Originally released in 2014 on Playstation 3 and 4, Yakuza Ishin! had never crossed borders while remaining exclusive to Japanese territory. It is therefore with a certain enthusiasm that the fans of the Ryū ga Gotoku studio awaited the arrival of this remake of the title, baptized for the occasion Like a Dragon: Ishin! and this time available worldwide on all gaming platforms.
A spin-off a little too wise
If you have already got your hands on one of the episodes of the Yakuza saga and have watched the trailers for this Like a Dragon: Ishin!, you may be wondering what Kazuma Kiryu is doing in the time of the samurai. Don’t worry, it’s not about time travel or anachronism, it’s about Sakamoto Ryoma, the main character of this episode. As you will realize over the course of the adventure, almost all of the characters that we meet, friends and enemies, take on the faces of other characters from the Yakuza license. While some only share their traits, others go so far as to also copy their attitudes, such as Shimano’s Mad Dog, Majima Goro.
The voices are also the same, so it will sometimes be difficult to distinguish Kiryu from Ryoma. The voice acting quality is once again high quality, but only available in Japanese. Good news for Anglophobes, as for the studio’s latest games, Like a Dragon: Ishin! benefits from texts fully translated into French. Enough to be able to better appreciate all the richness of a sometimes very talkative game.
Province of Tosa, 1868. Wrongly accused of the murder of his adoptive father, Ryoma is forced to leave his native island to reach the city of Kyo, a fictional copy of Kyoto at the time. Determined to find and bring the culprit to justice with his sword, he takes on a new name and sets off in search of the real murderer with only one clue: his rather particular fighting style. Along the way, he will meet many people and starting from the search for revenge, he will finally end up having an impact on the future of the whole country.
Without going into details and spoiling the pleasure of the narration, we can only salute its quality. The script is well put together and keeps us going. Rich in twists, betrayals and sequences filled with emotions, it suffers only from little dead time during the twenty hours necessary to see the end of it. However, it is possible to criticize it for being a little too similar to the construction of other Yakuza games in some of its themes as well as in the course of the adventure.
Indeed, Like a Dragon: Ishin! identically follows the formula of the main series. The story is divided into a little over a dozen chapters, where we find moving around town from point A to point B, fights in beat ’em all, dialogue sequences and cutscenes between. The set still works well, thanks to a successful staging and a soundtrack that accompanies it wonderfully, especially during boss fights. But we really struggle to see real differences or innovations, apart of course from the Bakumatsu era and its own universe.
A very generous adventure
The observation is quite similar at the level of the additional content. As for the Yakuza, Like a Dragon: Ishin! has enough to keep you busy for a bunch of hours. If it takes about 20 just for the main story, you can easily multiply that time by five to get 100% completion.
Among all this content, we find first of all the secondary stories. With a little less than seventy quests, they offer a welcome lightness with comical, even eccentric situations, compared to the much more serious main scenario. They are not all the most interesting, but some may make you smile. Some also give the opportunity to make friends that we can then maintain through a few unfortunately very repetitive actions. No dubbing for the latter on the other hand, it will be necessary to be satisfied with a few onomatopoeias.
One of these secondary stories will allow us to help a young girl named Haruka pay off her debt so as not to lose her house. For this, we will have access to this small house located outside the city in order to grow fruits and vegetables there. Without turning to the Harvest Moon either, we can improve the size of the vegetable garden and organize it as we see fit by optimizing the space at our disposal as well as possible, the different crops requiring more or less space. Once the harvest is over, we will head to the kitchen to prepare some good food there through mini-games similar to what we can find in a Cooking Mama. The debt not repaying itself, it will also be necessary to fill the order books that Haruka’s parents left him in order to generate a profit.
At a certain point in the main story, Ryoma will be promoted to captain and will have an entire division of soldiers under his command. It will then be possible to grow our army for a fee, during random encounters or at the end of dungeons. The latter ask us to go through caves filled with bandits with various objectives. However, these are only a pretext since each of the dungeons will ultimately be very similar. It will be necessary to sink into the galleries, clean a room of its enemies, activate a lever to open a door and this, until reaching the final room and defeating the boss who hides there. Boredom quickly shows up, especially as the enemies are stronger and more resistant over the dungeons, which tends to quickly become a purge where each opponent gets closer to the bag of life points than anything else.
At the end of another side quest, we will meet a monk who will give us a whole list of actions to perform as a reward for virtue. There’s something for everyone: talking to several people, running a long distance, defeating a certain amount of enemies, etc. Many of these actions will be done while playing normally, but it will take quite a while to complete them all. The virtue obtained with each action grants us different evolutions. For example, we can improve the vegetable garden, the kitchen or even the appearance of the house described above and also increase Ryoma’s stamina. And that, you will quickly need it!
Indeed, you will run a lot in the city of Kyo whether for the needs of the main story or to explore the many restaurants and participate in the mini-games available (singing, dancing, cock racing or gambling) . For license regulars, the city is as big as Kamurocho and just as lively. And if the inhabitants are numerous, the bandits and other ronins are also. We then find ourselves very often embroiled in fights that we would have liked to avoid at times.
Saber in the light
If the last episode of the license offered us turn-based combat, Yakuza Ishin! in 2014 and therefore its remake today still works with the beat’em all type combat system. Unfortunately, in 2023 the latter is starting to age and improvements would have been welcome.
Indeed, the fights can sometimes become quite rough, especially when many belligerents are present on the screen. It can then become difficult to hit the desired target, the fault of the absence of a locking system and a sometimes capricious camera. However, the confrontations remain a pleasure controller in hand including during the face-to-face with the bosses to which are added QTEs staged in a sometimes spectacular way.
If Kiryu had several fighting styles to face the opposing yakuza, Ryoma has no shortage of options either. In total, there are four different ways to fight that are offered to us. With fists, saber, pistol or a combination of the two, everyone will find what they are looking for. Personally, we mainly used the style combining the two weapons, fast and pretty in its realization. For each style, we have a skill tree of its own and if at the beginning of the adventure our options are limited, our range of available moves is enriched as we progress, allowing us then increasingly fun fights.
We told you earlier about the recruits that Ryoma could obtain. The latter also have a role to play in combat. Each recruit is represented as a card, with passive and active bonuses. Active bonuses can be used during confrontations and thus help us in complicated situations, for example. Of course, the rarer the card, the better these bonuses. Among the rarest, we note the presence of some well-known faces that we will leave it to you to discover, but also wrestler Kenny Omega and actor Rahul Kholi, fans of the license who see themselves invited here in the game.
Technically, Like a Dragon: Ishin! blows both hot and cold. This is the first game in the series to use the Unreal Engine 4 engine instead of the Dragon Engine used so far. If the overall rendering is quite clean, it does not yet correspond to current industry standards and is not likely to drop your jaw. The animations are still quite rigid and you will only have to rely on the cutscenes to have a good or sometimes very good quality rendering. Too bad that we see some delays in the display of textures in the latter.
Tested on Xbox Series X
