A few weeks back at Sega‘s HQ here in Tokyo, I got to sit down with both the director of the 2014 Japan-only Like a Dragon: Ishin!, Hiroyuki Sakamoto, and the director of the upcoming remake, Yasuaki Uehara. Together, we talked a bit about what it was like to combine Like a Dragon‘s Yakuza-centric stories with the historical events surrounding the last days of the samurai.
*Note: This interview contains minor spoilers about Like a Dragon: Ishin! and major spoilers about real world history.
Unlike the mainline games in the series, Ishin! is historical fiction and follows several of the most famous people from the Bakumatsu, the time surrounding and including Japan’s final civil war. With this in mind, there is one obvious question, “how true do you stay to the events of real-world history and how far are you willing to change things?”
For Sakamoto and Uehara, they…
