3.5/5 ★ – AerialViking's review of Like a Dragon: Ishin!.

Like a Dragon Ishin! is a remake of Ryu Ga Gotoku Ishin from 2014 that released on PS4. This is a game that I was quite interested in when it was announced. I had heard about these ancient samurai spinoffs of the Yakuza series that were never localized and I thought “yeah but we’d probably never get those; Yakuza is popular but why would they bother going back to localize a game that is a decade old at this point?” So I was so fucking surprised when they actually did that BUT also remade it? Holy fucking shit So was it worth the wait? How does this spinoff fair compared to the rest of the series? The combat in this game is somewhat of a take on the different styles of Yakuza 0 and Kiwami. You have 4 different fighting styles Brawler, Gunman, Swordsman and Wild Dancer. Brawler is pretty much your classic Kiryu moveset, although it feels greatly nerfed in this game; in fact Brawler is by far the worst style in this game. You do so little damage, even with tons of upgrades and using gear that increases the damage, I felt it’s not even worth doing. Swordsman is you’re classic samurai sword fighting style. It looks really good, and dishes out the most amount of damage (at least, it did in my playthrough). I ended up putting a lot of time into this style. It really helped me out, especially in dungeons. It feels like your standard, go-to style for tougher enemies. Gunman is very OP in mob fights. You can just stand there and mash the Square button and the enemies will die ESPECIALLY when you get something like the Vortex gun with its crazy rate of fire. Now, I admit it is pretty funny watching enemies not even get a chance, and using a gun with unlimited ammo in a Yakuza game (one that isn’t a special bonus weapon) is pretty empowering, but like it still feels very OP. The saving grace is that it’s not super useful against boss type enemies, and it does nearly nothing to enemies with armor, so at least it forces you to not use it all of the time. Wild Dancer is really fucking cool. It reminds of Majima’s break dancing style in Yakuza 0. It combines the sword and the gun from their respective styles, and man is it so cool. You are so fast and hard to hit in this style. This was my second most used style in the game, and in fact I mostly used only this one for the first chunk of the game. It’s just such a fun thing to use for combat. It is balanced out by it doing probably the 2nd worst amount of damage, just in front of Brawler, but you are quick enough that your DPS kind of balances that out. You can say that, yeah; overall I really did like the combat. Everything else you’re interested in for a Yakuza game is here. Karaoke, restaurants, special bespoke side-content, and you best believe Substories. Substory-wise, I did enjoy this one. Nothing in it blew me out of the water, but it was a fairly enjoyable time. The other side content was okay too. There’s a farming minigame as well as a dungeon crawler. Overall, I did get a bit sucked into the farming. Like there were several days where, before I went to work, I would just spend a couple of hours doing farm stuff. The dungeon crawling stuff was okay. Kind of repetitive, but I spread it out over a month or so, so it didn’t really bother me too much. As for the story, I liked it. I didn’t love it, it’s not one of my favorites in the series, but I did overall enjoy it. It being set in a real ancient Japanese setting with real ancient Japanese figures was really cool, and I did learn quite a bit about that era that I had no clue about, so most of my fascination with this story came from the setting. I did not really care *that* much about the actual narrative or plot going on. It was a decent amount of fun seeing a bunch of these characters who I hadn’t seen in awhile, pop up in this game though. It made me smile. In conclusion, this is a fun little diversion for the series which had introduced some pretty neat ideas for the series. I enjoyed my time with it, and hope one day that Kenzan gets a release over here too.