Beginner's Guide - Basics and Features

Like a Dragon: Ishin! is a game full of systems and content that can grab you for hours and hours. It can be a little confusing to understand how everything works at first, missing important features and having to check how to do something more than once.

That’s why this IGN’s Beginner’s Guide will aid you with some doubts you might have and with all the info you need to know in your first hours playing with Ryoma.

Here are the explainers you’ll find in this article:

• Have your Inventory Almost Full
• Test your Style
• Training and Style Orbs
• How Save Works
• Avoiding Unwanted Enemies
• The Diligence Records
• How Substories Work
• A Lot of Side Content
• Know your Currency

Have your Inventory Almost Full

When you’re playing Ishin! and almost any other Yakuza game, you shouldn’t be wandering the streets without having a good amount of healing items in your inventory. This will depend on the difficulty you choose, but you can get heavily damaged during any battle in the game, especially during long sections with plenty of enemies or boss fights.

Fortunately, you can always pause while you’re in combat (unless you’re performing a move or receiving one) and go to your inventory. Here you can use the different healing items at your disposal: purchased food, homemade dishes, and meds.

Test your Style

There are four styles for you to master in Like a Dragon: Ishin!: Brawler, Swordsman, Gunman, and Wild Dancer. While they have their clear strengths and weaknesses, you might end up using the one that works best for you and/or is the most fun.

For example, the Gunman style just relies on your revolver shots and special ammo, which is great when dealing with armored enemies or those who are hard to get nearby. However, you could prefer styles with more options and moves, like Brawler and Swordsman.

On the other hand, the Brawler style is great when you’re starting the game due to its grabs, unique Heat moves, speed, and the chance to use special weapons. But as you make progress in the story, you’ll notice that your first will stop doing as much damage as your weapons, which you can upgrade.

Training and Style Orbs

When you level up your character, you’ll receive a Training Orb. This can be used in any of the skill trees available for each of the four styles explained in the previous tip. Apart from your character, you can also level up a specific style and receive an orb for that style, called Style Orb. However, this orb can only be used in that skill tree.

What’s interesting is that you can swap between Training and Style Orbs when you have some of the latter. This means that you can, for example, remove one Training Orb from one style tree and insert it into another one.

By doing this, you can expand test multiple styles and keep them getting updated in a more or less balanced way. Or, if you prefer, you can just get all the upgrades for one style faster.

How Save Works

Something that we usually take for granted, it’s worth mentioning that this game has both an autosave feature and a manual save.

The manual save is pretty useful because you can save your progress by simply opening the pause menu and selecting the save option. You don’t need to interact with an object or enemy. Plus, you’ll be in the exact spot when you load your file.

Avoiding Unwanted Enemies

In Like a Dragon: Ishin! you will face hundreds of enemies while exploring the cities available. Apart from the obligatory battles, there’s a type of random encounter feature that will make you fight regular enemies tons of times.

If you don’t like this feature, there are some ways in which you can prevent at least some of the fights. For starters, you should learn to differentiate the ronins and bandits from simple civilians. You can check their striking clothing and that they are carrying weapons all the time. By knowing this, you can avoid the block in which you see them, turn back, and find another way to your objective.

Secondly, when you’re spotted by them, you still can avoid the fight (if you are not too close) by running away. Get far enough and the enemies will stop following you.

Another way of avoiding enemies requires a bit of luck and depends on your surroundings. Every time you interact with a friendly/neutral NPC or with an object, like a pot or jizo Statue, the presence of enemies reset. This means, for example, that if someone is chasing you and you open a pot, the chaser will disappear.

The Diligence Records

The Yakuza series is well known for having a huge completion list that basically tells you every single action you can do in the game, including challenges such as defeating X number of enemies or spending Y amount of money.

In Ishin!, the challenges are separated into a list that you unlock in Chapter 2 called Diligence Records. Here you’ll be able to check dozens of tasks divided into categories that will reward you Virtue upon completion.

While you will be completing some of these tasks just by playing and doing anything you want, it’s worth checking what’s available. You could keep some relevant tasks that give plenty of Virtue in mind so you complete them faster and then spend the Virtue for sweet upgrades in a shrine.

How Substories Work

Substories is how side quests are called in Like a Dragon: Ishin! These are usually brief secondary missions that will see you speaking with secondary characters, choosing answers, fighting unfriendly faces, and gathering items, among other actions.

Unlike some entries in the series, here the Substories won’t be marked on your map from the get-go. You need to trigger them by speaking with specific NPCs or walking through certain spots (and sometimes, during specific times of day).

If you want to discover all the Substories without using specific guides for them, you should explore your area from top to bottom each time you complete a chapter, looking for new NPCs and/or objects where they weren’t before. Also, enter every restaurant and interact with everything you can.

A Lot of Side Content

If this is your first time playing a Yakuza game, it’s likely that you’ll get overwhelmed by the huge amount of side content that the game offers. You can complete plenty of Substories, go to the Arena, finish Battle Dungeons, train with Masters, eat in several places, participate in dozens of minigames, etc.

Depending on how you play, this could hurt your enjoyment of the main story, getting back to it after dozens of hours, losing the pacing of it. Or you might repeat tasks until getting bored with the rest of the game.

Ultimately, this will be very personal, but we suggest that you create small routines for checking some activities that you want and then make at least a bit of progress every now and then. It’s worth mentioning that, after completing the game, you’ll unlock a mode that will let you explore freely all the areas, completing all the tasks you left behind.

Know your Currency

There are two currencies in Like a Dragon: Ishin!: money and Virtue. Virtue can be spent on permanent upgrades for some abilities like sprinting longer distances, acquiring more reputation in an area faster, or getting useful equipment like better fishing rods or several options for your second home in Another Life.

On the other hand, money is used for buying items, upgrading your equipment, crafting, playing minigames, eating in restaurants, drinking in bars, and using the palanquin (fast travel points).