Like a Dragon: Ishin - The Final Preview
Like A Dragon: Ishin! was originally released during a very different era for the Yakuza franchise. It hit shelves in 2014 as an offbeat launch title for the Playstation 4, when only the most diehard aficionados of Japanese imports were playing Yakuza games in the West. Ishin! positioned itself as one of the strangest entries in the canon, trading in the rain-slicked noir of the mainline succession for a samurai-western mashup set in the 19th century that's totally disconnected from the prodigal sagas of Kiryu and Majima. Sega never bothered to localize the game for English speakers, probably because they deemed it too frivolous compared to the rest of the Yakuza lineage. But American gamers are currently in the midst of an ongoing Yakuza renaissance, and that means Ishin! is finally coming to our shores in the form of this spruced-up remake that emphasizes all of its glorious anachronistic excess.
Do not be fooled by the historical vintage: Ishin! is very much a Yakuza game, in the sense that it is balanced precariously between a hard-boiled revenge saga and a dizzy ensemble comedy. I played the remake for two hours, which was bracketed by a story mission where our main character, Sakamoto Ryōma, infiltrates a secretive paramilitary organization filled to the brim with ruthless killers who've mastered a deathly, impervious sword-fighting style called Tennen Rishin. (In that sense, Ishin! borrows liberally from some of the oldest kung-fu tropes in the book.) Along the way though, I ambled into karaoke bars, chicken race track circuits, dance halls, and gambling dens – each populated with the exact sort of lovable miscreants that give this series its color. We are deep in annals of antiquity, and nothing has changed; the
Read more on ign.com
