Ryu Ga Gotoku Ishin! small details drip from Yokoyama and Nagoshi in latest issue of Famitsu.

Thanks to Polygon for the translation;

“It’s not that the era itself was attractive to us so much as the people involved with it trigger stories in our minds,” commented Ishin producer and writer Masayoshi Yokoyama. “I wanted to build a story this time around Sakamoto Ryoma, who’s this really attention-grabbing character in history, but really there’s such a vast amount of people involved with this era. You have hardline traditional samurai, you have people trying to create a whole new era for themselves, and you have others turning their eyes toward other countries. Trying to build a coherent story that brought all of these people together is a real challenge.”

“To be honest, this was a lot more [response] than I thought we would get,” Yokoyama said. “I figured we would see a spike on the first day and then it’d taper off later, but the number of votes just kept on rising. The way that the top-ranked characters kept changing positions probably contributed as well. A lot of the most popular characters from the election will appear in Ishin, so it’ll be nice to see people try to guess which characters will play which historical roles in the story. We’ll be providing answers to some of those guesses shortly.”

“We won’t have all of them,” Nagoshi added, “but there will be a lot of characters making appearances, including the ones that ranked the highest. It’ll be kind of a festival atmosphere for fans of the series, and it’s something I felt was important to do because it makes us feel more connected to gamers and the project we’re working on.”

“We may have deployed everything we could with Yakuza 5,” Nagoshi said, “but that doesn’t mean we’re on cruise control with the quality and volume of this title. We are challenging ourselves with new things here, from the graphical presentation to the way we’re bringing back the full cast. It’ll be a huge step forward.”

Sounds just like Kenzan! Taking aspects and characters from previous Yakuza titles and making an all star cast with a deeply engrossing, emotional story! Can’t wait to hear more.