I've been playing Ishin for the past few days, and I'm really enjoying it. My Japanese isn't amazing, and Yakuza games are always particularly difficult with their use of dialects I'm unfamiliar with and all the tough guy slang. Ishin is obviously an even bigger challenge with all the old Japanese, and I thought I would be pretty OK with it after having played through both Dai Gyakuten Saiban games last year, but Ishin is a whole different beast. I thought the modern-day Hiroshima accents were hard in Y6, but now I'm up against the local patois of southern Shikoku from 150 years ago. It's slow going, with constant trips to the dictionary, but it's good practice, at least :P
(Dai Gyakuten Saiban did prepare me for the Natsume Souseki Sub Story in Ishin, though.)
I suppose I'd always expected this game to be smaller in scope than a standard Yakuza seeing as it's 'just' a spinoff. I think I expected something like Dead Souls. So I'm pleasantly surprised to see that, nope, this is a full-ass Yakuza game for real. I guess compared to 5 it's a little less outrageous, but I feel like this is still a classic 150+ hour game if you want that Platinum Trophy. There's only one playable character (so far?), but you've got four combat styles available at once, what seems like four or five cities or towns, the usual slew of Sub Stories and side content and its own equivalent of Yakuza 0's CP to gather and exchange for upgrades.
And I'm really liking it so far. I'm still early in (just had the naked fistfight/grabass against Ryuji/Kichinosuke), but I'm loving how the story is unfolding (NINJA ASSASSINS, BABY!) and it's such a great idea to keep the classic Yakuza characters but 'recast' them as different people. Ryouma is fairly similar to Kiryu, but just different enough to provide some fun moments when he does something very un-Kiryu, and it's so much fun seeing how they've used each character and wondering who's going to show up.
