What was cut from Yakuza 3 in the West?
A hostess club system, twenty-one substories, and the trivia of Japanese history, removed so the game could exist in English at all.
Yakuza 3 launched in Japan on February 26, 2009, and in the West in March 2010 in a version Sega had quietly trimmed. On February 24, 2010, a Sega America community manager confirmed it on the company blog: content from the Japanese version "didn't make it over", mostly the hostess clubs and the Japanese history trivia sections.
WHAT WAS REMOVED
The 2010 Western versionThe hostess clubs
The clubs themselves, their conversations and the Hostess Maker management minigame were cut. The hostesses remained in the game and could still be dated outside the clubs, which made the surgery all the more visible.
21 substories
Twenty-one side stories were removed outright, along with the mahjong, shogi and massage minigames and various trophies.
Answer X Answer
The arcade quiz game built on Japanese history and culture trivia was judged untranslatable on the schedule available and dropped.
Sega's framing
"The choice that had to be made was either no Yakuza 3 in the west, or a version of the game that was almost exactly the same, but with a little less trivia." Fans did not accept the framing, and the backlash became the loudest localization fight of the series' life.
THE RESTORATION
The remaster, 2018-2020Everything back, mostly
The PlayStation 4 remaster (Japan 2018, the West from August 2019, collected physically in The Yakuza Remastered Collection in February 2020) reinstated the hostesses, all 21 substories and the missing minigames, at content parity with Japan.
A new translation
The remaster also replaced the 2010 script wholesale, repairing an error-ridden localization that had, among other things, renamed Kazama as "Fuma" and garbled the name of Kiryu's orphanage.
What never came back
Two honest asterisks: Answer X Answer is absent from every version of the remaster, and three substories were removed in all regions after being judged insensitive. Seven hostesses were also remodeled, their original likeness licenses having lapsed.