Monkey Ball And Yakuza Creator Toshihiro Nagoshi Confirms Departure From Sega

Is SEGA having some sort of midlife crisis?

Bit of a shame really especially that they’re jumping ship to go off and work for dodgy ass companies. It’ll be interesting to see where Yakuza goes next.

Big loss for SEGA.

He yakuza’d his monkey balls right outta there, didn’t he?

Are they all dressed for sega's funeral?

Let's face it, SEGA haven't been the same since the West adopted the 'Eggman' name as a replacement for Dr. Robotnik.

RGG is clearly the best studio SEGA has had for some time, producing consistently good-to-great titles on a near yearly basis. Losing top talent like this feels like a big loss.

Let’s hope the rest of the RGG team can rise to the challenge of putting out the great titles that fans expect.

I can't believe the article doesn't mention him and his team developed F-Zero GX!

@Clyde_Radcliffe I only found out about this a few months ago myself; I never realised the studio had become RGG. I am kind of still hoping that one day, they would return in some fashion to develop a sequel.

Good riddance considering he was willing to get bought out by a massive Chinese corporation. Hopefully Yakuza doesn’t enter a Sonic style regression now that he’s gone though..

Maybe now we will see Yakuza games come to switch as he was adamant Switch owners couldn't appreciate the series? It sucks he's gone but if it enables some Switch love that's a nice bonus.

@sikthvash
This is truer than people wanna admit, this was the point where they ripped out the SOA changes that helped it succeed and they even eventually more or less brought back the Madonna character which SOA rightfully expelled. Sega became increasingly deaf to what the west wanted near the end days of Dreamcast, look at how well Sonic Mania was received and sold, for any other publisher that would have guaranteed at least two sequels yet we haven’t heard a peep while going full steam ahead with the failure of a studio Sonic Team’s next game.

It sucks that he's leaving, but RGG is gonna be fine I feel. They have many other people there that will be able be in his stay, and the great games are just gonna keep on coming

I wish them luck but I hope that this change translates to RgG on Switch. I will triple (quadruple since I have the the wiiu game) dip.

I'm glad I bought Yakuza 0, Kiwami 1&2, 3-5 Remastered, and 6 during a recent sale. I've been enjoying Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania, but I also want to look at the other series this man created. All I know about this game is there's a scene where a bunch of grown men are in diapers, and that the rest of the series is full of weird stuff like that, which is pretty much why I bought these games lol.

Well if Ryosuke Horii didn’t leave then we’re fine, I actually look forward to seeing where the series goes from here.

He's a very talented game designer. He's worked on the Yakuza games long enough. I just want to see something new from him, doesn't matter who he works for.