Forgot about this game but...

[Andrew R]

Might give it a spin. What are the pros / cons?

[Valk]

Pros:
-Standard Yakuza shenanigans. Everything a yakuza game normally has is present. Substories, Minigames, Serious crime drama story. Akiyama.
-Unlimited weapon durability and ammo. Enemies designed based around it. You can finally experience a yakuza game designed for using a sword.
-A different spin on the style, with the 1860s (ish) setting
-Bathhouse butt grab
Cons:
-Unreal engine 4. Visually a huge step down from Dragon engine, and feels clunkier than the engine used in 3 through K1. Also comes complete with TAA and all of the associated problems.
-Slight delay between all actions. Can throw you off quite a bit.
-Single use consumable DLC. Always bad.
-Rebalanced money costs compared to the original game resulting in significantly more grind on higher difficulties and for 100%
-Censored Bathhouse butt grab

Not going to go into the can of worms that are "Is a remake/remaster/port really worth full triple A launch price" "Denuvo is in use" or "regional pricing" issues. These all have enough threads as is and aren't really the pros and cons of the game itself so much as just Sega doing....whatever they're doing.

Ultimately if you played and enjoyed the other yakuza games, you'll probably enjoy Ishin. It will feel very weird though, as it uses mostly 2013/14 design and systems that didn't get updated at all.

[Sentient_Toaster]

*shrug*

The characters) set in a time of transition and turmoil appeals, it's got that. There's a lot of heavyweight conversations in the game about the nature of Japanese society and the conflict over what it become. There's a good bit of plot and planning involved.

The katana and katana+revolver styles work well, with one being suited for duels and the other for group fights. Re: fights, the story boss fights generally seemed reasonable. There was one that might be rough if you're unprepared (strictly unarmed and unarmored 1 vs. 2, but hey, at least you have access to your inventory and can use healing items from it). It wasn't like, say, enemies blocking nearly everything while having eight health bars, or suddenly regenerating unless you used a heat move on them. Switching styles could have been more fluid -- like, you basically have to be in an idle state to switch, can't switch while you're running around -- but overall it worked well enough, other than brawling. Brawling's just weak, when almost every enemy has a weapon, many have armor that'll take forever to punch through since you can't put a "pierce" seal (or any seals) on your fists, and there are no bicycles or motorcycles with which to wreak havoc upon your enemies.

There's a decent number of minigames, if you like that sort of thing; but unless you want to craft stuff strictly legit you won't *need* to spend a lot of time on them. Like, plot-wise, I think you have to do one Battle Dungeon level once; and there was a main story that gave opportunities for the 1860s singing and dancing minigames but those offered the option to skip them, IIRC.

Trooper cards are... weird. Can understand people not liking them, although you can certainly limit their impact by e.g. not letting their abilities automatically trigger and just never firing them yourself. Their abilities can be pretty goofy.

Didn't really run into any glitches that I could notice, anyway.

What I absolutely loathed was the grindiness of the equipment system (grind for materials, grind for money to buy the cheapest sword in bulk to donate to level up the smithy because for some godforsaken reason you can't just donate money directly; grind for money to pay the smith to craft things once he's actually leveled up; grind for seals to enhance weapons; grind for seals to replace the six seals in a row that were simply wasted because the game decided that upgrading failed; etc). If you don't use a trainer to add resources, and want to get high-tier gear in a purely legit fashion, you'd need to go through Battle Dungeons over and over... and the layouts and enemies are fixed, so it's not like a Diablo-style procedurally-generated dungeon that might surprise you at times.

I also despise NPCs whose interactions consist of "Give me X. Give me X. Give me X. etc" until you fill a meter potentially multiple times, of which there are far too many in this game. Don't really have the patience for repeat beggars.