ok for starters, stop ignoring that making back shenmue 3's budget when it has a massive handicap ISNT THE PROBLEM, its all about getting budget for 4 from new investors. and secondly, yakuza are games made in a single year most of the time (exceptions being 1, 5, 6 for engine purposes, and judgment) and out of them 1 was really the only big budget game in the series as it was from scratch and constantly asked for budget increases to the point where it needed to sell 500,000 copies to make a profit, something Nagoshi staked his career on, this is all chronicled in a great little documentary called forging the dragon by yakuzafan on youtube if you want back up on that. After 1's success the co producer basically dropped the bombshell on the team that if they want to actually stay successful they need to pump out a sequel asap because he learned first hand through jet set radio how fast hype can disappear if you wait too long to make a follow up, and so started the franchises design philosophy of yearly releases at lower budget relying heavily on reused assets both from past games and other sega properties. Like I said before, the games put alot of their budget into advertising through big named actors more than anything as a large part of 1 selling as well as it did was because of the actress who played reina in ps2 yakuza 1 was a popular actress at the time
Yakuza is a shining example of cutting corners and making the most out of low budgets, its absolutely way below shenmue 3's budget. Again theres a massive reason so little of the games are actually original, especially in recent years (0 and up) where the copy and pasting has been taken to a extreme, they arent even bothering to make new animation patterns but have been recycling even some major bosses from past games kiwami being the absolute worst case of this where even its final boss had qte's lifted straight from yakuza 5 and making characters like shimano, major antagonist with multiple fights, just have mr shakedowns animation cycle, actually that one in particular is so noticible in recent games they keep using mr shakedown every chance they get its infuriating and so noticible.