The Significance and Differences of Like a Dragon: Ishin!

after almost a decade the insatiable Yakuza Community counted the days to when Sega and rgg Studio would hopefully one day re-release outside of Japan began beloved by Die Hard fans that all over the world fans could enjoy such a unique entry into their series but how would they justify doing that well we're going to talk about that later for now I'll get right into the middle of the video and say if this game at all looks interesting to you that's because it is I've met a handful of comments and videos of my own about how much I enjoyed the original version of like a dragonation even despite the fact that my Japanese is about as good as my ability to talk to women with that being said there are a lot of videos floating around right now of people playing enjoying and perhaps even recommending this game to their viewers but I feel not too many of them are really providing much of a context to it all so rather than saying the same thing as everyone else only a much harder to understand accent I'll discuss more of the history and significance of this remake as well as differences between it and the original and then finally I'll cap it off with some things in this game that make it unique to the other games in the series that allows it to stand out so drastically to start I'll take you back to the Year 2005 when Sega released a brand new game titled which when translated into English means like a dragon however when Sega of America got their hands on the game they named it Yakuza in today's day we'd probably see something like that and think it was dumb to give the game a completely different name but back then there was a whole idea that Americans were far too stupid and ignorant to understand anything even remotely related to Japan so they tried their best to americanize it fortunately they didn't go in the way of what was typically expected of Americanization and calling the game Mafia Japan or something stupid nor did they call something like a rice dish a cheeseburger surprisingly they were quite faithful to the source material but at the same time were kind of Unfaithful the first game had a dub which is memed for being terrible but it surprisingly has respectful elements like the use of honorifics and dialogue like China and San and all that the game found its corner of fans in both Japan and the west but unfortunately as time went on Sega didn't really feel like they could justify the cost of localizing the game going through all the rampant nonsense a publisher has to go through when porting a game over to another country such as dealing with the immense incompetence of the idiotic team of brain dead morons known as the Australian classification board a game like Yakuza 3 for example suffered from many things being cut or other things it would suffer from like how the older games called the protagonist by his first name despite the fact that you can very clearly hear them calling him by his last name they also thought not to bother localizing the Studio's launch title on the PS3 being Ken's on but they seemingly thought it was a good idea to fully invest in a zombie game that runs it one frame per hour this then escalated to Sega choosing to not even release a physical version of Yakuza 5 and the PS3 outside of Japan only offering it as a digital purchase became quite clear at this point that Sega of Japan had given up in the Western World this obviously then didn't bow too well when they released their next game which was about Japanese samurais taking place in the history of Japan that probably only a Japanese person would understand that game being of course the origination at the time of the game's release there were a fair few fans who were clamoring to get their hands on it and begging Sega of Japan not to give up on the games and after all this begging rather than just localizing ishin they decided to whip out a new approach to the localization of their next game instead essentially providing one last chance for Western audiences a famous figurehead of this new approach was a head member of the new team Scott Stricker he and his team in collaboration with Japanese team taking great strides and making something that could appeal to All Nations created Yakuza zero which as we all know is the most popular game in all of history ever to exist it's not all too hard to find people that are still very salty that their unsuccessful niche of a franchise bloomed into something so recognizable by everyone but if it wasn't for Yakuza 0 and people like Scott and his team I wouldn't even be making this video in fact I wouldn't even know what the hell these games were at all but after Yakuza zero all but one game ended up getting fully fledged English versions with that one game being a stupid gotcha game because Japanese people hate having a savings account while the Asian remake doesn't have one the games also ended up getting English dubs which they hadn't done ever since the very first game the doves this time around were of an extremely high quality and thanks to the efforts once again made by Scott and his team were extremely faithful and respectful to the series although once again you'll very easily find Sookie little crybaby bitches who say where where I don't want more people to play the game I want Sega to make less money and give less of a shit but suffice to say adding a dub extends the potential Audience by a fairly large margin so anyway with the success of the series now covered how the hell Edition just managed to slip by and come back again well simply put fans were still begging Sega for them to localize the game in the west but a 2014 video game only released in Japan on PS4 and PS3 wouldn't exactly have been the easiest thing to just make language patches for and then Chuck it onto the international PlayStation store or something I'll Port it to PC then but then that's only one platform that'll get it or why not put it on Xbox and Playstation as well well they could but consider that in Japan it's already on Playstation so they would be making essentially just an Xbox and PC version but still mucking around with the PS4 version well how about next-gen versions then I mean I don't really know how well a port of a 2014 video game would sell as a next-gen game so after lots of consideration what did they do well they remade the entire thing well really made it realistically this is a port of the original game to Unreal Engine but some extra things being added or changed this is because essentially everything is the exact same with some slight tweaks and changes now obviously this sounds lazy as hell but is it a bad thing no the original game seriously was good enough to recommend to people who don't speak a word of Japanese so obviously this new game available on Playstation Xbox and PC that has completely translated and localized script is 100 worth of now then this is obviously very significant as it shows that people can bully a video game Studio into doing what they want them to do but it also means that there are now only three proper video games I'm not counting you in the franchise that are yet to be released internationally this game also marks the first game to be under the new series name of like a dragon say what you will about the name change but it does mean now after almost 18 years we have the same name in both Japan and the West does mean however that the very cleverly named Yakuza like a dragon which was actually rgg 7 in Asia has been shafted a fair bit the game wasn't just called Yakuza 7. this was because of how drastically the game plays to every other game as well as completely moving on from the main protagonist Kiryu who was available in Yakuza 0-6 so the large brand individuals of the localizers called it in a way like a dragon like a dragon or Yakuza Yakuza but now rather than calling the sequel to Yakuza like a dragon Yakuza like a dragon 2. it's instead going to be called like a dragon 8 to match it up with the Japanese name and speaking of Japanese names like a dragon ishin is actually named ishin kiwami in Asia which matches it up with the other two remakes the series has done being yakuzukiwami 1 and 2. so already they have kind of betrayed the idea of having the same name for both Japan and the west but you know whatever at least the English logo looks way nicer than the Japanese one haha just kidding no it doesn't the Japanese logo is way cooler now then I'm not sure who to blame for this but I do know now that it'll all be different people working on this game compared to previous games while rgg Studio over in Japan made a big announcement a while back about a shift in staff with ishin kiwami being the first game under these people in their current roles the team over in America had a big change too that kind of went under the radar considering what the Asian remake actually is the new team in Japan doesn't really mean all too much but the new English team does mean a fair bit as there was no original English script to compare it to Lost judgment was the last thing that Scott strickart worked on and probably will ever work on in the series the DLC expansion of lost judgment known as the kaito files was the first thing worked on by the team since Scott died of whatever happened to him you can tell this by the fact that for whatever reason the team when working on the main game of lost judgment kept on trying to add as many kaito's gorilla jokes as they possibly could Which Scott had to keep on shaking his head in disbelief and going what why is a gorilla cool with the gorillas you can see this lack of strickart influence and the fact that in the Kato files they referenced bananas and kaito being a gorilla around about a hundred thousand bloody times so then for ishin we're able to experience for the first time what this new team of individuals will do for a full game will they be more of a direct translation kind of localization team or a spin thing so heavily that you don't even know what the hell the original line was supposed to be anyway kind of team or maybe you won't even notice at all and to be honest you probably won't so far I've already noticed things like three line and subtitles which I've sent to Scott and he wasn't very happy about I've also done some weird things like putting the last names of characters first but apparently that's an accurate thing to history although they also did it for actor names and whatnot for whatever reason besides that though the writing already seems to be about the same quality as we would expect from the last team but now with the addition of them actually writing the word oi in the text which is something that has always pissed me off about these games as they've never really done that but in any case with that long history lesson out of the way it's time to discuss some of the differences between the original game and the Remake the most blatantly obvious one is the graphical overhaul of the game the game is now an Unreal Engine which to list some examples of games that use this engine you have something beautiful like Final Fantasy VII remake then you also have fortnite lots of people online like to pretend like they know what an engine is for a game so you tend to see lots of people say dumb shit but just because it's in the same engine as fortnite does not mean it's fortnite anyway in comparison to the engine used for the original game the Remake has access to much prettier lighting which can definitely be seen at night time and again and now that it has a PC Port that of course means super smooth frame rates and things like Ultra wide support right wrong now that apparently they're working on Shader compilation stutter which is a common problem for Unreal Engine games on PC what this means is that the first time you load unique things like a heat action for example the game will stutter sometimes it's a little sometimes it's a lot the Gans frame rate for me at least runs at a stable 120 FPS besides the stuttering and although my monitor's refresh rate is 175 Hertz game only lets you go up in intervals for the frame rate meaning that if I want to go above 120 I'll have to put it on unlimited which isn't really a problem besides during like loading screens because your computer will just go like the two biggest things that have shipped me off with the PC Port is that the frame rate is locked to 30 FPS in cutscenes and the entire fucking game is bound by the chains of a 16x9 display area what the hell rgg Studio every other PC Port you've ever done has at least supported ultrawide displays and gameplay they've always put some dumbass borders up for the cutscenes and whatnot but now they're they're the entire time you play the game there's also an annoying bug where you can clearly tell shit's being rendered Behind These borders there's stuff like the karaoke UI or some texturing cutscenes extends off the screen combine this with the fact that they've done full frame rate cutscenes for every PC port and if you've even done that in the console versions for the more recent games like judgment and lost judgment and you have to wonder what gave them the brain damage to change their mind I mean imagine how sexy these cutscenes would look in 21 by nine at 60 FPS or above all but no it's stuck like this at a low frame rate that stutters every three seconds but in terms of gameplay features they added the rather silly Trooper Cards into the main game which was originally something only present in a minigame these cards have various loadouts that you can attach to a specific fighting style as a opposed to originally where I was just the one Speaking of the Styles there are some UI changes in this version most notably the trooper cards as I mentioned before are just always there as well as the style icons always being present in the corner of the screen being in the bottom left where the minimap was the minimap has now moved to the bottom right corner of the screen where the health bars used to be and so now the health bars are in the center of the screen this is all kind of dumb because they could have kept it how it was in the original with the style icons being that they would only show up whenever you press whatever button to swap to whatever style the exact same in Yakuza zero and Yakuza kiwami as well so I don't know why they did this because it looks pretty ugly they also change the health bar up in the top left to now be red and the silver trim around the bar originally is slightly different the heat gauge is still pretty much the exact same between the Japanese version of the Remake and the original version of the game being a circle that spins around clockwise the Western version of the game uses Roman numerals to denote how many filled up heat gauges you've got as opposed to the Japanese symbols that were used in the original there are also now damage numbers that'll show up whenever anyone deals or takes damage in combat which you don't like you can disable I will say though that these numbers are quite useful in determining whether or not an attack you're doing is actually dealing damage and I've always wanted at the very least for enemies to just have their health displayed in a number so I can know whether or not what I'm doing is actually worth doing now then this next thing obviously wasn't in the original but I just thought I would mention it anyway and that is the completely new font used in all of the text in the English version of the game which is very different to the font used in previous Yakuza games then there's also a major change which was actually one of the first changes shown off being the new casting for some of the characters the original Asian had various characters from previous games reappearing as characters in this one with someone like mine who was last seen in Yakuza 3 or obviously protagonist being curious a lot of the characters were from Yakuza 5 and to be completely honest the likely reason for that would be because they would have just finished making that game and probably called up the actors from it and were like hey Matt you reckon you can come back and record a few more lines for this game you're right cheers Mark game journalists being the brilliant Geniuses that they are keep on mentioning how this game is some sort of alternate universe type of thing or a time travel story or whatever but in reality the best way to look at the characters from other games showing up in this game is as if the story is just a play and the characters are simply actors playing other characters I mean realistically that's what it is anyway a lot of the characters in Asian have the exact same personality and characteristics of their original counterpart but there are also some slight exceptions like a character like kashiwagi for example however there are some characters where it adds to the story if you know about the character's original appearance sorry to spoil Yakuza 5 a bit but considering that Baba is a bit of a shady bitch in Yakuza 5 don't really know whether or not you can trust emanation however in the remake he's been recasted as Zhao from Yakuza like a dragon who is someone who you can always trust because he's your best friend in that game so they sorted through that whole doubt thing out the window this time around some of the new characters do include the iconic dodoma family Trio of Shiba Sawa kuze and oweno from yakuzasiro then there's the side characters who have gotten changed around like Bacchus and Shinji for example and as is always the case it's good to see these Lads along with these recasted characters we have some change to the music from what I've played so far the entirety of the original soundtrack is still in if I do notice that there is an original song no longer present I'll be sure to update the description or my pinned comment to let you know or maybe you'll see it mentioned somewhere by someone online regardless some of these new songs are just songs from older games but some other ones are actually completely new songs it's not a story spoiler as it's incredibly insignificant but I thought I would give one example of this as these new songs only show up a fair bit into the game during this long battle you originally come into a room and fight Kanai from Yakuza 5 who has no dialogue at all but when you fight him he just had one of these standard Boss themes from the game in the remake however it's Shimano from Yakuza 1 who has his kiwami one theme play when you fight him now for the final bout of changes I'll be discussing all of the changes for interactable things in this remake there are many slight gameplay tweaks that either affect the combat or the open world exploration so here's all the things that I could notice just purely based on my own knowledge and experience everything not mentioned here was either exactly as it was in the original or not significant enough for me to notice or bother mentioning firstly for the adventure changes most of the buildings in the game like shops and restaurants no longer have a loading screen behind a door instead you can seamlessly walk through them like in the dragon engine games unfortunately unlike the dragon engine games it's only a select few buildings with small rooms and there are still a large head full of loading zones exactly like in the original there's now a toggle Sprint function when pressing the sprint button but unfortunately unlike judgment and onwards judgment being the game that introduced that you don't have infinite Sprint I don't know if in the remake you can upgrade your Sprint to be infinite but in the original you could upgrade it to last for a fairly large amount of time but alas it wasn't forever this means that a lot of the time you're going to have to press either of the Walk buttons or press a sprint button against turn off your Sprint unlike a judgment where you just press it and forget it you can now also move around in first person like in the more modern games of the series although you can't interact with stuff like items on the floor I'm not sure whether this is exclusive to DLC owners or not but you can now also change your outfit without having to be in the premium Adventure feature which pretty much has never really been a thing in any game some of the menus now are a bit faster to interact with like when you spend a solob for example however there are also some menus like closing out of the abilities menu for example that are slower shit and it's annoying you can now hide the HUD which commonly was only a thing for the PC versions of each game however most of the games will always have at least one issue present when you do hide the herd for example in Yakuza 0 it will hide QuickTime event prompts or in judgment and lost judgment it doesn't work at all during combat but for the most part in this game what it hides and doesn't hide is actually pretty good although unfortunately it does hide the health bar when you're eating at a restaurant for whatever reason speaking of before you consume an item in your inventory it will now show you how much health it'll heal before you consume it and it's most likely due to the trooper cards being a permanent feature there are no longer meal bonuses from eating food like in Yakuza 5. there's now a model viewer and blacksmith chart for your equipment that you can view from the equipment menu blacksmith has now also been reworked a bit for one there's no longer any of the things where you have to Time stuff right when applying Buffs and whatnot depending on your performance during these you would get a stronger effect applied to your equipment this time around though the strength of your buff depends on the quality of the items you use the bus as well are no longer required by an fusing one sword with another sword or a gun with another gun so on and so forth instead you now place these orbs into your equipment which can now also be for a cost swapped out whenever you want instead of being forever stuck with whatever you had originally these orbs are required through various means one of those means is dismantling an item which has a chance of giving you that item's orb some of these effects from these orbs are new such as ones that affect the trooper cards however in terms of which of these effects are new and which from the original I've removed I'm not too sure myself there were a shitload in the original but it seems like in this is actually a fair bit less maybe they're also now denoted by little images rather than Japanese symbols which weren't hard to read in the original because they were Japanese but because they were all about 4 pixels you can now also view what each of your effects do by pressing triangle or Y or whatever button which is very nice quality of life Improvement speaking of having the chart now in the blacksmith also makes it a bit like Monster Hunter but it also means that you can now see what you can get and how to get it it's a nice quality of life Improvement for people who don't don't want to rely on guides to see what's available there are also some changes to other minigames like wood cutting being a lot more forgiving and a lot quicker but also adding two new songs to karaoke one of these songs is a brand new one by Sarah Yoshida and the other is a remix of the iconic bukomita now I'll move on to General combat changes first one I noticed immediately way back when was the new style to the intros of boss fights and regular fights the style is very much the same as yuccas are like a dragons but instead of the purple filter with the red fire it's all black and the text gets slashed right before transitioning into the fight some of the boss fights have a different style use which is mostly the same but it has some beautiful looking color and effects to them in terms of the dynamic intros IE ones with cut scenes I haven't gotten to any of them yet as of the time of recording this voiceover but for whatever reason whenever these intros pop up on Random Encounters can't move at all which is honestly quite annoying this is because the first thing I noticed when I actually started playing the game is how insanely aggressive the enemies are in comparison to the original at the start of every encounter one of the enemies will immediately attack you and Norman also only one enemy will attack you at a time which is more or less the norm but as soon as that enemy dies or you divert your attention from them another one will immediately attack you again enemies do not ever stop swinging but seemingly on the lower difficulties they deal less and take more damage than they did in the original this is probably done because the original game was completely not bullshit sometimes but also because Legend difficulty is available by default and there's a new DLC difficulty called ishin which is probably just the game's original easy difficulty to be honest the AI though in the original game would still smack the shit out of you but for the most part all they really ever did was stand around staring at you or dodging for 20 minutes I don't know why but now all of your basic attacks can hit enemies on the ground which is something that was introduced in the dragon engine games however in this one you just swing over the enemies and hit them anyway for whatever reason and there's no animation of you actually attacking them on the floor it's honestly quite bullshit as it means you don't have to do a slow heavy attack to hit an enemy on the ground like you used to have to do and can instead keep on spamming Combos and dealing a shitload of damage however the enemies as well as yourself get up off the ground way way faster especially you you don't even have to mash a button anymore as RAM will just stand himself back up automatically straight away in saying that though I don't know if I'm doing something wrong but it seems like a majority of the bosses in the game you can no longer knock to the ground without the use of a heat action you also just can't grab them 99 of the time this severely limits your options in combat and it's also just plainly fucking annoying besides that though the only other difference with the bosses is that some of them have their own versions of these stupid Trooper card attacks then finally for both the gun and unarmed Styles when you grab someone and throw them if you're holding towards a wall riyama would do the thing from Yakuza 5 where you stun an enemy by pegging them into that wall it was a pretty bad feature that you didn't want half the time but for whatever reason in the ocean remake it bugs out almost 100 of the time and you will do that special throw but you won't throw your enemy into anything it is very annoying and now I'll move on to changes that are specific to the four fighting Stars firstly in the wild dance style you can shoot while moving the wild dance Parry is also available right from the start which it wasn't in the original and the upgrade where you would originally obtain the Parry is now replaced by something that increases the window of the timing for it attacks feel like they lunge forward a bit more meaning you swing and miss a lot less but evade strikes are way way slower meaning way less of an ability to cheese the shit out of your enemies finally you used to be able to shoot multiple times after firing your gun during a combo and you can then continue your combo now however you can only shoot once and maybe I'm remembering it wrong while I'm saying this but it also will just end your combo overall though the wild dance style is much better in this game compared to the original although it's probably still in third place for the styles for the unarmed style or brawler not the one from zero but the one in this combo speed by default is about the same as the attack buff you once got after powering in the original game but after upgrades the combo speed is made even faster combo finishes also used to be quite insanely trash but now with the speedier speeds they're actually quite good then even with an upgrade the state you enter after Parry lasts for a significantly short amount of time the komaki's Dharma tumbler ability where you can do it double dodge is now faster but for some reason I you do it you get Frozen in time for a brief second the only reason I can think for this happening is that the animation has sped up but the time allocated to actually doing the Dodge has been untouched meaning you stand still for a second as the game catches up it also is no longer a universal ability meaning that the gun sword and wild dance styles no longer have access to it which is wow so amazing awesome great thanks finally the evade strike cheese that I would spam all the time no longer works which is very depressing what you would do is you'd knock a normal enemy onto the ground and evade strike sideways endlessly until they died it quite honestly couldn't do anything about this but now the evade strike no longer hits grounded enemies which is maybe intentional given that you can hit enemies on the ground with regular attacks overall the cheese of the unarmed style has been removed but despite that A lot's been improved however it's still in second place with the gun style in an attempt that was most likely done to Nerf how insanely overpowered it was in the original they've made it so that you shoot a lot slower while moving but you shoot a lot faster while standing still previously the fire rate was the exact same regardless of whether or not you were moving also the combo finishes for the gun Style Now consume your special ammunition making them a lot more worthwhile as you now set multiple enemies on fire for example previously they were kind of pointless as they would just be slightly stronger bullets and just shooting regularly was far more effective overall in their feeble attempt to Nerf the gun style they have accidentally not done that at all and it is still easily the most stupidly broken thing in the game besides the triple cards obviously and finally with the katana style in the original game it was something that many people tried to argue with me about saying that it was actually good after many hours of consideration and leveling up the style and after hours of using another remake I can safely say that everyone is wrong still sucks in fact it sucks so much that the only difference I've noticed with it is that starting a combo after hitting an enemy with the circle guard break attack thing it's harder to do and much like the Dharma tumbler the animation speed for charge finishes seem to be sped up but the time allocated to doing them is the exact same so yeah it's still shit and it's only made slightly good by the fact that you can equip overpowered swords but you can also equip overpowered guns so just use them instead and now for the final and most pressing difference is that there is no longer an intro to the game that plays whenever you launch it every youngster game before Yakuza 6 has had a cool intro with some cool music playing over the top of it with the original ishin having a song called clock strikes by a band called one okay rock normally I hate the songs that you choose to use from official artists but I actually quite like this one sadly like I said before Yakuza 6 did drop that Trend and the closest thing we've had since at the little music videos judgment loss judgment did however those were not hey look at this cool game we made kind of intros but instead hey look at these actors we got which is cringe and I hate it now then with all of these splurging of facts that I've done it is time to cap it off with why this game is worth it despite my grievances with the shitty dog shit piece of shit PC Port of the game it's still issue the story the music the gameplay it's all still eaten the game that was so good that despite me understanding barely any of it I still so willingly played back in 2021 and enjoyed the goddamn hell out of it I absolutely love the characters and the interactions they have with each other in this both as a general enjoyer of the game but also as a youngster fan seeing Mena interact with characters from games to come out after yaksa 3 is so cool and seeing the different relationships like kiryo nishki hating each other from day one it's a nice spicy Twist on things but easily the biggest thing with this game and honestly the final nail in the coffin that made me ship it all the way over from Japan to my house was the soundtrack listening to that shit on Spotify just made me so eager to hear these songs that I was absolutely loving in game but the best about the soundtrack is something that's to be expected of all of the games in this series and that is the immense care and passion that goes into every single song even the ones that play in random bits of site content but where this game soundtrack stands out is just how insanely good the side music is got some kick-ass songs like the arena battle theme awesome super fun ones like the chicken racing one [Music] [Applause] but my favorite song of all these is one of the ones that played during the training with the gun style yes stuff like the kamaki training theme which sounds like a sort of standard tutorial type of song but then Los Alissa just has this been in it that's just so good that I'm gonna fade the video out with it but before I do I hope you enjoyed and I thank you for sticking around for this long this took a lot of effort to be able to put out something like this when Sega refused to give me any review copies of the game so I would be grateful if you share this with any of your mates who might be interested in understanding more about this game and if you're willing feel free to subscribe to me but if you don't that's okay I hope you still like the video anyway Lads ladies and all else I introduce you to Lost Lewis side foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: SnowiestAngeman

Views: 193,978

Keywords: Yakuza, Yakuza Series, SnowiestAngeman, SnowiestAngeman Yakuza, Ryu Ga Gotoku, Analytical, Yakuza OST, Funny, 龍が如く, Yakuza Music, Ishin, Localization, Localize Ishin, Ishin OST, 龍が如く 維新!, Ryū ga Gotoku Ishin!, Yakuza Ishin, RGG Ishin, RGG Japan, Japan only, Japan only Yakuza, Yakuza spinoffs, Japan exclusivity, 維新!, RGG Ishin!, Like a Dragon Ishin!, Ishin! Kiwami, Kiwami, Ishin Remake, Remake, Unreal Engine, Ishin Unreal Engine, Analysis, Like a Dragon Ishin, Ishin Kiwami

Id: 5VjRuhZlMpM

Length: 26min 27sec (1587 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023