It Felt Just Like A Vacation – Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth Review

The average day lasts about sixteen hours if you account for eight hours of rest. On a weekday, I get up around 6:00 or 7:00, get ready for work from 10:00-6:00, then return and spend the rest of the day until 11:30 doing whatever before going to bed and repeating the process over. If I’m spending those four hours playing video games, then I should be able to spend 20 hours gaming per week. If I’m spending the rest of the weekend on a game, then that means I could get through a 30 hour game in about a week, a 60 hour game in two weeks, and anything longer should last me a whole month. Now, this assumes my brain works normally, which it doesn’t, so you have to account for hours spent doing nothing, watching other stuff, the occasional chance I get to hang with friends, and times I just don’t want to game.  

That was not the experience I had after finally completing Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth on May 27th, a full four months past its initial release date. With 200 hours of playtime under my belt, it’s hard to fully consider how I feel about this game in comparison to those who had to shotgun this experience much quicker for the sake of a timely review. I don’t envy anyone who needed to do that, especially with how dense Infinite Wealth is as a game and as a narrative. Like, I was playing this when snow had initially started to pile up here in New York, and I managed to finish on the week we’re expecting consistent temperatures in the 70s and potentially 80s. It’s the longest I’ve really allowed myself to just get through an experience since my ventures with the Trails series (admittedly I do try and blitz through those when possible since they have a built in speed-up button). Nevertheless, I got a lot to say about this game and can only make sure I’m as thorough as can be in describing how I took away this recent installment to the crime-dramedy franchise. Also, I’ll be talking liberally about the other games in the series along with the ending so spoiler warnings are in effect! If you’d like a concise version of my thoughts, scroll to the very bottom! 

Trouble in Paradise

Infinite Wealth is the second game in the Like A Dragon series to feature Ichiban Kasuga,  who took over as protagonist after the departure of Kazuma Kiryu in The Song of Life, which is a whole other story to get through. What’s important to note is that this game takes place a few years after Ichiban’s debut adventure and things are looking pretty up for him! He’s got a job, he’s hanging out with his friends Adachi and Nanba, and he’s finding the courage to try and tell party member Saeko that things between them might be more than just a friendship. Of course, this all goes south pretty soon when a VTuber cancels him, and Ichiban is given a great task: locate his mother in Hawaii. Along the way, Kiryu crosses paths with him, revealing that he’s living on borrowed time with a mission that also has him island bound. Fists collide, allegiances form, and the question of what it truly means to atone and live with purpose gets asked relentlessly. 

We’ve Got Friends In Warm Places

With Ichiban and Kiryu tag teaming for this new adventure, the game is not so subtle about the amount of party members you’ll be amassing for this ride. Your crew from the last game makes a return – Adachi, Saeko, and Nanba are all expected – and alongside them come new characters like taxi driver Eric Tomizawa, dancer Chitose Fujinomiya, and last game’s queen of the Yokohama Underworld Seonhee making her playable debut. I really enjoy how quickly the game has you focusing on everyone you’ll be working alongside as much of these characters you already are familiar with from their debuts in the previous game. Eric and Chitose are welcome additions as other characters in their mid 20s/early 30s to offset the amount of badass 40 year olds you’re hanging out with. Nothing bad about said 40 year olds, but it’s genuinely cool to see my own friend dynamics as an adult on display where age truly becomes less of a factor, so long as you feel a genuine sense of camaraderie with the people you choose to spend your time with. That said, skits you can check in on throughout the overworld definitely don’t pass up the chance to joke about the generational gap when appropriate. 

Party member interaction is upgraded with new features like Character Bingo; specific situational skits that happen along the journey which increase your bond level with characters. Gain enough bond levels and you can unlock Drink Link scenarios where Kiryu or Ichiban help a friend out through their specific personal issue in the vein of Persona Social Links. Like A Dragon has been putting in the work in its last couple installments to emulate the experience of being in community with people since Kiryu’s barfly days in Hiroshima, and Infinite Wealth leans in heavily on this aspect. Ordering at restaurants can lead to certain table chats based on the theme of the menu, and there’s so much effort put in to cement who everyone in your party is outside of just helping in fights. It’s a lot of humanizing that, for an assortment of folks who live adjacent to criminal gray zones, is refreshing to see. 

New Sights, Same Troubles

As is customary in each Like A Dragon, your adventures take you to a new location. This time we go beyond the streets of Kamurocho, far past the rivers of Yokohama, and travel internationally to the island of Hawaii. This is a pretty bold direction for the series, one which lands in some aspects, and then leaves a lot to be desired in others. For one thing, Ichiban’s trip to meet with his mother reveals the fact he’s actually part Hawaiian! This isn’t anything groundbreaking per se, but a good portion of the substories then focus on Ichiban learning from locals in some capacity, which is really cool considering how diverse that pool becomes. That said, it’s hard to be fully in support of a plot that takes you to Hawaii when the island is currently being drained left and right by the various aims of profit be it resort tourism, outright colonialism, or general displacement of the indigenous Hawaiian people. 

To some extent these issues come up, and I’d say there is a general understanding of wanting to preserve the island as is, but it’s never really enough to feel substantial, which in general is a common weakness of RGG studio narratives. Don’t get me wrong, the story itself is no slouch when it comes to making me care about Ichiban and company. It’s more like, Honolulu doesn’t get a chance to be its own lived in space the way Kamurocho, Sotenbori, and even places like Okinawa and Onomichi are; you have plenty of things to do in this island getaway but even when they mention grim truths like the homeless population in Hawaii or the prevalence of cons with how easy it can be for tourists, especially Japanese ones, to be lost in translation, it never feels as deep as it could be. Eric is the gang’s Hawaiian resident for the game, and I guess I’d want more from him about how this place has changed the same way we hear Kiryu reminisce about Kamurocho or even have Seonhee mention the shifts in the Geomijul affecting how Ijincho feels. Granted, it’s maybe this hollowness that is rooted to what’s been taken of Hawaii thus far, but at this point I’m extrapolating.

Kiryu’s Finest Hour

What doesn’t get skimped on, however, is the dedication taken in making this perhaps the final time we see Kazuma Kiryu in action. There’s a gravity to his showing up here, a genuine sadness to the fact he keeps having to show up in the first place even as he’s facing the reality of untreated cancer. Truly, it’s amazing that they’re able to take the narrative highs from The Man Who Erased His Name and expand upon them here to bring home who Kiryu is now. At one point Kiryu is forced to return to Yokohama due to his illness, leading to a split in your party and Kiryu acting as the leader for the heroes’ Japan side. Rather than have standard substories and personality traits like Ichiban, Kiryu is focused on his personal bucket list, the people in his life who have grown from his experience, and the final friends he needs to make some sort of parting connection with. You even get a special move that replaces the tag team mechanic by letting you escape the confines of a turn based JRPG and kick ass with the classic punch kick combos you’ve known since the goddamn PS2. This game loves Kiryu, and for good reason. You always remember the man, and even if initial concerns were brought up about how much he comes back for a series that should be moving on past him, this game is well aware and heightens the ante to make you hope he isn’t gone for good after. 

Everyone is On Vacation!

On the other side, Ichiban’s substories are also a lot of fun to experience given that he’s also going through a general crisis of needs during this island getaway. Having left Japan after the world’s worst proposal that everyone saw and agreed sucked ass, Ichiban gets to learn some lessons in love from the locals and tourists of Honolulu. One of the more moving substories included the return of the yakuza clan from Yokohama with diaper fetishes. I’m not kidding, it’s a genuinely funny and touching story about helping your loved ones in hospice that happens to involve the funny diaper guys, no kinkshame.

Apart from all the familiar Ijincho faces showing up stateside, a lot of side stories also highlight some key aspects of Hawaii like the cuisine or even take a moment to recognize how overzealous interest in culture can come across as a little hostile when trying to engage with people, as Ichiban learns from a white Kurosawa fan.  Some stories I’m not as hot about considering where RGG lands on how the police state can be a space for atonement. It comes up later in the final moments of the game, but it’s a genuinely dissonant tone given that Kiryu and Ichiban in particular start their journeys as fall guys, people who get incarcerated and ultimately further entrenched in the cycle of crime and punishment as a result of their intentions of doing noble deeds for others. The system is inherently flawed, and while there’s no softening of showing corrupted cops or the imbalance in power as it affects others, there’s also no real conclusion on how to find a solution or even create a change.

Love Is A Battlefield and Ichiban is Dying Out There!

Not all of the romance sub themes land, as there is a dating minigame that comes up which is fun in concept but usually just leads to a joke where Ichiban ends up meeting a chicken or something, which I’ll read as a general joke about catfishing rather than something more sinister. Much more sinister though are the specific gift subplots that come up where Ichiban basically gets sexually assaulted by women who are interested in them. Making the joke “and Ichiban gets his bones rattled by a woman who really really wants him whether or not he shares his consent” sucks! I don’t mean this to infantilize Ichiban especially considering his upbringing around sex workers, but there’s got to be a better way to explore Ichiban as a romantic partner and also incorporating comedy to it. He’s a dork, he’s earnest to a fault, he’s curious about how other people are and excited about what others are interested in, and he has rock hard abs; of course people are gonna wanna get with bro. But, for example a substory that comes up with the receptionist from the vocational school, having him end that by, say, being flattered of the affection but focused on Saeko would be a fun way to pin that. 

Not to say he needs to stay celibate for a relationship he isn’t sure is happening, but this is the guy who got hooked on Dragon Quest and then spent most of his life in jail. He recognizes he isn’t getting any younger, but also he probably would have a more stiff outlook on what romance looks like as we explored in his roasting from Nanba and Adachi early in the game. Especially considering the male audience that the game has, letting Ichiban be the surrogate for stories that teach about romance as more of a conversation and less about control, being clear about what you want out of a relationship be it friendship or companionship, hell even having a story or two that takes Ichiban through the experience of sex work directly would do a lot in humanizing this subsect that’s integral to who he is and why he’s such a caring person. 

Paradise 2: Dondoko Drift

Now if we want to talk about resort stays, we gotta talk about Dondoko Island. Partway through the game, Ichiban gets swept up into a whole resort management minigame led by two mascots. The loop for this side game is to break apart trash, get resources, craft items, and eventually build houses for people to stay at and attractions to visit while you raise happiness and popularity to get money. It’s about a week’s worth of grinding to actually get through the little narrative they whipped up about pirates polluting the island, but I have to say it’s such a robust spin on the whole resort management and resource allocation cluster of the video game genre. Being able to craft stuff from your inventory or your storage is a godsend, alongside selling from your storage directly. The guests that come to your resort are all types of folks from two second character prompts like Doctor Hell the friendly pediatrician, to some familiar faces from the past like Nick Ogata from the last game. 

Not only are they eating Animal Crossing’s lunch, but Infinite Wealth also has the chance to mess around with their Sujimon minigame, a simplified Pokemon equivalent that has you recruiting the sleazy enemies you encounter throughout the game to train and fight against other freaks. These battles occur in 3v3 instances where placement and move cooldown can spell your fate in an instant. Many of the minigames you’re familiar with make a return, and there’s even a SEGA Bass Fishing machine in the arcade this time! They also have a port of SpikeOut, which apparently hadn’t been given any sort of shine since 2005. It’s interesting seeing RGG have the means to make stuff that could pretty easily be sold off as an easy phone game to make a profit out of, but they never do and just keep it all as a feature to the base game. Despite the new additions, the classic series-staple side content doesn’t suffer from being plentiful, which is a great thing. We actually get a sequel to Bakamitai too and it goes hard as hell!

The Gameplay’s Peak Too!

While the series does focus on being plentiful in its side content, Infinite Wealth is still a full ass JRPG whose systems are just as robust! You have limited movement in a highlighted field while planning your turn, either to get closer to allies or position yourself around enemies. This is important, as magic and skills now have areas of effect that will show who will be affected and in what way. Some attacks still can affect one single target or highlight all enemies in a battle, but now you can select spells that have a wide radius of effect for hurting or healing, skills that run right through a line of baddies, and the occasional attack that affects a sliver of foes in front of you. The Trails allegations aren’t getting beat with this one, and I’m all for it! 

Movement also helps with the standard attacks in-game which can have a knockback effect, potentially letting you beat a motherfucker with another motherfucker if you set them up right. Weapon attacks can also come up if you happen to be near a traffic cone, a bicycle, etc. which can also be something that inflicts elemental damage, perfect if your enemy is weak to ice, fire, or electricity. Combo attacks between two characters can be unlocked as well, leading to yet another reason to try and orient everyone on screen just right so that you can have a party launch a bad guy in the air while Kiryu or Kasuga hit them with a flying cross chop. It’s still turn-based, but the kineticism makes fights so much fun. Tag Team moves are another fun edition to the game where each party member is able to unlock a special move they do with the leader of the party. As you get stronger, you also get the chance to one hit kill encounters like in Earthbound once you’re 11 levels above a mob on the move, which will be highlighted via blue indicators overhead to distinguish from enemies that are at your level with red markings or much stronger than you and being marked in purple. 

Jobs make a return with some pretty Hawaii-centric overhauls coming in to spruce up the variety. You have access to some classic jobs like Host and Idol, but then some new options like the gun touting Desperado, the magic focused Pyrodancer and Geomancer, and the physically imposing Samurai and Action Star. There’s actual variety for the women in your team which rocks, and a lot of the redundancy from last game manages to get tackled here. I focused on getting the most mileage out of each party member’s unique class, then finding one more job to round out spell affinities, or make sure that I have some extra skills to complete whatever build I was going for. Skill Inheritance is related to Bond Level this time around, a higher bond level leading to more inheritance slots open for characters to import skills onto a more powerful job. 

New Game, Same Shortcomings

I will say that there can be a lot of overlap in the late game for jobs, and I ended up returning to starter jobs to make sure I had some variety in parties. I’d be curious to see some sort of individual job growth for each character in the future. It’s funny that Kiryu can be a cowboy and I love it, but it’s really hard to think of a reason I wouldn’t want to stay in his unique Dragon of Dojima job for most of the game. Hell I’d love to see RGG Studios try their hand at a Sphere Grid style of character building, or even give each character their own unique sets of jobs to use, or even limit what could be picked up once I make some choices. Like maybe an Aquanaunt focus would make the Breaker style unnecessary, and vice versa. I’m just spitballing because jobs in general have been a little bloated in both JRPG installments of the series, and it’s not any sort of detraction to the game so much as figuring out a means to trim the fat with what’s offered. The sauce is inherent to Infinite Wealth, it’s all a matter of making sure there’s enough to go around.

Unfortunately the game does fall prey to an insistence on grinding, or rather the ability to overgrind once you get to the area specific dungeons. Level creep never feels too bad as you’re often told what level you should be at when major story beats start to ramp up along with the kind of gear that you should buy for your party. Jobs do take a minute to grind, which means that if you’re gunning for a specific skill you’ll be repeating these dungeons a pretty great deal in order to get your particular builds, which led to a case of overleveling on my end. It evens itself out by the final boss, but where the first game had an asymmetrical ramp up near the end, this game does remedy some of that if you aren’t grinding for specific gear or skills. The challenge can be there, unless your lizard completionist brain kicks in and you end up trumping most enemies by a solid ten levels. 

The Part That Sticks With Me

The final moments of the game, as I’d mentioned, ramp up to the levels of insanity one comes to expect from the Like A Dragon series. What started as a way to reunite with a loved one has now become an international scheme to take the crumbling infantry of the Japanese yakuza and essentially force them to work a nuclear waste deposit for the rest of their lives as some eternal punishment engine. The entire crew is thus split into two camps: Ichiban taking down Bryce Fairchild, the overzealous leader of the Palekana religious sect who’s all but bastardized the local religion for his own needs, and Kiryu taking down Ebina, the new crime lord in Ijincho and Ichiban’s half-brother who hates the entirety of what the yakuza are as an organization and wishes for every one of them to toil in the aforementioned nuclear waste grounded zone. Bryce kinda just goes out in a whimper, the fiendishness of that character never really gets cemented in a way that feels substantial, but Ichiban manages to end things his way and ensure Bryce gets seen to justice. 

On Kiryu’s side, he manages to bring Ebina down but gets an earful from a harsh pill to swallow: Ebina will come back, people with that much hate in their bodies will always come through and find some way to make the yakuza public enemy number one even if every clan were to dissolve. And so, not with a final fist to face, but with a face filled to burst with tears, Kiryu begs Ebina to find forgiveness, to forgive him as an ex-Yakuza chairman who could’ve done anything, but instead ran away, and to forgive every person who ends up finding this bloody and miserable road. Kiryu collapses, and Nanba and company rush to get him on top of the Millennium Tower to get any kind of support. The final sequence in this game is a montage set to Sheena Ringo’s “The Invaluable” where Ichiban returns to Ijincho to find Eijiro, the man who ended up throwing him down this whole rabbit hole as part of Ebina’s whole plot for revenge, and help turn himself in to begin any kind of chance at redemption. He helps Eijiro to his feet as he’d been beaten and battered once exposed as the reason for yakuza smear campaigns, and amidst gawking social media vultures casting garbage at them, Ichiban carries him to the station. All the while, Kiryu battles for his life as help arrives to get him to a hospital, the player unsure of what’s to come. 

Vacation’s Over

About two months ago my dad had a stroke. My mom and sister caught it quickly, they called 911, and he immediately got treatment. Since then he’s been regaining his strength, going to therapy, but still has some trouble with speaking which also impacts the way he can work, or rather impacts the reality that he still has to make some sort of income to break even despite working every single day the last 27 years of his life. To see Kazuma Kiryu, the man who very much is as old as my dad and is such a monolithic figure to people, reduced to a thin specter of himself  was a hard reminder of how nothing in life is certain or infinite. To see him racked by the guilt of just knowing people and not being able to reciprocate that, even as he recognizes just how many people do support, is maybe my own worst fears coming to fruition and is just so enrapturing when you do consider just how many people would sing their praises to the Dragon of Dojima even outside of the yakuza.

My father is in no way a perfect man, but he is the person who I realize has always had faith in what I do and has always been so proud of what I could start to build for myself. It’s because of him daring to try in the little ways he could that I feel more emboldened to care and show up for others. I forgive the realities of a young twenty-something struggling to learn how to be a father and a worker at the same time because he didn’t know, he wasn’t aware. Contempt is something that I can harbor, but what good does that do to feign nursing a wound that’s long since healed. I joke about how Like A Dragon is a series about fathers and sons, but god at this point how is that not the through line, to see a success and failure of the organized crime system join forces to effectively vanquish the structure that weighs heavy on them all is generational trauma healing, is masculine reclamation, is so many things that still just account for a first step forward. The reality of seeing myself in Ichiban’s selflessness hit like a truck as I watched him carry Eiji amidst the thrown stones of the crowd. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth is not the answer for tackling the systemic barriers that affect those who engage with organized crime and those who end up feeling its effects while the ones with the power to enact change refuse to because of how they profit. 

What this game is, however, is an unapologetic ode to community and forgiveness. It’s the conversations you have with your friends about what you did in high school. The willingness to learn about a stranger’s life and offer a helping hand, because you felt like you had to. Your parents are not infallible, and in fact that tether might be strained or outright severed, but you can choose to provide the love and support that might have been lacking onto others.  It’s recognizing that things are difficult, that life has no singular solution, but what helps make the struggle manageable is a group of friends, of family, of true connection to confide in and uplift. It’s been about four years since Y:LAD came out and roughly three since I first joined Gamesline. The difference of where I was to where I am is staggering, and thankfully I have my friends and family to help in getting me where I am now. While I can only imagine the adventures that are in store for me, I’m just as eager to see what’s in store Ichiban now that he’s come to recognize his infinite wealth.