Like a Dragon: Ishin! (2023)

Finished the main story yesterday. It's a good Yakuza game through and through. Now seeing the missing piece between Yakuza 5 and Zero I kinda see that era as the golden age of the series.

• Yakuza 5 brought diversity of content (5 playable cities, goddamn) and just all around fun factor of the series to a really high standard. Sadly bogged down by a silly story but oh well. Still, an absolute blast of a game.
• Like a Dragon: Ishin then brings an awesome change of scenery for a spin off. Also scales back the staggering amount of content a bit but provides a much more focused story and four distinct fighting styles for one character. All around good stuff.
• Then comes Yakuza Zero that ups the amount of content a bit (two cities, very fleshed out minigames), gives a focused story AND two characters BOTH with 4 different fighting styles.

Also, before 5 came Dead Souls which I have a soft spot for and pretty soon after Zero came Yakuza 6 which again gave a very fresh experiece.

But yeah, back to the topic. I just really liked Ishin. Atmoshpere was good. Characters and story were good and featured no rubber bullets or brothers-in-CIA twists. The fighting styles were very distinct and pretty well thought out, except for gunman which was a bit more of a hit-and-miss in its execution. Dungeon crawling missions were fun. Difficulty was higher fo a change. More thought out weapons and gear system brought some more RPG flavor to the mix. It also has one of the coolest fights in the whole series backed with an absolute banger of a tune.

It's not my favourite Yakuza game but it's one of the best ones.

I played the remaster on Xbox Series X and it was... fine. Some effects that I believe are due to the shift into Unreal Engine sure looked nice but they still had graphical wrinkles to iron out. Lighting effects were weird at times and most notably textures were really slow to load. Thus, in cutscenes characters would first be shown with low res textures before flickering into higher res ones. A jarring effect but of course not game breaking. And the actual game was, as far as I know, really close to the original release with some slight alterations. So gameplay-wise the remaster brings the goods (if you like pre Dragon Engine Yakuza games, that is).

My copy of “Like a Dragon: Ishin!” came with a gorgeous steelbook case I greatly prefer to the standard one… but no slipcover (presumably because it is multi-platform), and no title on the spine. 🤨

So I printed and cut a little vinyl sticker and stuck it on a bootleg PS5 slipcover I bought a while ago. Problem solved! 🤓