One of the can’t-miss highlights of every Tokyo Game Show (TGS) is the Sega booth. Games aside, it’s always quite the spectacle thanks to its great stage design, photo ops, TGS-only activities and regular live performances based around their best IP. But, of course, the whole point of the booth is to show off the publisher’s next crop of games, and this year’s offerings were absolutely worth seeing.
There was quite a bit to see between the titles shown in Sega’s partner company spaces, a quick look at Control Resonant just ahead of release and a Warhammer 40k gacha event, but the highlights were undoubtedly the demos for Stranger than Heaven, Persona 4 Revival and Crazy Taxi: World Tour. Hardcore Gamer got hands-on time with all three and came away impressed.
What was being shown of Stranger Than Heaven was roughly 25 minutes of gameplay, primarily combat, taking place during three different eras of main character Makoto Daito. The first was set in the town of Kokura, Fukuoka in 1915. Daito seemed to be a young man in his mid to late-teens here and seemed to be a sort of well-known street tough.
The next segment took players to Kure, Hiroshima in 1925. Daito had gotten older by that point and seemed to have earned a favorable reputation amongst the townsfolk, but street brawls still seemed to be a regular occurrence for him. The final portion brought players forward to Minami, Osaka in 1943. Daito was an older man by that point and seemed to enjoy a high place in society. He still had to fight, but his enemies seemed to have grown along with him and presented the greatest challenge of the demo.
In terms of presentation, this version of Stranger Than Heaven was similar to the more recent Yakuza games. Everything was well animated, character models looked polished and all three cities were convincing. They came off as real, lived-in places and granted a lot of opportunities to interact with them.
As for combat, this new system of controlling Daito’s limbs with each of the corresponding shoulder buttons actually felt quite natural. It required a little more thought than the typical Yakuza fight, but the fights were appropriately slowed down to compensate. See, in this system, players always have to be thinking about the directionality of attacks, both theirs and the enemy’s.
If you (or an enemy) launches an attack from an unexpected direction, then you can knock the opponent down and go in for bonus damage or even a finishing attack. At the same time, if you (or the enemy) blocks an attack with a guard on the same side, you could then counter and perhaps even knock them down instead.
This was made most clear in a one-on-one fight during the Osaka segment against a sword-wielding rival yakuza. He could block and counter attacks just like the player as Daito, and he absolutely could two-shot you if he got in a couple of clean hits while Daito was down. It was a tough but exhilarating fight, and that, combined with everything else shown in the demo, has this writer really looking forward to trying the full game.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://hardcoregamer.com/sega-wows-at-tgs-2026-with-both-new-stories-old-favorites/
