GAME CLEAR No. 125 -- Like a Dragon: Ishin!

Like a Dragon: Ishin! (2023, Multiplatform)

Developer: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios
Publisher: SEGA
Clear Platform: PlayStation 5
Clear Date: 3/17/23

A Pretty Good Restoration

So it turns out if you commit to writing a blog post about every god damn game you beat, you will run into problems if you beat a bunch of games from the same series. There is, at a certain point, only so much you can say. I’m probably there with Yakuza – now finally localized as Like a Dragon, as it arguably should’ve been all along. Having said that, since this one takes place in the 19th century, it’s actually pretty different from the other several I’ve already written about on here! How nice.

Like a Dragon: Ishin! is a remaster of a game by the same name that was released on PlayStations 3 and 4 in 2014. A peculiarity of the fact that this remaster was released on PlayStations 4 and 5 is that that makes it the only remaster I can think of that was released on the same platform it originally launched on – in Japan at least. For those of us in the rest of the world, this marks its first release. Given where the series was at the time and the nature of the game, this makes sense. Yakuza had not quite broken through in the west just yet at that point, so it didn’t really make sense to do a worldwide launch of a Japanese historical fiction spinoff thereof.

Since then, Like a Dragon has grown considerably in popularity outside of Japan, so it makes sense that SEGA decided the time had come to tap the well of low-R&D stuff like a remaster of Ishin!. Curiously, they decided to redo the game in Unreal – more on that later.

As aforementioned, Ishin! is a historical fiction that takes place around the time of the Meiji Restoration (明治維新, “Meiji Ishin,” hence the title) and focuses on that event’s major players and the events that precipitated it. Oh, and all the major characters are “played” by characters from the Yakuza games, which is both cool and funny. My favorite side-effect of this is that it brings with it some familiar voice talent. I don’t speak a lick of Japanese, but I love the voice talent of the series.

Anyway, the describing the nature of this retelling is where it gets difficult for me to talk about this game in a way that is of any use to anyone reading this. First of all, I was completely unaware of the Meiji Restoration (or the Tokugawa Period, etc.) before playing this game, so I did a good amount of cruising Wikipedia to try to keep up. That said, I certainly do not consider myself an expert on the matter whatsoever, and it’s still basically impossible for me to discuss the differences between truth and fiction or to reckon with the decisions RGG Studio made in portraying these events and their major figures, whether good or bad. I had hoped that this Polygon review would help me understand that, but it seems to really just suggest that such an analysis should be performed for us gaijin but the author refrained from doing so to avoid spoilers. To be clear, I totally get that, and I do hope author Kazuma Hashimoto eventually gets the green light to do such a piece. I will read it in a heartbeat. I’ll also come back and edit this post to point you in that direction since that would certainly be a better read than anything I could muster.

What I can talk about, though, is the gameplay, which is 100% Like a Dragon goodness. Although it’s set in 19th-century Kyoto instead of the ultra-neon, ultra-urban Tokyo of the main series, it follows the same core gameplay loop. You play as Sakamoto Ryōma (portrayed with Kiryu Kazuma’s familiar visage and voice), who was a real fella of historical significance and a samurai, as was the style at the time. You run around Kyoto finding things to have cutscenes about that give you a reason to fight people. Fitting the times, swordplay is prominent and is the primary way you engage enemies and especially bosses. Amusingly, gunplay also features heavily, which is largely absent from the modern gangster titles! Ryōma’s got four fighting styles. One combines swords and guns into a flashy, dancing style of combat, one is just swords, one is just guns, and one is hand-to-hand if you find yourself itching to return to the fisticuffs of the mainline games. You’ll feel right at home switching styles if you enjoyed doing so in Yakuza 0 and/or Yakuza Kiwami. All styles have their uses, and while I found the sword-only style to be my favorite, all the weapon styles are fun to dabble with and are quite different from what you will have experienced through most of the Yakuza games, which is welcome in a series that can be a bit samey in that regard.

When you’re not fighting your enemies or advancing the story, you can also expect a huge host of side quests and minigames RGG Studio is known for. Rhythm games, gambling games, combat training, and even a little farm/life sim are included if you feel you need the distraction. You won’t find an Out Run cabinet anywhere, unfortunately, but short of ridiculous anachronisms, the usual stuff you know and love is here. I would say I even found the humor of the substories to be above average for the series. Great stuff here, and as always you can more than double your time with this game if you really dive deep into all the extra stuff. It’s a bounty.

While I feel pretty positively about this game overall, I will lodge one complaint, which is that this is definitely the buggiest RGG game I’ve played so far. I don’t know if that’s a result of the Studio’s aggressive release schedule, growing pains with Unreal, or maybe both, but I just noticed a lot of little silly things that seemed to be signs of a rushed product. Floating NPCs, laggy menus, bugged subtitles. These things were almost never real impediments to enjoying the game, but they do make me concerned about the amount of time SEGA is allowing to let these things bake. The game has already received a few patches that I’m sure address some of these issues, but you’d always rather see those things knocked out by launch.

I guess we’ll see what the state of that is when Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name launches later this fuckin’ year! Good luck RGG Studio!

In the meantime, if you can squeeze this in, I don’t think you’ll regret it.