Like a Dragon: Ishin! Hands-On Preview - TGS 2022

ign.com:

The year is 1867, and a lone warrior wielding a katana wanders a dusty Japanese town packed with merchants, bandits, and the odd pet. The warrior, a grim-faced Shinsengumi soldier named Ryouma Sakamoto encounters a group villagers dancing, and after a brief kerfuffle… joins them.

This is the kind of scene that fans have come to expect from the Yakuza series, which was recently renamed Like a Dragon to fit the Japanese series. The key difference is that it’s set in the Bakumatsu Period rather than under the neon lights of Kamurocho, trading suits for kimons and automatic weapons for katanas (though the hero, who is Kazuma Kiryu in all but name, has a revolver). But despite the samurai setting, it remains very much the same in spirit.

That means a decent amount of the game is spent wandering through alleys, playing various mini-games, and generally looking for trouble. There are no Club Sega arcades in 19th century Japan — or in modern Japan for that matter, what with Sega’s recent departure from the arcade business — but you can play shogi and poker. In the course of my 40 minutes or so with Ishin, I visited a geisha, tried my hand at fishing, and spotted a chicken racing game (though that last one was sadly locked out).

Much of this takes place in daylight, which is a big reason for the shift to Unreal Engine 4 for this entry — (Like a Dragon 8 and Like a Dragon Gaiden will both continue to utilize the older Dragon Engine). When the sun goes down, the Shinsengumi turn their attention to more serious matters, such as a figure known as “Izu the Butcher” — a fighter capable of dispatching two captains with a brief flash of his blade. Yakuza has always been a violent series, and Ishin continues that tradition among