It's where you'd be doing your (optional) combat grinding. This unlocks one of the two biggest minigames full JRPG style dungeon crawling, clearing out bandit caves and forts free of story. As part of his quest to find a masked assassin that exsanguinated his adoptive father, Ryoma infiltrates the Shinsengumi, a brutal government police unit. One interesting mechanical difference here is the Officer system. It's all the more jarring (and funny) when the four bandits you just shot ten times each all get up, apologize for their rudeness, give you an item and scurry off home. Ryoma, being a steely samurai, is no mad dog killer but also doesn't seem to concern himself with whether his opponents live or not outside of cutscenes where he refuses to land a killing blow. While Kiryu brutalized his foes, he didn't often appear to be trying to murder them. It's all the more jarring (and funny) when the four bandits you just shot ten times each all get up It does introduce some ludonarrative dissonance. While there's some funny and weird ones, Ryoma mostly just straight-up stabs a dude. This goes double for the Heat Actions, the super-bar consuming special moves that defined the tone of the series. Ryoma's revolver never needs reloading, allowing him to fan that hammer all day long-hilarious in scenes when dozens of low-HP goons surround him.ĭespite the inherent wackiness of blasting thirty men in as many seconds with a six-shooter, fighting here is gorier and more brutal than Yakuza's often-slapstick combat, with enemies getting impaled, sliced or shot point-blank. It's also pointedly unrealistic, with minibosses taking a comical number of slashes to knock down. While initially a bit stiff and limiting until you unlock more moves, I had a good time once I'd bulked up Ryoma's swordfighting style a little, and got a hang of what range is best to swing or thrust from. In this case, there's barehanded brawling (best for evasion), traditional samurai swordplay (huge damage, high commitment), trick-shooting with a revolver (ranged, obviously), and a hybrid sword-and-gun style that blends elements of all three for spectacular combos but lower overall damage. Once again familiar to series fans, Ishin's action combat lets you freely switch between four different fighting styles. Its fights are lent additional energy by the series' traditional guitar-heavy action themes, anachronistic as it may be here. While the sidequests might not be as polished as the main story arc, they're far more varied, running the tonal gamut from tragedy to screwball comedy, and frequently involving unpredictable minigames, but more often than not leaning on Ishin's combat engine. (Image credit: Sega) Weapons of mass distractionĬompared to your Grand Theft Rows or your Elder Fallouts, the world of Ishin might seem tiny, but it's hard to go thirty seconds without finding something or someone interesting to get sidetracked by. Even as I resolved to burn through the main story to hit my looming review deadline, I still frequently lost hours to idly bumbling around the city of Kyo, getting roped into minigames and side-stories. There's a little tonal whiplash where these two halves meet, as a high-pressure dash across town to catch a fleeing villain can easily be interrupted by a visibly lower-budget sidequest (seldom featuring voice acting or cutscenes), but it's a formula that has worked for ten games already, and will continue to do so. On the other hand, it's a slightly rough-edged man-about-town simulator, setting you loose on a small but incredibly dense city full of weird locals, minigames and distractions, linked through lightweight RPG mechanics-levels, skill trees and loot. It's full of compelling (subtitled Japanese) performances and dramatic twists and punctuated with real-time brawler combat similar to Shenmue. A murder mystery to be precise, set in the tail end of the samurai era. On one hand, Ishin is an episodic period thriller. What newcomers are getting here is a game of two halves. Thanks to starting small and focused and offering a glossary of terms for reference, Ishin works as an easy starting point for the series, as it's an entirely standalone, self-contained story. Ryoma himself may share Kiryu's heart of gold, but he's a more worldly and focused figure, less naive and confused by his surroundings than his modern-day counterpart. The differences in characters are interesting too, with Soji Okita (a historical reimagining of Yakuza favorite Goro Majima) getting to play a far more menacing and violent role with familiar stab-happy glee.
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