'Like a Dragon: Ishin' Review

History can't have two Sakamoto Ryomas.

'Like a Dragon: Ishin' marks the point where Yakuza was no more and the RGG franchise finally became the Like a Dragon series of games- just in time for the franchise to move away from being purely about Japan's Mafia. And it's also somewhat symbolic, given how the original stood as the final step on the original trajectory of the series, as a solely Japan-focused collection of games, before turning back and becoming the global phenom it is today. 'Yakuza: Ishin' was never given an English Translation, and fans assumed it never would as poor sales in the West seemed to indicate Yakuza had been totally forgotten. It was sometime after this game when one last effort was made for a simultaneous Western/Eastern release with full quality translations, almost as is to prove to themselves there was no point of trying any further. That follow up game would be Yakuza 0- and the rest was history.

With Ishin we are brought back to that turning point, remastered and re-released as part of the 'Like a Dragon brand' to bring all fans up to speed finally, after all this time. And for my part, it is a great release finally being up to see the game that birthed a song I knew only from a fanmade translation from a very dedicated Youtube channel for years. (Samurai Ondo- Majima's true masterpiece!) I held a lot of expectations coming around to 'the Samurai Yakuza' game, and in typical fashion for these games what I experienced was nothing like what I thought I would. It's safe to say that Ishin pretty much slapped me around, as a man who thought himself more than familiar enough with this franchise to breeze through another on his journey to series parity; but was it a slapping for the better or worse of my time with the game? Let's find that out together.

'Like a Dragon: Ishin' is a peculiar proposition, framing itself as a fictionalised historical effort borrowing actors and character models from across the wide series of Yakuza games and 'recasting' them, as it were, as famed historical characters. Kiryu Kazama, our beloved protagonist, is now Sakamoto Ryoma. Majima is Okita Soji, and Ryoma's sworn brother Takechi Hanpeita is predictably played by Nishikiya- wait, no? Takechi is played by Shibusawa? The most scheming of three villains of Yakuza 0? That's... an interesting choice. A fun little note you'll find is that whilst these characters and their respective actors are playing totally different people within the narrative, their personalities and abstract narrative roles are never too far away from their originals. Kiryu is every bit the incorruptible force of nature of Ryoma, Soji is a violent killing-machine with a madman's glee. Even with the recasting that 'Like a Dragon: Ishin' got over the original 'Yakuza: Ishin'; that philosophy stays true, so familiarity with the series, whilst not essential, provides some intrinsic idea of what you can expect from each character. (Which does not exactly speak wonder about Ryoma's burgeoning relationship with his sworn brother, huh.) 

Of all the times throughout the Samurai era of Japan that could have been chosen, Ishin picks a particularly interesting and not often adapted time- the coming of the outside world. Just as Red Dead Redemption revels around portraying the last gasps of the Wild West, Ishin settles itself in a period of great upheaval and change as the isolationist Japan is forcibly opened up to world of gunpowder and foreign might, which some might go so far as to call the end of the Samurai age. This is the aura that clings over the core of the central narrative, as the future of country is split between warring ideologies, as well as much of the sidestories, wherein radical xenophobia often clashes with progressive co-mingling with the new world. There's little point in dancing about it- RGG do an excellent job scaling up their dramatic narrative chops to the shifting futures of an entire nation- they make this 'historical epic' stuff look easy!

Gameplay

Given the time period, Ishin obviously does away with the series staple hand-to-hand styles that we've all come to know and love over the years... for the most part, there's still a basic brawler style. (It's just useless now.) Ishin marks the long awaited return of the 4 combat styles which we haven't seen since Kiwami 1- and I for one have yearned for that combat diversity ever since! Now we have the Swordsman for classic single-target katana duelling, Gunman for ranged dominance, Brawler for it's one crowd control ability and an entire slate of largely useless combos and Wild Dancer, for a sword-gun hybrid crowd slashing moveset that frankly feels insane to wield. And with that is rebirthed my interest in actually learning the intricacies of combat.

Of course, it's not as though newcomers to Ishin can get away with not learning each style inside and out! Ishin might just contain the most challenging combat the franchise has had to date, and I mean actual challenge this time, not that Yakuza 3 ever-blocking garbage which makes that game near unplayable. For the first time in a long time- players can't just spam the attack button and watch enemies collapse. There's a lot slower combat chops, parrying is not available from the start and even by the endgame you never really unlock any traditional parry options you might expect from a sword-based game. There's more of a balance to gameplay, reading which enemy is going to attack, dodging and knowing the right combo to best take advantage of the enemies blunder- before retreating to blocks and weaves for the next opportunity. Some have certainly found the challenge to be detrimental to the experience, but I found a uniquely extrinsic charm to mastering the more tactical challenge to combat, rather than just learning what combos look the best as I typically do with these games.

All of this leads into the new levelling system which, to be honest, is a bit complex for a Yakuza game. All styles level up separately, necessitating you to switch and train each separately, but you also have an 'overall' level to take account of too. Every time you level up a style you unlock a point that can spent in a radial skill tree full with new moves or significant damage/health boosts- but when you level up your overall level you unlock a 'training' point which can be spent in any style. However that training point can be swapped out for a more permanent 'style' point later, freeing up that training point to be spent elsewhere- which might be necessary given that there are only 25 style points per style and much closer to about 40-50 skills per style. Does that sound confusing? It is. But it does nail that feeling of progression which felt a little lost when the franchise stuck closer to 'auto levelling' from 3-5. I also much prefer it to the 'notches' system of Kiwami 2 and 6. (Maybe because it's close to 0's system. I am a 0 simp- confirmed.)

Going Feudal

It's important to note that Ishin is more of a Remaster than a Remake, in that it recreates the original game in substance with additions or revisions made atop of that. As such, much of the clunkiness in design of the original game has been carried over to this version practically untouched. The inelegant tutorial force-feeding you basic world interactions? It's there. The stifling claustrophobia of Tosa's world design, with buildings that inexplicably require a loading screen to enter. Hobbling about at a snails pace when damaged to a critical pace (modern games have made the hobble less cripplingly slow) and the fact that your health doesn't get reset to full if you die during a fight. If you enter a fight with no health, your retry will retain that deficit. Hell, the cutscene before each fight has been revived! Most of these could have been easily brushed past with the new engine, as demonstrated by every game released around this one- but I suppose when you're committed to faithfulness that includes all the warts and jagged edges.

I would be remiss not to note that despite these headaches and hang-ups, the Dragon engine does look absolutely gorgeous rendering pre-restoration Japan. The richness of character model skin in closeups, the refraction of godrays breaking over the rooftops, there is a richness to his world that imbues a visual warmness to feudal Japan. I actually really love the way the Dragon Engine compliments this world space, which is funny because I find modern Kamarucho a bit too glaring sometimes, with all the neon pulsing. This might just be the best looking Like a Dragon game I've played, and I'm not just saying that because we get to see Kiryu's naked buttcheaks in a sauna wrestling match. But... well... I'm not going to pretend like that isn't a contributing factor either!

Having a totally new city of Kyo to explore is a rare treat in the Like a Dragon world, providing us a host of totally new streets to become intimately familiar with as well as host of new world activities to keep us preoccupied. You can bet on Chicken races to score the big bucks, partake in cannon ball slicing, battle your way through the arena, (in probably it's most challenging iteration yet) learn to dance in the style of the Geisha, go fishing, partake in a horribly time ravishing farming minigame, play about with the cooking-mama style cooking minigame and of course, go Karaoke with the friends you make throughout the story. And there is much besides because of course, Like a Dragon is a dream-title for minigame lovers, as it always has been.

New to my eyes is the 'Friends' system, which is funny considering I was playing this title alongside Judgement which also features a 'Friends' system. Essentially you'll connect with people across Kyo that demand simple tasks of you, such as giving them a vegetable you've grown in your farm, in exchange for a bit of their 'friendship' bar filling. It seems like something of a prototype to the version coined in Judgement, and certainly the scale of how long it takes to max out some of these friendships veers straight into the realms of tedium- but it does create a sense of community with those you come across. Unfortunately, a lot of these characters are decidedly one-note, and so once again I remember the community of much smaller towns such as the cast of 'Yakuza 6' much more clearly and fondly. Still, it was interesting idea.

Coming to Kyo

The dramatic events which carry Ryoma around the shifting sands of Japan's most powerful are delightfully simple yet evocative. A revenge tale mixed with a murder mystery mixed with a spy thriller, where Ryoma spends much of his time under a false name surrounded by the members of the Shinsengumi, a elite team of ruthless mercenaries who famously spent much of their years chasing down an activist called 'Sakamoto Ryoma', creating a delightful aura of tension for much of the early story. RGG really are at their best when their characters are surrounded by others who allegiances are largely unclear, which becomes increasingly difficult to achieve in the core games as Kiryu comes to know literally all the most righteous people across Japan, so literally any new face in the story is inevitably destined to be the bad guy at some point. (Seriously, any new Tojo Clan face after Yakuza 2 is a 'surprise' villain in the final act.) It's great to see them play around with trust, again!

Of course, as you might have picked up on, names and identity are key themes for Ishin as well as the larger question of 'legacy' which hangs over the entire world like a knife when the future of the Japanese world is in the balance. Deciphering what is behind a name, what it means to reinvent oneself and even to live under a pseudonym- and the validity of the life lived therein, are all addressed and laid bare for the viewer to digest in that delightful Japanese manner of story writing. These near primordial ideals laid bare at the heart of the narrative help raise the narrative into something of an epic- even before you start rubbing shoulders with the literal lords of the land. All helping cement one of the most powerful stories RGG has ever told.  

Crafting

If there is one step that I think Ishin takes which verges on going too far into it's genre type, it was the Blacksmithing trees because wow- that was straight overwhelming. All your equipment in the game, swords, guns and armour (and special weapons which I never used because they don't contributed to any of the skill trees EXP) are splayed out in a tree of successive power for which you can collect materials and transform one blade into another and so and so forth. These weapons scale wildly in power and costs as you go along the tree, with some endgame blades practically trivialising combat for the cost of 100-200 Ryo- (Which is about four to five hours straight of grinding the farming minigame, for context.) and a slew of resources so rare you might just be farming the new dungeons for a week before you get enough 'Dragon Eyes' to power that sword to it's fullest.

There's even a 'slotting' feature right out of an ARPG, where you can earn exceedingly rare boost tokens (or dismantle much more common dropped equipment which contain the token you're looking for already slotted) and slot those boosts into your preferred equipment for a small fee, as well as a frankly inexplicable chance of failure. With how difficult it is to get these tokens in the first place, I really don't think there should be a 'failure' chance. (Particularly one that seems to pre-roll it's results so you have to really work to pull off a save scum.) Oh, and there's a system for upgrading the colour rarity of your swords in order to boost their base damage as well as the number of slots they have. If literally any other game got hold of these systems they would be microtransaction hellholes- under RGG they're just a eye-bulging amount content nicely asking for your heavy time investment.

General Cards

A somewhat new addition to Ishin are the battle cards which sit at the bottom corner of your screen at all times. Whilst they were around in the original, they existed purely for the dungeon diving metagame- here they've been expanded out to encompass nearly the entire game, and as such the whole world has been scaled around them. (So if you plan on playing some of the higher difficulties, it's pretty important to understand the things.) Battle cards are recruitable squad-mates that you can assign to each one of your styles in order to give them a small collection of passive stat boosts and potentially battle-changing active powers. For example, you may have a card that gives you a boost to attack charge speed, which you assign to your Swordman style, and when you activate that card you'll have an extreme 3 times damage boost for a brief few seconds.

Where these cards get somewhat controversial across the community is with some of the more... shall we say... ostentatious character cards with the sillier powers. You'll get a pet tiger which can summoned out of nowhere to do damage in a frankly too long animation, or maybe a card literally featuring Youtuber CohhCarnage that allows you to fire laser beams out of your hands. The most eye popping for me being the Nyanners card. Yes, the Vtuber Nyanners. It calls the lifeforce out of surrounding enemies in the form of little 2D cat heads that fly into you. In an otherwise grounded Samurai fiction-historical setting- these can be a little jarring. Personally I already know this as a franchise where protagonists glow blue and perform inhuman feats of violence that somehow never cause casualties, so I can reconcile this in my head; but I don't discredit those who think these abilities in particular go a little too far in breaking immersion.

Also, this is a strange one, a lot of the cards are broken. Ishin is already one of the least documented Like a Dragon games so good luck finding any feedback on your problems online, but from my testing there are quite a few fundamental design issues that have never been fixed. For one, when you unlock 'special moves' they can, maybe only for some, be accessed with the same trigger as the cards- meaning they'll be times you want to activate the card where you'll instead activate the frankly useless special abilities instead- typically opening you up for enemy punishment. And then some of the passives just don't work. It's hard to judge for some of the more background boosts like the 'increase charge speed', how do you even judge something like that? But the one which provides continuous healing based on how many sword cards are in your deck? Yeah, that broke in real time for me. When I first equipped that card it healed me three times for a mere 30 health and then never again for the rest of my playthrough. I think this system might have been a tad rushed.

Dungeons

As mercenaries for the Shinsengumi, it falls under the player's purview to sometimes... do their job. And in Ishin that comes in the way of the repackaged 'Bouncer Missions' from Kiwami 2, this time known as 'Dungeons'. These instance missions play out like 'missions' in 'Final Fantasy: Crisis Core' or 'Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker' or any of those other Japanese games which make you suspect that the concept 'quantity over quality' floated about production once or twice. You charge through a gauntlet of encounters, topped off by a boss, and earn random loot from a pool listed on the mission screen. Slowly unlocking more encounters, in the same tile-sets, against slightly tougher enemies, and so on and so forth. At the very least, thanks to Ishin's genuinely difficult combat, it's a bit less utterly mind numbing than the 200 bouncer missions of Kiwami 2- but I wouldn't call it 'top tier content' either.

You really have to sink hours into this mode alone before actually interesting bosses start showing up near the tail-end of the Dungeons mission tree. Fights here are challenging, demanding decent gear, build consideration, resource planning and perhaps a bit of heat-action scumming too. You'll probably need to invest in the several style trainers for each individual style that exist throughout the game, because Ishin is a game made by madmen who kept throwing in content atop content. These are some of my favourite fight throughout the game that really push you to the brink without collapsing into the typical nonsensical degeneracy of an Amon fight. (I actually skipped Amon for this game, because I didn't even want to conceive how painful it would be. Also I couldn't be bothered to grind city quests to unlock him.) It's just a shame that you have to dedicate so much to get here, along with the fact that most of these quests award a total pittance by that stage in the game. 5 Ryo per 10-15 minute dungeon? I might as well just grind farming!

Shaping a Nation

The late game is stuffed with some of the most bizarre and epic moments I've ever experienced in an RGG title, alongside some of the most frustrating. Ryoma's naivety, inherited from his face-sake Kiryu, is headache inducing when he needs to be told of the same revelation five times from five different sources before he takes it as gospel. (Maybe it's because I was playing Judgement starring an actually competent detective at the same time, it just made all this meandering especially annoying.) But I love all the ways in which the team told the story of the Meji Restoration, without losing their trademark insane narrative twists tucked in there. (Showing off Takechi posing for that famous Sakamoto Ryoma photo that's even on his wiki page was a stroke of genius.) There are even some straight confusing moments for which no one has any explanation. Why does Takechi severely age for one scene and then go back to normal for the rest of the game? It plays out like that in the original too, for seemingly no comprehensible reason.

Also, it must be said that the fan-service of bringing so many iconic series faces together is really satisfying. Mine being a supremely important character vindicates those who fell in love with the man purely for his story and not because he performs shirtless pushups in most of his scenes. Kondo being Adachi is... genuinely hilarious to me for reasons I can't quite explain. (I guess seeing Adachi in a position of respect is so antithetical it's funny.) And most importantly, having Ryoma's love interest Oryo have her face changed to be Yuki is just perfect. Yuki is the character who always seemed like she would make a genuine partner for Kiryu if only it were meant to be. (which of course it couldn't be, given she was created for the prequel and added into the remakes of the original two games.) Finally bringing them together in this mash-up cross-over affair is supremely sweet in a manner I did not quite expect from the scary mob-game makers at RGG.

Most historical fictional tales tend to get lost nearer the end as they have to bow to the wake of genuine historical change, which in reality usually veers out of grasp of the handful of historical figures prominently featured. This would have been the case with Ishin too had they not done such an excellent job affixing a personal revenge/vindication plot atop the real world story- thus even making the arguably redundant final confrontation feel as climatic as it should. Plus, I should add points to the team for finding a giant tower atop which to host the finale in lieu of Millennium Tower- although I wouldn't have batted an eye if a portal opened up and warped us atop that building just for the finale, for future reference RGG. That finale was epic, and a worthy successor (or predecessor, as the case my be) to the brilliant Shibusawa showdown at the end of Yakuza 0 which I still hold as one the franchise's key defining moments. Although Ryoma does go on a bit in front of the Jingu stand-in at the end. (Started getting 'Metal Gear Solid 2' flashbacks for a bit there!)

Music

This marks one of those games worthy of a mention for it's musical contribution, not least of all because of the remixes of classic franchise tracks to woodwind instruments to fit the setting. I immediately flipped out and downloaded Katsura's theme when I realised it was literally just Akiyama's 'Affected Fight' given woodwinds and a hip-hop edge. Incredible! It's just a shame we don't get a 'Receive and Bite You' remix. Also, my hearing may be off but I'm pretty sure 'Pledge of Demon', which makes a triumphant return to the soundtrack, is literally completely unchanged from the original. I was listening out but I think the team literally just lifted it. Which I'm not complaining about mind, that original track is a banger- I just... thought they were doing something different with this soundtrack, you know?

Summary

'Like a Dragon: Ishin' is a peculiar game, carrying all of the shine and polish of modern Yakuza whilst held back by some of the design shortcomings of the original which it follows far too closely. Some of the gameplay changes are not implemented quite as well as they could be, and there is definitely a vastly distinct challenge wall here that series fans are in no way prepared for. However as the original Ishin was such a great game- that excellence rubs off on this 'Remake/Remaster'. Personally I actually love the idea of recasting everyone to reflect modern Yakuza whilst retaining some of the older classics and giving them updated models. (I know there are diehard Mine fans who did a backflip when they saw him brought to Dragon Engine glory.) Ishin is absolutely packed with content, some of it conceived with genuinely impressive depth- such as the crafting and levelling trees.

Ryoma's tale is one of the most impressive interwoven historical fiction I've been privy to across all gaming, sacrificing practically nothing from the personal stakes or the historical events to bring both into the limelight- and performances are typically top tier for the franchise- even as the game copies the original scene for scene for some reason. I do think that as a remake Ishin could have tried a lot more to smooth over the cracks of the original, but the package delivered is still solid enough to stand with the high quality bar that the Like a Dragon franchise has become emblematic of in recent years. Of course I recommend this game, with the warning to not approach it like your typical Yakuza title, and slap my happy A Grade atop the title for good measure. Yet another spectacular Samurai era game to throw atop the pile of Sekiro and Nioh and 'I hear' Rise of the Ronin and Ghost of Tsushima, reinforcing how well this era fits in the world of gaming. Can't wait for Assassin's Creed Red to come and break that streak!