Like a Dragon: Ishin! Digital Deluxe

I went in expecting a straightforward Yakuza reskin in a kimono, and walked out roughly forty hours later having been completely won over by the Bakumatsu-era atmosphere RGG Studio managed to bottle here. Originally a PlayStation launch title that never left Japan, the game was rebuilt on Unreal Engine 4 and released worldwide in 2023, and that history shows in ways both good and complicated. The core hook is the four combat styles: Brawler, Swordsman, Gunman, and Wild Dancer. Each has its own skill tree fed by style-specific experience points, so the game quietly nudges you toward diversifying rather than camping one stance forever. Swordsman is your bread-and-butter for boss duels, with a charged finishing blow that rewards timing over button-mashing. Wild Dancer - sword in one hand, revolver in the other - is the flashy crowd-control pick when you are surrounded. Brawler leans on parries and environmental weapons, which means grabbing a crate off the street and ending someone with it is a totally viable strategy. Gunman rounds things out with ranged pressure, though some enemies are bulletproof, which forces you to actually think about swapping. The styles are not perfectly balanced - Swordsman does a lot of heavy lifting - but the variety keeps individual fights from going stale. What the combat engine cannot fully hide is its age. This plays like Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami rather than the more fluid Dragon Engine titles that came after. Boss encounters occasionally feel rigid, with hitboxes and recovery windows that belong to 2014 rather than 2023. Players coming from Lost Judgment or Yakuza: Like a Dragon will notice the step back. That said, the argument for the older engine is real: faster, more arcade-style animations that suit samurai theatrics better than the heavier realism of later entries. Outside of combat, the game is generously stuffed. The Another Life system lets you slow down with farming, cooking, and trading - a genuine tonal counterweight to the relentless revenge plot. A secondary dungeon campaign built around clearing bandit caves gives you a satisfying grind loop for rare items and extra experience. Side quests, minigames, and substories stack up the way they always do in this series: absurd, occasionally brilliant, never throwaway. The historical Kyoto setting, the Bakufu political factions, the coded nods to real figures from the period - all of it gives the world a texture that modern Yakuza settings rarely match. Who is this for? Series veterans who skipped the Japan-only era will get the most out of it: familiar face cast into a completely unfamiliar world, melodrama dialled to eleven. Newcomers who bounced off the turn-based combat of recent entries and want the old brawler format back will also land well here. Anyone hoping for a technical showpiece or cutting-edge feel should recalibrate expectations before hitting start.

Alex · Scout Team

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