Finally, Game Pass lets us experience Kazuma Kiryu’s version of hell - and it's absolutely essential
You can take the man out of Kamurocho, but you can’t take the existential dread out of the man.
Renowned philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a play based around a version of hell that consists solely of a plain room which three sinners are set to be trapped within together for eternity. There’s no lava, no torture, and no Homer Simpson being fed more doughnuts than anyone could reasonably eat. There’s just the judgement of a group of faces who’re fated to look upon each other forever. There’s no exit.
For Yakuza series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu, Like A Dragon: Ishin, one of the latest titles to rock up on Xbox Game Pass, is that room.
Despite the game taking place in 1860s Kyo, rather than 21st Century Kamurocho, it’s full of faces any veteran of RGG Studio’s games about beating up smartly dressed criminals will recognise. Everyone from Kiryu, to Goro Majima, and even everyone’s favourite underground motorcyclist Daisaku Kuze is there, having been designated a new name, station and costume befitting their fresh stations in the Bakumatsu era.
In many ways, the game, which arrived in the West for the first time back in February as a remake of the original game released in Japan in 2014, acts as an interesting aesthetic twist on the traditional action-combat style that made up the Yakuza series before it took on the Like A Dragon moniker and began to experiment with turn-based battles. Switching between four different fighting styles based around the fists, samurai sword and pistol of Sakamoto Ryoma, the disgraced ronin whom Kiryu’s lent his smouldering mush to, you’ll blaze your way through a typically well-written adventure dripping with drama and conspiracies.
However, if, like me, you choose to interpret Ishin not as a game whose characters just happen to look a lot like the key figures of the mainline Yakuza series and instead as an extension of Yakuzas one through six, it becomes something a bit more interesting. Here we have Kazuma Kiryu, the Tojo Clan’s unkillable Sisyphus, experiencing some kind of dream or hallucination in which he and many of those he knows have been transported to a different time and place. They’ve all taken on totally new lives, and yet, so little about Kiryu’s predicament has changed.
For God’s sake, Haruka hasn’t even bothered to change her name.
There’s still a faction with a weighty and intimidating reputation to join. There’s still familial strife and lofty ideals serving as an emotional driving force behind individuals who know deep down that they can’t entertain the idea of compromise. There’s still a karaoke minigame that I’m absolutely atrocious at.
There’s still a world to be saved. And it’s still the bloke with Kazuma Kiryu’s face and voice that’s got to do the saving.
I don’t know about you, but if we’re taking this to be some kind of dream being had by modern day Kiryu is having, it’s up there with a man who writes for a website about video game dreaming that he’s writing for a website about video games (this never happens, I swear) in terms of work/life balance cries for help.
Everyone’s had a dream that randomly stars whichever mates or coworkers you’ve been hanging out with recently, but no one’s ever done it quite like the Dragon of Dojima.
I’m not even going to attempt to read into the psychology of Kiryu’s imagination spitting out the scene involving Ryoma and Ryuji Goda’s historical facsimile in a sauna that the game throws at you early on.
Just know that, much like those poor sods in Sartre’s play, Big Kaz isn’t ok, and you won’t be either once you’ve given Ishin a go.
Like a Dragon: Ishin is available at no extra cost on Xbox Game Pass, now.
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