Like a Dragon: Ishin! is a welcome release for Sega’s stylish samurai saga
It’s a sign of Yakuza’s growing cultural cache that an instalment once deemed too idiosyncratic for Western audiences has been localised and given a semi-lavish updating. Like A Dragon: Ishin! isn’t quite a full-bodied remake to match the earlier Kiwami updates, but is certainly no phoned-in cash grab and rather artfully places it in the current Like A Dragon landscape.
At first glance, you can understand the apprehension towards localising Ishin! back in 2014. The action relocates from the seedy arcade wonderlands of present-day Japan to Kyoto in the 1860s, a city undergoing great political upheaval that takes a few hours to find your bearings in.
It boils down to civil war between imperial loyalists and the military government, but a lot of the specifics need to be teased from glossary terms tagged to text boxes and a Wiki’s worth of reading material buried in sub menus. It doesn’t have the instant cops-and-robbers fun of the modern-day tales.
Given time, the Yakuza magic bubbles up. Our lead, Sakamoto Ryoma, is pulled from the history books, but is modelled on legendary Yakuza stud Kazuma Kiryu. It creates a fascinating what-if scenario where his story roughly follows the footsteps of the real-life Ryoma, but those same feet are also used to kick bandits into rivers.
It’s the Assassin’s Creed-ification of history: a secret story ‘behind’ known events. Yes, Ryoma did help engineer the Satsuma–Chōshū Alliance, but did he do it by force-feeding one of its leaders a pot of sour plums? Citation needed.
If Kiryu’s presence offers a firm foothold in a chewier tale, he’s lent support from allies and enemies lifted from the wider series and recast as the main figures in his adventure. It ends up behaving like one of the Star Trek:
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