Your resident Ryu ga Gotoku fan here for yet another mini review, this time of Like a Dragon: Ishin!

This game came out originally in 2014, but received a semi-Kiwami treatment by being ported to Unreal Engine (4, I believe, not sure).

The game is set in pre-Meiji restoration Japan and follows the story of real life badass Sakamoto Ryouma although the game's story isn't exactly historically accurate.
It's still a wonderful journey through 1860s Japan and the quality cannot be understated here - this is another amazing production from Ryu ga Gotoku Studio.

How I Played the Game

Just like half of Yakuza 6, I played this game through Xbox Cloud Gaming. Unfortunately my Series S broke down and since I do not use Windows, I had to play this via the XBPlay app on Linux. That being said, the image quality was supreme and I did not experience any sort of stuttering or jaggies throughout my over 16 hour playthrough.

Graphics

Source: GameSpot

I can't say how the original game looked like because I never actually played or saw that version, but that being said, the presentation here with Unreal Engine is absolutely stunning. The game looks great when walking around town but looks even better amidst the cutscenes, with gorgeous facial animations.
The effects while battling are also really well done and there's nothing to complain here.

I said I run Linux and therefore can't play the game natively through Gamepass, but I did try it out for a couple of hours through dualbooting (before getting rid of that Windows partition), and even on a low end system like mine (i7 3770, RX 570, 16GBs DDR3 RAM on an SSD) the game ran flawlessly.

The Gameplay

Source: IGN

My least favourite thing about Yakuza 0 and Kiwami were the multiple fighting styles. In both games I stuck to Rush style/Breaker style and beat the game that way. Ishin has multiple styles: Swordsman, Brawler, Gunman and Wild Dancer.

Unlike 0 and Kiwami, I simply do not have any complaints here. All fighting styles are fun to play as and they're not as annoying to grind through to get real strong moves. It was absolutely phenomenal to switch between them as different situations required different "tools."

A quarter into the game you also get access to troops, which can help you out in combat by dishing out extra damage, healing you or giving you status buffs/debuffs to enemies. It seems a little complicated at first, but it's really easy to wrap your head around and mixing and matching different styles and troopers is really really fun.

The Story

Before I get into the story itself, there's something cool I wanna talk about:

Yakuza/Like a Dragon side games use the same actors as the mainline games, but playing different roles. This is like watching a movie being played by the same actors and it's honestly pretty cool.

But onto about the story: I cried.

It is so gripping and emotional that I couldn't help but cry more than once.
It just grips your balls tight at certain moments and you can't help but feel more and more invested. This was definitely a highlight of this game that I wasn't expecting whatsoever.
The entire drama between Sakamoto Ryouma, his family, his new friends, his enemies, his frenemies, Haruka (yes, she's here), his love interest and more... It's just phenomenal.

By the time you get to the halfway point, you'll already be 100% invested in this game and you won't be able to stop till you see it through.
RGG Studios has this incredible capacity of delivering banger after banger time and time again.

Should You Play It?

ABSOLUTELY!
The game goes on sale on the PSN for PS4 and PS5 regularly and it's currently in the Gamepass catalogue, meaning you can play it about damn anywhere if your internet is good enough for streaming. This isn't just another RGG game, this was an absolutely incredible experience that differs quite a bit from the mainline series (not as much as Hokuto no Ken's Yakuza spin-off) but that still delivers what you're expecting quality wise from these guys.

My regards to SEGA, RGG Studios and everyone who makes Like a Dragon still possible. There is no way I'm ever dropping this series.
I only have a couple other games to beat before I'm finally done with all things Ryu ga Gotoku, but by then there'll probably be another game released anyway.

The games I have left are: Kurohyou 1 and 2, Kenzan, Dead Souls, Judgement, Lost Judgement, Gaiden and 8 when it eventually comes out.

I don't think I'll play all of these, but I'll definitely play most of them. Judgement is already downloaded on my PS4 and the experience there has been great. I've also been replaying Yakuza 7 (LaD) on the PS4 to get an idea of how much more powerful the PS4 is in comparison the Xbox One when it comes to multiplatform titles such as these, the difference is insane.

Anyways, that's it for today, thanks for reading!