When Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s newly-announced Like A Dragon: Ishin releases in Feb. 2023 for console and PC, it’ll be the first time players outside Japan get their hands on the Yakuza series spinoff – and it’s thanks in part to a rather unlikely development.
RGG Studio head Masayoshi Yokoyama told Fanbyte that, despite the growing popularity of the Yakuza series worldwide, the team only started thinking Like A Dragon: Ishin could find an eager audience after seeing the success of Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima.
“We saw how well Ghost of Tsushima did, and how it was about this very Japanese setting made by Americans, so that gave us confidence Ishin could do well in America too,” Yokoyama said.
Like A Dragon: Ishin may feature the familiar faces of series protagonist Kazuya Kiryu and other Yakuza notables, but the action RPG is set long before Kiryu walked the streets of Kamurocho. It takes place in the 1860s at the end of the Edo period, during a time of immense political and social upheaval. At the center of the changes is Sakamoto Ryoma, a man striving to end centuries of samurai rule and the oppressive social structures that sprang up around it.
“Goro Majima and other Yakuza celebrities join Ryoma as friends and foes in this fictional world that trades the flashy streets of Tokyo for the chaotic bustle of 1860s Kyo,” the studio said in a press release following the remake’s announcement. “These new character dynamics are as thrilling as they are unexpected, with a series of mind-blowing twists and turns in a story only Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio can tell.”
Just don’t expect it or other Yakuza games to launch on Nintendo Switch, ever.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF.
