The release of Like a Dragon Ishin marks the first time non-Japanese players can officially get their hands on the critically acclaimed action/adventure spin-off set in the Bakumatsu (1853–1867) part of the Late Edo Period, a time of great turmoil in Japan just before the official end of the samurai (who were abolished only a few years later).
It is also the first attempt from SEGA developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio to use Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 instead of the internal Dragon Engine. The studio confirmed the choice was made because the Unreal Engine is better at rendering daytime scenes, which abound in Like a Dragon Ishin due to its different setting. In contrast, the Dragon Engine was specifically designed to recreate the bustling nightlife of modern-day Tokyo.
Given the unfortunate launch state of several PC games made with Unreal Engine, some users might feel uneasy about the change. Thankfully, testing the PC version yielded a positive impression.
First and foremost, the dreaded stuttering seems to be basically nonexistent, even though the game doesn’t provide any notice of shader compilation upon launching the application. I’ve only spotted a single instance of stuttering the first time I discharged the firearm.
The game otherwise runs at extremely high frame rates even with all the settings tuned up on a PC with Intel i7 12700KF CPU, GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, and 16GB DDR4. As you can see in the captured footage, it hovers between 300 and 200 FPS at 4K resolution with AMD FSR 2.1 enabled on the Quality setting. The headroom is so high that I could comfortably use NVIDIA DLDSR to bump the rendering resolution to 5760×3240, using the 2.25x scaling factor from NVIDIA’s Control Panel, while retaining over 130-140 FPS at all times and enjoying the increased graphical fidelity derived from downsampling.
Granted, Like a Dragon Ishin isn’t exactly the most demanding Unreal Engine game you can run on your PC. As mentioned by Kai in his console review, it’s not even a full-fledged remake, and the original game launched on PlayStation 3. The environments are particularly small, owing to that console’s technical limitations.
It’s also clear that Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio didn’t push the engine to its limits, which is understandable since they were just getting to grips with it. Nevertheless, the visual result is pleasing enough, and there could be lots of space for improvement on PC thanks not only to ReShade shaders like MartyMcFly’s RTGI but also to actual mods and .ini file tweaking, which are made much easier by the use of Unreal Engine. The performance headroom is certainly there to push Like a Dragon Ishin’s visuals even further.
In the game itself, you’ll have the following graphics settings available for modification:
- Output Screen
- Display Mode
- Resolution
- AMD FSR 2.1
- AMD FSR 2.1 Sharpness
- Intel XeSS
- VSync
- Graphics Quality
- Field of Vision
- FPS Cap
- Texture Quality
- Shadow Quality
- Geometry Quality
- Real-time Reflections
- SSAO
- Render Scale
Once again, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio includes a Field of View slider in a third-person game, which is far from granted. On the other hand, the lack of NVIDIA DLSS support is slightly disappointing for GeForce RTX users. Judgment was updated after launch with DLSS and DLAA, though, so there’s hope the same will happen in Like a Dragon Ishin.
While the studio has already confirmed to be returning to the Dragon Engine for its next two games (Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name and Like a Dragon 8), this promising debut on Unreal Engine would suggest further research into UE5 as a solid candidate for future games.
You can check out Like a Dragon Ishin before purchasing on PC and consoles thanks to the freshly released combat demo.
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