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Asterra

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Asterra

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About this mod

The UI of the vanilla game is mostly 900p. This mod forces the UI to meet modern 4K standards.

All languages are supported.

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You read that right.  For whatever reason, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio decided to make a change in how they present their game's UI.  Instead of providing UI elements tailored to Xbox 360-era 1080p like they have for every Yakuza game since at least Yakuza 0, they chose to tailor almost the entire UI of Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii as pre-Xbox 360-era 900p.  Welcome back to 2005.  If you noticed that the UI looked perhaps even a tier lower than RGG's already low preferred resolution, now you know why.

But they didn't make it as simple as all that.

  • Probably 80% of the UI is 900p.
  • Another 5% is 1080p.
  • Another 5% comes in 1080p and 4K flavors.
  • The rest is a grab bag and some textures present as low as 720p.

To fix all this, and give the absolute best presentation possible to users of a 4K display, I did the following:

  • I scrutinized in game which UI elements, among all the menus, minigames and various gameplay scenarios, present as which resolution, and categorized appropriately.

  • I figured out through trial and error which UI elements can and can't be transparently replaced with superior alternatives—the game has its own rules here and some textures can only present at their vanilla resolution.

  • I upscaled each category of UI element appropriately to hit 4K exactly in as many cases as possible.  Any less and detail is left on the table; any more and the game's rubbish internal scaler promotes harsh aliasing.

  • I cycled between half a dozen different models depending on which worked best for individual UI elements.

  • In cases where UI elements only work at vanilla resolution, I at least replaced the vanilla elements with versions that have had their miserable compression artifacts cleaned up.

  • That also went for the UI elements that already have 4K versions.  They may be 4K, but they still had compression artifacts that needed cleaning.

  • Sometimes the game won't even USE its own 4K versions of its assets.  The titles that display during the opening musical or during character introductions, for example—there are standard resolution and 4K versions of all of those titles, but even if you literally game in 4K, the only versions that ever get used are the low resolution ones.  So the best that can be done here is to clean up the heavy compression artifacts, which I have done.

  • In many cases, I hand-reconstructed elements in order to preserve true details—for example, there are two sets of UI images for the various "treasures", one big and one small, and the game uses them in different parts of the UI.  I elected to recreate the small images not by upscaling them but instead by repurposing the large images and fitting them to the dimensions of the smaller images one by one.

  • In the case of the maps, which also come in two sizes each, I provided maximized versions of the "full" maps, so that there will still be respectable detail even if you zoom in as much as the game lets you.

  • In some cases, I hand-composited UI elements from higher quality specimens elsewhere in the set.  For example, there are many different iterations of the various map icons, each a different size, and some of the vanilla versions are SO SMALL that the details in them are more of a suggestion than something actually scrutable.  And thus when they got upscaled they gave an equally poor result.  Therefore I borrowed those details from better options elsewhere and pasted them in, rescuing those UI elements from the fate of 900p.

Because of all of this, in addition to some new rules RGG decided to adopt which dramatically complicated the process before I sorted them out, this 4K UI project took over a week to reach a releasable state.

INSTALLATION:

Use Shin Ryu Mod Manager (at least version 4.5.3 as of 2025-03-04).  Download "part 1" of the mod, plus whichever "part 2" corresponds to your chosen language.  You can either extract the two archives to the mods folder or install them directly with Shin Ryu Mod Manager's "Install Mod" option.  Click the green checkmark afterward, just to be on the safe side.


Keep in mind the following caveats for now:

  • THIS IS A ZERO COMPROMISE UI MOD.  Or nearly zero, anyway.  By that I mean the improvement in quality comes at costs.  Most conspicuously, a cost to your drive space.  Secondarily, I personally use a NVMe SSD and of course have no hiccups but I simply cannot speak for a non-SSD solution.  There's a chance menus may be a bit slower.  RGG's push for 1080p/900p undoubtedly stems from a desire not to cause their own menus to be sluggish (on console) and that's a non-zero risk here.  Having said that, I'm not doing anything differently here from how I've done it with my 4K UIs for past RGG games and nobody has raised a fuss about it yet.
  • After installation, the mod uses close to 18 GB of drive space.

  • I spent extra time generating language packages for every language that the game supports.  Enjoy.

  • The usual rules about UI elements with numbers applies, which is to say: Any UI texture that happens to include the graphics for a counter—scores, timers, etc.—cannot be upscaled, because all that will happen is that those numbers will appear huge on screen.  This time around, I am preemptively assuming this to be the case universally, and releasing the mod with vanilla-sized (but cleaned up) UI elements in such cases.  As long as I didn't miss some, this potential issue shouldn't rear its ugly head.

  • I haven't gotten very far in the actual game.  While you've been playing the game, I've been spending basically all of my time on this mod.  Therefore there is a decent risk that I will need to update the mod due to one or another texture appearing too big or otherwise off-kilter.  Outside of reports (with screenshots) and my own gameplay discoveries, I have no convenient way of knowing which UI elements may end up proving problematic, and I need to make it to those points in the game before I can concretely identify issues.  Too-large UI elements won't break your game, but be forewarned nonetheless.

  • As with all past efforts, there will come a time when I am no longer working on this mod.  With Infinite Wealth, I had to abandon everything and deal with RL for a while, even before I finished the game.  That hopefully won't happen here, but understand that there's only a certain window during which time fixes will be forthcoming, and that honestly goes for any mod that anyone ever made for any game.  That said, I usually take my time with RGG's games, far moreso than most.

Let me just add that 900p sure is... a choice.  As far as I know, people using a 900p display account for less than 1%, which ironically puts RGG's traditional 1080p fixation into perspective since such folks are >50% of everyone.  But then I look at the calendar and realize the 2000s really were a while ago.  This shouldn't be a question of what RGG feels the ideal target resolution is.  It should be a question of whether RGG knows how to support the needs of player base SEGA is tapping when it comes to the PC market.  1080p is already frankly not defensible in 2025, and if the tools didn't exist to do something about it, I would probably put my money into some other game first.  That's how important this is to me.