Stranger Than Heaven trailer reveals RGG's latest will span 5 time periods and cities

Sounds like RGG's upcoming action-adventure game will live up to its codename, Project Century

During Xbox's Partner Preview on March 26, Sega and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio revealed a fresh glimpse of Stranger Than Heaven, an action-RPG in the vein of the developers' widely acclaimed Yakuza and Judgment series. The game’s story will span five different time periods across the first half of the 20th century, including 1915, 1921, 1943, 1951, and 1965. The story will also unfold in five cities — we've already seen Osaka in previous trailers, and the latest footage doesn't specify where else we'll be headed on this adventure. In any case, it's an ambitious scope worthy of the project's former codename, "Project Century."

In the trailer, our heroes ride a trolley car, rip through a few cigs, flirt with a lovely geisha, do some arm wrasslin', and get into a brawl in what appears to be an active steel mill. At one point, one of the protagonists wields a very large knife and shoves it right into some poor shlub's ACL. Zoinks! "Break through Japan's underworld," the trailer says in boldface as a jazzy drum riff plays. We don't know for sure at this point if Stranger Than Heaven will give us insight as to the origins of the Yakuza saga's Tojo Clan, but it's definitely looking that way.

Stranger Than Heaven won't be the first game from RGG to take players to this many locations. Yakuza 5 also featured five cities, adding Fukuoka, Sapporo, and Nagoya to the roster alongside series staples Tokyo and Osaka. However, judging from the latest trailer, Stranger Than Heaven's environments will differ radically from one another due to the shifts in the game's timeline.

A few weeks from now, Xbox will host "A Special Look at Stranger Than Heaven," a deep-dive broadcast that will offer more insight into the game's story, setting, characters, and mechanics. That event will take place on May 6 at 7 p.m. EDT, and you can find out more on Xbox Wire.