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 madcap sidequests, intricate relationship-building subsystems, and ridiculously fleshed out mini games are all right in place. Case in point: I bumped into a sweaty samurai otaku — like the Comic Book Guy for katanas — who promised me a huge prize if I could procure for him a specific type of blade. He didn’t want to use it, of course. He just wanted to see it up close.
All of this is rendered pretty well for a game that’s nearly a decade old. Ishin! does have that uncanny plastic sheen you might remember from Yakuza 0, but Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has done some impressive work in the cutscenes. Ryōma emotes with remarkable clarity, which is important in a series like Yakuza that tells the bulk of its story through long, expository soliloquies. Someday this franchise will need to upgrade its visual chops, but for a re-release of a 2014 curio, Ishin! asserts itself well.
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Despite sharing its title with the 2020 reboot Yakuza: Like A Dragon, which pivoted the franchise to a turn-based combat structure, Ishin! retains its brawler roots. Ryōma cycles through four different combat styles, wielding his fists, a blade, or, delightfully, a Wild West revolver. Yes, this is a Yakuza game that gives you a gun, alongside a special ability that lets you enter a dreamy bullet-time like John Marston to better line up your shots. The variant I gravitated towards the most was something Ryōma has dubbed “Wild Dancer,” where he brandishes both his katana and firearm at the same time and drunkenly flails around the arena. One combo ends with him unleashing a hail of bullets in every direction, as if you’re briefly tapping into some latent Devil May Cry DNA. It’s a genuinely innovative flip on the established Yakuza precepts; after years of destroying our enemies with cinder blocks and pool cues, sometimes we want to get the job done by simply aiming down sights.
Again, Ishin! does not dramatically alter the contours of the Yakuza universe. This is a side-story by nature — it’s proudly ancillary — and seems to be best understood as a chance to savor some indulgent fan service injected into a new set of genre trappings. That said, you might be surprised at who pops up over the course of your journey. At the end of my demo, I was introduced to one of the head honchos of this paramilitary battalion. It was a man named Soji, who looked and sounded exactly like Majima. (He even wore an eyepatch.) As part of this remaster, Sega has cast a number of actors who appeared in latter-day Yakuza games to reprise loose facsimiles of themselves in Ishin! I can only hope that this implies the existence of a grand multiverse of Yakuza; from the stone age to the singularity, Kiryu will be beating people up eternally. At last, all is right in the world.