can tell from the many different concept sketches in the gallery above.

“I don't even know if it's about physically aging her up,” says character art director Jay Evans. “It's more like just a confidence that character has that maybe she didn't have before, in this stage of her life as a supervillain. But on the visual side it was cool because we got to do a fresh take. This hadn't been done.”

Initially, the team simply worked from what we’d seen from Harley before – the same kind of haircut, the same kind of clothes, even having her more closely tie in with Gotham Knights’ unruly Freaks gang, who will ally with her at points. Associate character art director Jianli Wu said that design was fairly far along before the team was told to scrap it try something new:

“The criteria we were given was to make her really fresh, new and iconic. That was one of those keywords I remember from going through that process. And it was very challenging, but also it was such an exciting opportunity for us to go about this character, because [it’s] not often we can deviate that much from her iconic haircut and all that. We were pretty much given, ‘Don't do that. We want something new.’ So that was really liberating from an artist's point of view, and very challenging. It's probably one of the most challenging characters we've designed in the team.”

The result is a Harley that references the past of the character in new ways. Her boss fight costume makes use of the black and red design with diamond accents that was part of her original appearance in Batman: The Animated Series, but pushed further, with the diamond design made more prominent. Her hair and make-up have changed, even her iconic hammer has ‘grown up’.

“This is Harley Quinn, even though from a silhouette or haircut perspective, she's really changed,” says Wu, “which is different from, say, Mr. Freeze. Mr. Freeze, we retained the dome, the goggles and all that. For her, we broke that.”

This constant balance between the Harley we know and the Harley we’ll get to know touched every part of her design, even how she fights.

“We had a very specific vision in mind for Harley,” says game director Geoff Ellenor. “She's more herself than she's ever been in her imagination in our Gotham. She has taken this opportunity to say, ‘I am actually a bad person. This is the version of myself that I want to be. I want the freedom to do whatever I want to Gotham and in Gotham.’ And when we got into designing her combat, we loved the old, ‘I have a big goofy hammer.’ But if you take that into the Gotham Knights aesthetic, it becomes an actual giant heavy block of metal that later in the boss fight has a lot of articulated, sparking, electrical equipment attached to it to make it worse.”

Harley’s not often one for straight up hand-to-hand combat. Indeed, her villainous plot involves providing implants to Gothamites that remove their inhibitions and allow them to live their best lives alongside her – which inevitably leads to them violently attacking you when you try to stop her.

“Her move set is really about moving through this crowd of enemies that she attracts because she has all these devotees just essentially to slow you down and distract you,” continues Ellenor. “And she constantly keeps that hammer in motion and she's very strong, she's very powerful, she's extremely agile, so she can dodge a lot of your moves. And it's always about the player or players trying to get the opportunity to interrupt something Harley is doing and deal damage to her before that big hammer comes back upon you.”

Ultimately, like any gaming boss, Gotham Knights’ Harley Quinn is first and foremost a foil for the player, designed to offer interesting wrinkles of story and gameplay. But the way the team has turned her into that foil is a wonderful way to honor the character herself.

Redding points out that it’s a neat reflection of what the Gotham Knights themselves are going through. These are four sidekicks being forced to grow up and take on a lead hero’s mantle. She’s doing the same for a supervillain. Where Joker was always a mirror to Batman, it seems Harley is aiming to perform the same favor for whoever steps up as a new Dark Knight. Redding sums it up in words that could have come from Harley’s own mouth:

“Hell, if they want to be the new protectors of Gotham City, they're going to need a villain. They're going to need a nemesis – and who better to do it than me?”

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Sega has announced Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, a spin-off game coming in 2023. It will connect Yakuza 6 with the upcoming Like a Dragon 8, and star Kazuma Kiryu.

Coming to PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Steam, this will be an action-adventure game, unlike the mainline series' RPGs, although gameplay details were held back. 'Gaiden' is a term for a side story, and this will be a canon story, set during the events of Yakuza 7. It will explain how Kiryu comes to end up in Like a Dragon 8.

The game will apparently be around half the size of a mainline Yakuza title. "You'll still be able to go into the town and hang out, and have the side quests," explained a translator for Sega's announcement stream.

In a trailer, we saw Yakuza hero Kazuma Kiryu meditating at a temple, asking for forgiveness, having abandoned his name and past. However, he appears to be pulled back in for one last job in the criminal underworld, under the codename Joryu.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Sega has announced Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, a spin-off game coming in 2023. It will connect Yakuza 6 with the upcoming Like a Dragon 8, and star Kazuma Kiryu.

Coming to PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Steam, this will be an action-adventure game, unlike the mainline series' RPGs, although gameplay details were held back. 'Gaiden' is a term for a side story, and this will be a canon story, set during the events of Yakuza 7. It will explain how Kiryu comes to end up in Like a Dragon 8.

The game will apparently be around half the size of a mainline Yakuza title. "You'll still be able to go into the town and hang out, and have the side quests," explained a translator for Sega's announcement stream.

In a trailer, we saw Yakuza hero Kazuma Kiryu meditating at a temple, asking for forgiveness, having abandoned his name and past. However, he appears to be pulled back in for one last job in the criminal underworld, under the codename Joryu.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Yakuza 8, now officially titled Like a Dragon 8, will be released in early 2024 and will unexpectedly feature a return for original series hero Kazuma Kiryu.

Announced during a stream from developer RGG Studio, the game will also see the return of Yakuza: Like a Dragon heroes Ichiban Kasuga, Koichi Adachi, and Yu Nanba. We saw a teaser trailer featuring the Kasuga and Kiryu (who has a new, grey haircut) wandering through the fictional Kamurocho. The game will be released for PS4/5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Steam.

Onstage, the game's producer and two voice actors appeared to tease the game, saying that this would be the story of both characters, both of whom will lead a party. It appears to be an RPG again, in the vein of Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon. The team also said it will be "the largest game to date" in the series. Kiryu will apparently also introduce a new fighting style in the game.

As for why Kiryu is returning, the team was coy, but they said the game's theme is about "the man with all the weight of the past on his back, and the man with all the weight of the future on his back".

We'll get an explanation for how Kiryu returns in the spin-off, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, which arrives in 2023.

This will be the first mainline Yakuza game made without series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi, who has left the studio to create his own with NetEase.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.