Developer: Ryu Ga Gotoku
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 21st February 2023
Platforms: Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5
Reviewed on: PS4 Pro
Price: £49.99
▫️ Code supplied by publisher ▫️

Like A Dragon: Ishin is the first title in Sega’s long running franchise to adopt the “Like A Dragon” moniker instead of “Yakuza” for its release outside of Japan. Known as 龍が如く (Ryu Ga Gotoku which translates to “Like A Dragon”) in Japan since its inception, Sega have finally decided to align the nomenclature of the Japanese and global releases. I’ll be referring to the historic titles in the series as Yakzua however. Eagle eyed readers will spot that Ryu Ga Gotoku is also the name of the studio itself that produces the games.

Ryu Ga Gotoku Ishin was originally released only in Japan in 2014 on PS3 and PS4. It never saw a Western release, despite great fan demand for it – until now. Like A Dragon: Ishin is a remaster of the original game, localising it for a global audience and bringing it to modern platforms.

Ishin is a spin off from the mainline Yakuza series, taking place in the 1860s Bakumatsu period at the end of the Edo era in Japanese history. The Bakumatsu was the final years of the Bakufu government, the military rule of the shoguns. The Bakufu had ruled for many centuries – although the emperor remained the nominal ruler of the country, he was in reality a puppet and the real power lay with the shogun.

Tokugawa Ieyasu was a hugely important character in Japanese history – in the early 17th century he unified Japan and established the Tokugawa Bakufu which would rule for the Edo period, implementing a strict isolationist edict to Japan’s foreign policy from the middle of the 17th century. By the 19th century Japan was struggling to maintain this isolation as Western nations showed more and more interest in trading with Japan and establishing relations.

This came to a head in 1853 / 1854 when American ships, lead by Commodore Matthew Perry, sailed into Tokyo Bay and forced Japan to interact with them – at gunpoint. This in turn lead to a series of trade and diplomatic treaties being imposed on Japan – mostly to the nation’s detriment and America’s benefit. The USA throwing its military weight around to bully other countries, that doesn’t sound familiar at all…

So, by the time we reach the 1860s and the time that Ishin takes place, Japan is in the midst of great economical and political turmoil. The might, and right to rule, of the Bakufu was being genuinely challenged, notably by factions who wanted to restore the Emperor to the status of de facto ruler, not a mere figurehead. The two ringleaders of this opposition were from Satsuma and Choshu provinces which are mentioned in the game and the term “loyalist” is used for factions / individuals who support the restoration of the Emperor.

Apologies for the history lesson but I think the historical context of the game is important and immediately leads me to one criticism I have of Ishin – it doesn’t really do a good job of explaining the political machinations at work early in the game. As noted we are introduced to a loyalist group and later on we meet the Shinsengumi, a military group who were a special police arm of the Bakufu charged with maintaining order on the streets of the capital city, Kyoto. Japanese children learn this stuff at school so for a Japanese release it probably wasn’t that necessary but for a global one? I think Sega could have done more setting and explaining the historical scene of Ishin.

Indeed the Ishin of the title, 維新, refers to the Ishin Shishi, a group of political activists, the more extreme members of which were very much anti Bakufu, pro imperial and worked to overthrow the ruling Tokugawa clan.

This kind of leads into my other main gripe about the game. It’s utterly obviously a remaster of a now almost ten year old game. It looks and feels like a PS3 game with high quality assets pasted on top. And, that’s exactly what it is, for better and for worse.

I’ve actually had the original PS3 龍が如く維新 in my backlog for a couple of years but had never got round to playing it for <reasons>. While my Japanese is sufficient to be able to understand enough to play the game, I am not a fluent speaker and it does make things slower and more difficult – especially when trying to understand chunks of text with no voice acting. This was probably enough to put me off until I had more motivation to play.

So, I was curious as to how the original would compare to the new release and in preparation I played for about 4 ½ hours, taking me to early chapter two. I was reasonably impressed – it looked and felt like a classic late PS3 / early PS4 Yakuza game. Except, as noted, transplanted into the late Edo period samurai world.

To me it felt like a combination of Y5 and Y0 game mechanics, which makes total sense when we remind ourselves of the release order of these games:

So, a good solid Yakuza game.  I was kicking myself for not having played it sooner but also not surprised at all – Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio got the formula down for the games a while ago and have been regularly producing titles of top quality for years.

The million dollar question was of course, how would the remaster compare…?

I’ve already commented on that – not especially well to be completely honest. It certainly looks cleaner with much higher resolution assets and running at 60 fps (in performance mode). And that, comparing my play on the original to the same point on the remaster, was that.

I was quite disappointed, I have to say. I’m not sure what I expected – the game didn’t market itself as a remake or anything and to quote what it says in the PR materials:

“The missing chapter in the RGG series comes to the West! Like a Dragon: Ishin!
expands upon its 2014 Japan-exclusive predecessor with localization support,
all-new content, exquisitely remastered graphics and enhanced capabilities for
modern platforms in Unreal Engine 4.”

I mean the graphics are improved upon but character models, animations, even the in game menus were recognisable from the original.

At this point I had to remind myself that my two favourite ever Yakuza games are 5 and 0 so if this Ishin was built using the same bricks as those two classics, it was bound to be a belter of a game.

And so it proved.

I played on and let myself get drawn into the story, saw the map open up with newly accessible areas, started to unlock side missions and content. I was soon hooked – Ishin is good: really, really good.

I want to talk a little bit about the choice of game engine in LAD Ishin. RGG Studio chose to use Unreal Engine 4 for this remaster. When Sega announced this last autumn, the immediate question was why weren’t they using their in-house Dragon Engine which had powered every RGG game since 2016’s Yakuza 6? Especially when they also confirmed that the next two Like A Dragon games, Gaiden and 8, are to use Dragon.

The official line is that Unreal Engine is better at daytime scenes than Dragon, meaning Dragon isn’t very good at these. To be perfectly honest I find that difficult to believe – all of the five games developed using the Dragon Engine feature plenty of good looking daytime scenes. Indeed my memories of Onomichi in Y6 are far more of day than night.

While this is obviously pure speculation, I suspect the answer may well be more to do with the fact that RGG Studio “are considering” a switch to Unreal Engine 5 for the mainline games in the future. Could it be that remastering Ishin was a dry run to see how easily they could adapt their existing assets to build a game using Epic’s seemingly ubiquitous game engine?

For me the one of biggest drawbacks about not using Dragon is that the game doesn’t seamlessly transition from inside to outside of all buildings. This was a change that Dragon brought in Yakuza 6 and has become standard since. Going back to loading pauses, albeit brief ones, when you move between areas of the map and enter and exit many (but not all) of the buildings on the map feels really clunky to me. Once again, remaster not remake.

What Ishin reminds me of the most is the Yakuza Remastered Collection which included 3, 4 and 5: all PS3 games cleaned up and given higher quality assets. That was a collection of three classic games for the price which was a great deal. I struggle a wee bit with Ishin being a single title at full price…

Having said all that, I will reiterate: Ishin is a really good game. It foreshadows a lot of the gameplay features I praised in Yakuza 0 such as the four combat styles, being able to spend “virtue” (AKA completion points) on in-game benefits and building bonds with NPCs around the city. I don’t think Ishin quite gets the blend right though – the number of “bondable” characters is really high, it feels like you are constantly finding shopkeepers and passers by who you can bond with – some more easily than others. Even if I weren’t trying to play through the game (relatively) quickly I seriously doubt I could be arsed achieving bonds with them all. In Y0 we see this mechanic scaled back to a far smaller, but more meaningful, selection of characters.

Like A Dragon: Ishin as noted takes place in the Bakumatsu period of Japanese history, around 1860. Characters from the Yakua universe “act” as historical figures. Kiryu Kazuma, the protagonist of the mainline games until Yakuza 6, takes centre spot as Sakamoto Ryouma, a true historical figure. The game starts off in the southern province of Tosa and then progresses to Kyoto, the empirical capital of Japan. We see a whole host of other favourite Yakuza characters similarly playing the roles of various other historical persons, notably Majima, Goda and Akiyama.

The main plot revolves around Sakamoto’s efforts to find the killer of a character very close to him, with the evolving conflict between the Bakufu and the loyalist factions weaving in and out of this arc. The historical events are generally based on real ones but the details are not strictly speaking accurate.

One random observation I would make is one of the kanji characters we see in Sakamoto’s name, 坂本龍馬, the character for “dragon”: 龍. This is of course the same word as the dragon of the title of the game series and the game studio:  龍が如く. It also forms part of the nickname for Kiryu, the Dragon of Dojima: 堂島の龍. I wonder if this is purely a coincidence or if it had anything to do with the choice of character to be “played” by Kiryu?

Although I have said it is an obvious remaster, absolutely not a Kiwami-esque remake, there is some new content. Some of the Shinsengumi captains are “acted” by characters from Yakuza: Like A Dragon which obviously released several years after Ishin so must have been added for the remaster. The Trooper card combat mechanic once acquired is available for all combat – apparently in the original it was only applicable for the dungeon crawling sidequest.

Speaking of combat, this is definitely one of Ishin’s strengths. Again indicating 0’s combat system, it introduces four unique styles and the ability to flip between them at will. In addition to typical Yakuza brawling we get a sword, a pistol and a hybrid combining both weapons – the Wild Dancer style. I tended to use this as my main style as the dodge is very effective but I discovered at certain stages that I had neglected some of the other styles to my detriment. I won’t say any more in case of spoilers but my advice would be to level up all four styles as much as possible!

Yakuza / RGG games are not particularly noted for their profound commentary on social issues and Ishin is largely no different. As I have talked about though, it does

  take place in an interesting historical period when Japan was going through a lot of mostly involuntary upheaval. There’s a scene early in the game when Sakamoto receives a pistol from his compatriot and there is a comment made that “the era of killing people with a sword is over” and that guns are equalising factors in warfare because it “does not take any skill to use them”. I can’t help but take that as a wee dig at the lack of skill and honour of the Americans and British who have waltzed into town and bullied Japan with their superior technology.

While I’ve said Like a Dragon: Ishin is a very good game – and it is – it is certainly not a perfect one – it has flaws, some of which I have already talked about. Its PS3 generation origin is evident throughout. I found the camera frequently not panning intuitively during combat and often had to manually adjust it with the right thumb stick. Not really what you want to be doing during a boss fight when you need to be constantly dodging and striking. Probably the most obvious technical issue is the pop in of NPCs on the streets of Kyo. This is really noticeable and often quite jarring.

As I’ve talked about, I feel the game doesn’t really do enough to flesh out the background and world in which it takes place. A good example of this is the in game glossary. Ostensibly a great idea – certain words are highlighted in dialogue boxes and pressing the Options button launches a pop up which explains said words. However, in practice the range of words explained is very limited and mostly pertains to geographical areas. As someone who is somewhat familiar with Japanese history and geography and speaks a bit of the language it wasn’t a huge issue for me but I could see it being a source of frustration / disappointment for some. Frequently I would see that the glossary was available for a sentence and open it only to be informed for the umpteenth time where the Tosa domain was, rather than the other word in the sentence I was interested in.

While we did receive the code for the game before launch it was only a few days before so this review was never going to be ready for the release day. However I did want to get it out as soon as possible so I played my way through a lot quicker than I typically do with Yakuza / RGG games. I completed it in just under forty hours but could easily have taken twice that and I think the experience would have been a superior one had I done so. Once or twice I definitely felt underpowered in boss fights and there is a difficulty spike about three quarters into the game which would have been easier to deal with had I spent more time improving my abilities and equipment.

Having said that, my attempt at mainlining a Yakuza game wasn’t especially successful…

As a long time Yakuza / RGG fan this game is a return to the period which produced my two favourite ever releases in the series – Y5 and Y0. Does Ishin make it as my 3rd favourite? I’m not sure but it’s definitely close. I personally do not like the change in combat system that Yakuza: Like A Dragon took and am not excited whatsoever about future mainline releases from Like A Dragon 8 and beyond. Releases like Ishin however are exactly what I enjoy about the Yakuza series, now go and make Kenzan Kiwami Sega, please!

For anyone who has a penchant for the franchise, Ishin is absolutely easily a 9/10. For gamers new to the Ryu Ga Gotoku world however, while I do believe they will enjoy the game, it probably won’t have quite such an impact. Maybe 8/10 for new players? I’m going to average these out for my overall score.

-Calum