Ishin Fighting Guide: How to Start a Fight and What to Press

Quick answer

Enable PVP in your settings, press T to enter your fighting stance, then attack with M1, press R for a critical hit, and use skills with the number keys 1, 2, 3, 4 and up.

• If a fight is going badly, the school infirmary is where one group of players fled mid-fight to heal.
• If you don't want to fight other players at all, disable PVP in settings again.

Start the fight: turn PVP on, then press T

Two things stand between you and a fight with another player, and they sit in different places. The first is the PVP toggle in settings, which governs whether you can fight other players at all — turn it on when you want to fight, and off when you don't. The second is your stance: press T to enter your fighting stance, and the fighting inputs take over from there.

That order matters in practice. In a recorded encounter between two players, one told the other that pressing T is what enables you to fight — the stance key is the visible start of the exchange, but it only means anything with PVP already enabled.

Fighting is also not the whole game, which is worth knowing before you leave the toggle on. The game's overview tells players to try to avoid fights in the halls, and gang fighting is tied to turf during recess, so the PVP setting is the switch that decides whether a given session is a fighting one or a school day.

The inputs you fight with

Once you are in your stance, these are the controls:

Every one of these can be viewed or changed in settings under the keybinds section, which is the same menu that holds the PVP toggle. If a binding doesn't suit you, that is the place to fix it rather than something you have to memorise as-is.

Criticals, skills, and what your style changes

R gives you a critical hit, and it stays on R whatever you rolled. The number keys are different: 1, 2, 3, 4 and up fire your skills, and which skills those are comes from your fighting style.

Your style is the combat discipline you rolled during character creation, and it supplies your whole moveset. You start with 20 rerolls and there are 12 styles in the game, and an auto-roll setting in the combat menu will cycle rolls until a rare variant appears. Three styles show how differently the same key presses can resolve:

• Aikido lets you slide into an opponent using ragdoll forfeit, followed directly by a heavy strike.
• Kendo gives you traditional sword strikes, with a 2% chance to drop with an exclusive keyblade weapon appearance.
• Boxing offers straightforward hand-to-hand punches suited to standard street sparring.

So the answer to "what do my skills do" is not in the keybind list — it is in the style you are carrying. If the starting batch of rolls doesn't land you a style you like, more rerolls can come from codes.

Style and height are chosen in the same step

Your style is not the only combat decision made at character creation. Height is set there too, and it changes how the fight plays out: taller characters have better reach and hit harder, but their attacks are slower, while shorter characters attack faster with less range.

That trade-off is the part to weigh — reach and power against speed — rather than a ranking of which build wins. The beginner guide walks through the whole creation step, including the rerolls, if you want to settle the build before you start sparring.

After a knockdown: mounting and carrying

Combat doesn't end the moment an opponent drops. Downed opponents can be interacted with in additional ways: they can be mounted or carried.

In one recorded fight, after downing an opponent the player mounted them, which finished them off and acted like a taunt; carrying the opponent was the other option. The exact keybind for finishing off wasn't remembered by that player, which is the practical reason to open settings and read the keybinds section before you need it mid-fight.

When you're losing: the infirmary, or the PVP toggle

When a fight started going badly for one group of players, they fled to the school infirmary mid-fight to try to heal. That is the recovery move observed in practice — leave the fight and head for the infirmary rather than standing in a losing exchange.

The other exit is the one you set yourself: disable PVP in settings. That stops you being pulled into fights with other players, and it is the same control you turned on to start one.