Like a Dragon: Ishin!

My first hour with Ishin had me grinning at the audacity of it: Kazuma Kiryu, wearing a samurai's topknot, undercover in the Shinsengumi as Sakamoto Ryoma, hunting his adopted father's killer while accidentally reshaping 1860s Japan. That's the pitch, and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio commits to it completely. If you've spent time with any mainline Yakuza game, the faces, voices, and melodrama will feel like reuniting with old friends who happen to now carry katanas instead of car parts. Combat is real-time brawler action, a welcome return to the studio's pre-turn-based roots. Ryoma cycles between four distinct fighting styles: Brawler for fist-and-environment chaos, Swordsman for deliberate high-damage strikes against single targets, Gunman for controlling space at range, and Wild Dancer, a hybrid stance that blends blade and gun into fast, crowd-friendly combos. Each style has its own skill tree, and switching between them mid-fight is where the real satisfaction lives. The Trooper Card system layers on top of this: you build squads of up to four cards per style, drawn from over 400 recruitable characters (yes, including animals), and trigger their abilities in combat for heals, buffs, AoE attacks, or crowd-control. It sounds busier than it plays, the system is optional enough that you can ignore it, and engaged enough that min-maxing a squad build around your preferred style has genuine depth. The setting does real work here. Kyo, the game's Kyoto stand-in, trades the neon density of Kamurocho for quieter streets, paper lanterns, and the creak of wooden architecture. It breathes differently, and not always to the game's advantage: the open world can feel sparse compared to later series entries, and the minigame selection, while covering farming, cooking, karaoke, and a solid slate of substories, doesn't quite hit the variety highs of Yakuza 0 or Lost Judgment. The story itself has a saggy midpoint where the pacing loses its footing, but the finale recovers with the kind of theatrical conviction that makes this studio's cutscenes genuinely memorable. Takaya Kuroda's Japanese performance as Ryoma is as commanding as ever, and this is a Japanese-dub-only release, so subtitle readers get the full experience by default. The elephant in the room is technical lineage. This is a rebuild of a 2014 PS3/PS4 title using Unreal Engine 4, not the Dragon Engine that powers the studio's newer work. The combat feels a half-step behind Lost Judgment's fluidity, the camera gets combative in tight corridors, and pop-in is noticeable in cutscenes. Weapon crafting at the blacksmith and the card progression systems add meaningful texture, but the bones of the game show their age compared to what RGG has built since. For series veterans coming from Judgment or Infinite Wealth, that regression is real. For players newer to the series, or those who just want a cinematic samurai action game packed with side content and a story that earns its runtime, the age barely registers.

Alex · Scout Team

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