I don’t know what Gamesline is in 2025. I want to be optimistic, but we’ve been doing this for over a decade, and we’re all very different people. I would love more than anything to continue to do this forever, but we’ll see. I don’t mean to be foreboding here, I just genuinely want to hear what we could do to keep y’all interested, I suppose! I’m going to be 31 years old this year, and it sucks to have to think about balancing my career with this, like I gotta figure out bills!! I have things to do at a job! It’s weird. I will do my best to find this balance. I’m going to post this, then chat with the crew and find out what we want out of 2025. Thanks for reading.

5. Momodora: Moonlit Farewell

Momodora’s a consistent franchise, and the finale was a solid Metroidvania that wrapped everything up nicely. I wouldn’t call it a boat-rocker, and I wouldn’t call it a bore either. Moonlit Farewell met expectations perfectly, with stunning visuals and charming gameplay. A lovely capstone on a niche franchise, I can only hope more folks check these games out since the series is wrapped, and I also hope the developer continues to create these well-polished experiences. I don’t have a ton to say about it because it’s a simple game, but I do hope Metroidvania fans go back and give this one a go if they skipped it last year.

4. Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore

This could have been so many things. Obnoxious, boring, rote. Instead, Arzette is a loving homage to something that many would never think deserved one. A celebration of an extremely stupid moment in gaming that has been transformed into new art time and time again. It then transcends that homage by being not only a fun game, but by being as goofy as the Zelda CD-i games that inspired it, standing right next to it in iconography. I know we’ve only had Arzette for a year, but I’d say Frich the Frog’s “FINE DINING” line is up there in the YouTube Poop (YTP) pantheon already. Arzette could only be made by people who not only loved YTP, but Wand of Gamelon and Faces of Evil, the original games, as well. That’s what sets Arzette apart from most parodies, a pure, unbridled love for something that many people would consider garbage. They even made a CD-i style controller to use with the game, how could you not at least love the effort put into Arzette?

3. Metaphor: ReFantazio

They made another Persona but this one has better politics and doesn’t have a gay panic scene. That’s already a plus in my book. 

Okay but for real, Metaphor’s got one of the best casts in an Atlus game. Pretty sure I said the same about the Persona 5 crew, but this one’s just as good, if not better at times! Not having to worry about romance options allows for stories to feel more natural, since you’re not having to stop near the end of Hulkenberg’s route to turn her down and slam the brakes on her characterization. Studio Zero did a fantastic job breathing life into the world of Euchronia, as well as all of its citizens. Battle was fast and fluid, I loved the aspects of press turn that got integrated into the standard Persona style combat. I loved that the bosses are based on Hieronymus Bosch paintings, fitting the hellish might of the game’s antagonist. Louis is iconic, a villain who has understandable motivations but unacceptable methods. It made the political aspects of the game more realistic, with desperate people siding with his ideals in a hope that they’ll be spared from getting crushed in the machine. As we’re currently seeing in the US, buddy, we’re all gonna get crushed in the machine. 

This hit all the marks for me, but there were two other RPGs I still enjoyed a bit more. But Sega released them both so I don’t think they’re gonna complain.

2. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

The Like A Dragon cast continues to be the actual best cast in gaming. As much as I love Strohl and Eupha, they’re not Ichiban Kasuga. Nobody is. When this game was announced, I wanted to be fully done with Kiryu’s entire plot, as the seventh game felt like the perfect hand-off to the next generation of old man criminals. I ended up happy to be wrong, as Kiryu’s return in Infinite Wealth was a heartbreaking, incredible walk down memory lane with one of the greatest video game characters of all time. Kiryu’s bucket list could have easily been a bunch of nostalgia-bait, and it kinda is, but Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio did a fantastic job showing Kiryu’s turn from a man awaiting death to a man who wants to use what time he has left for himself and his loved ones.

The Ichiban story, in which he searches for his mother in Hawaii, is a bit weaker, but there’s still some lovely moments throughout. The RPG aspects have been polished, and I did appreciate that the party getting split up lets them get more time to shine in combat. Like A Dragon as a series is always welcome, and I ate this up, alongside The Man Who Erased His Name, the prelude to Infinite Wealth. I’d count TMWEHN alongside Infinite Wealth, as they go hand-in-hand story-wise and the prequel makes everything that happens with Kiryu in Infinite Wealth far more tragic. Like A Dragon continues to be a salve in these harrowing times, a glimpse into a world where bad people get their asses kicked and good people are sometimes involved in organized crime. 

1. Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance

Ooooough Shin Megami Tensei….The brainrot….It’s real. I loved my entire playthrough of Vengeance, and it’s almost purely a gameplay thing for me. There’s a hypnotic quality to the flow of combat once you start building strong enough party members, and I had a ball blasting through everything that stood in my way. I drafted out fusion chains, I calculated stats, I did the WORK to make my team as balanced and powerful as possible, and by the end of the game I was crushing my enemies under my high heeled boot. I’ve been appreciating games that allow me to fall into a relaxed state these days, probably because if I introduce more stress into my body my heart will explode. Finding that chill grind in Vengeance helped me latch onto it quickly, and I was glued to it for months. 

Aesthetically, Vengeance is visually passable but audibly excellent. Please go listen to the Qadistu Battle Theme at least, please. There’s only a few new songs added to this update’s OST, but all of them are bangers with zero caveats. The new additions are sprinkled through the entire release, and while it doesn’t feel like a completely new game compared to the original, it’s the only way I’d recommend trying the game out, since a ton of the little frustrations got ironed out. It sucks a ton that the original version of the game is practically garbage now, with a full-priced release required to get the actual definitive version of SMTV. But….It’s worth it!!!! And it’s on sale all the time, so if you’ve never played SMTV, you really gotta hop on this one. 

The post John’s Favorite Games of 2024 appeared first on Gamesline.

2024 was a wild year in gaming for me, with so many games I loved which could have made my top 10. In fact, I wrote up blurbs for around 50 more games that came out, which were eventually moved off my list when I realized “Oh yeah, that game did come out in 2024.” It was almost funny, at one point or another I had included Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, Persona 3 Reload, Tekken 8, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Balatro, Helldivers 2, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Nine Sols, and the much better action game than Black Myth Wukong Stellar Blade. 2024 was a fantastic year for video games that were right up my alley, and while so many great games failed to make the list, you’ll never guess where Game of the Generation Nioh 2 falls this year with it’s 280 more hours.

Dishonorable Mention: Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

When I was initially compiling my list I had this game at number 4, but I can’t justify giving a place on my list to a game that features multiple substories where sexual assault is treated as a funny haha just because it happens to a dude. Yes it’s so funny you raped Ichiban in a dark alley, twice. This single aspect took what would have been one of my favorite games of the year and made it one I have no interest in ever touching it again, despite how much fun I had with it as a game overall. My completionism truly got the worst of me with this one because if I hadn’t been trying to 100% the game, I wouldn’t have maxed the friendships out with the person running the travel agency or the school and I wouldn’t have had the game completely ruined for me. The more I tried to write about how this was going to slot into my list, the more this criticism gnawed at me until I realized that no, I couldn’t have it on my list despite how good it is overall, because this shit isn’t funny, and should never be treated as such.

Honorable Mention: Hades II

I can’t really bring myself to include an early access game on my full list, but Hades II has been a phenomenal time. Its excellence was to the point where it almost got me to break that rule, considering just how much fun I’ve had with it. It’s a game I’ve been enjoying alongside my girlfriend with her having her own save on my Steam Deck and me playing through on my PC. Funnily enough, she’s significantly further along than I am but it’s been fun to be able to play a new version of a game like this that has so much promise coming into its full release whenever that might be. The characterization continues to be fantastic, the mechanics incredibly rewarding, and the art design is second to none. I can not wait to see where this game goes in the future.

10: Earth Defense Force 6

What can I say about Earth Defense Force? It’s absolute dogshit and I love it. It’s the most perfect distillation of something that is so bad it’s good where it knows exactly what it is and it doesn’t pretend to be anything but that. You fly or run around shooting bugs, sometimes you pilot a giant mech, you blow things up and slowly upgrade yourself by picking up giant boxes from the ground labeled Weapon and Armor in the most basic of fonts. It’s EDF, either you love it or you hate it and I am one who loves it. It really doesn’t do much of anything new, it’s just more stages, more funny singing, and a hell of a lot more fun.

9: Dragon Age: The Veilguard

When I first went through this I did not think it would make my list. I enjoyed it, yes, but there was a point towards the end of the game where it would make or break its overall standing, and I had to be sure of my feelings. So I immediately went back in for a second playthrough and somehow managed to enjoy myself more that second time than the first. I think this game is an accomplishment. A team took what would have been a pretty dogwater live service game and turned it around into an experience with a really good overall story that suffers predominately from zones that feel a little bit off and a team dynamic that has absolutely no friction whatsoever. I would have appreciated pushback when I’m choosing all the asshole options. Overall though, the fact that they got me with their twist, along with every class you can play feeling really good, locks this in the top 10 for me.

8: Unicorn Overlord

You know what’s really good? Ogre Battle. You know what’s also really good? Unicorn Overlord. I came into this expecting something pretty good and ended up with one of the best strategy RPGs in a very long time. While the story isn’t anything to really write home about, the strategic gameplay was immaculate. Being able to see the outcome of a fight that was about to initiate and change gear and use items to try to turn the tide if it looked like you were going to lose led me to constantly have a little bit extra on me weapon-wise so I could shift out skills, and while it didn’t always save the day, the amount of times I was able to turn a guaranteed death into a tactical retreat was nice. It’s also just absolutely gorgeous to look at, which isn’t a surprise being a Vanillaware joint, but this one for me is an absolute standout.

7: Dungeons of Hinterberg

Have you ever played a game that is exactly what it says on the tin? I usually avoid calling a game a comfy game, but there is something about this that just hit in the right way for me. It was comfortable, as comfortable as the jacket the main character wears. It’s got a day and night system like a Persona where you decide what to do every day. Do you tackle one of the many dungeons on every map biome? Or do you spend the day relaxing in the zone you chose to travel to? When you get home at night, do you spend it hanging out with a specific friend? Or do you maybe head to the campfire to listen to the other slayers talk and get a little friendship boost with all of them? The nice thing about the game having no time deadline meant I was able to see everything it had to offer in one playthrough. The difficulty is never really a huge challenge but there were more than a few creative boss fights and puzzles in the dungeons that I had a lot of fun deciphering my way through. Every biome having its own set of magic also made each area feel completely different. The snowy mountain being a highlight, where your secondary spell is just a snowboard and you shred through levels, do slalom, and just really have a lot of goofy fun. Overall, Dungeons of Hinterberg is just a pleasantly fun experience that came at a time when I really needed it and is well worth the time you put into it.

6: Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance

SMTV is a game I have a weird relationship with. I loved it when I first played, giving it my #2 game of 2021 and called it the perfect SMT game for newcomers. However, the more I thought about it over the years the more I realized that I never wanted to revisit it, unlike Nocturne and other games in the series I’d replayed multiple times. I take back everything I said about the original release of Shin Megami Tensei V. It’s been completely ruined for me now that this is out. Every decision they made in Vengeance makes it a significantly better game than V was on release. From being able to hang out with your demons to the new characters and more focus on your friends it improves every single aspect of the game. The characters matter more, I care about everyone more, and even the original routes were drastically improved by the changes to the game. It’s rare that what could have just been a basic re-release with some tweaks and a little more story ends up being this much of an improvement over the original, but it truly is worth the full cost of the game and ended up sucking up a lot more of my life than I expected.

5: Metaphor: Refantazio

Hey, hey you there, did you know it’s possible for the Persona team to not completely contradict their main arc and characterization in their social links? Because holy shit they finally actually accomplished this incredible feat. Metaphor is a fantastic game from start to finish with a pacing that doesn’t completely ruin the experience. That’s been my problem with Persona for so long, feeling like if I want to see everything I have to do every new big task as efficiently as possible. Here, I finally got a game where I didn’t need a guide to make sure I made all the right choices to not lock myself out of seeing all the game had to offer. I was just able to do it all which left the only place that felt like it dragged a longer period towards the end of the game where it’s all dedicated to giving you enough time and resources to max out all of your stats and do sidequests. Having not finished every dungeon in a single run, this meant I had things left to do so it didn’t drag for me, but I can 100% understand the people I talked to who just wanted to finish the damn game and having such a huge span of time where there weren’t any ways to progress the main story led to it feeling like a slog for them since if you had just efficiently nailed your way through everything, you were just sitting there spamming to make the days go forward.

From a battle system standpoint I really feel like they nailed it as well, fun classes, fun animations to the attacks, and an emphasis on buffs and debuffs actually mattering unlike what they had done in Persona really made me feel like I was using my whole brain for a decent amount of the fights. Not to mention some of the best super boss encounters they’ve ever put together. I really appreciated what they did with the game this time around. Overall, I think its biggest accomplishment was in making me excited for whatever this team has lined up for the future rather than fearing it.

4: FANTASIAN Neo Dimension

The biggest celebration of the year for me was this game finally being freed from iOS. I had already played through the first half of the game on my phone but there was no way I was going to pay a monthly fee for ONE GAME. So I never really went in to try the second half when it was released. What an incredible game. The first half already had an incredible amount of depth to it, but like the classic Final Fantasy VI you’re left scouring the world, rebuilding your party for the second half. This time, like the World of Ruin, you can go about it in any order, doing tons of new sidequests along the way as you find where all your friends are. Not to mention a spike in difficulty, I can see why now when you finish part one you unlock a completely different leveling system and get access to super moves tied to a bar that builds. You need them and you need them strategically. There was one set of bosses that you had to kill in one big burst or they would fully heal themselves as they swap positions. It was an incredible fight that took me multiple tries to figure out and that just felt good. The whole game has some of the best uses of strategic thinking I’ve seen in a JRPG battle system with its use of a funny temporal prison to trap random battles in. So instead of taking on 2 or 3 enemies at once, you can take on 30-50 while random power ups flood the battlefield. It really adds thought to a lot of what I am doing. Plain and simple, it’s one of the best JRPG battle systems I’ve ever experienced and I am so glad that it’s freed from its Apple Arcade prison.

3: Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail

Wow, it feels good to feel good about Final Fantasy XIV again. There was a long period of time where I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep playing or not, and I think it took finding a healthier balance with the game than I had before. Towards the end of Endwalker I was doing so much that I wasn’t enjoying just to keep going. Fight design was boring, job design was boring, and a lot of the extra stuff I just wasn’t enjoying. I was logging in when I had no real reason to log in and it burned me out. Dawntrail came out and it’s given me hope for the future of the game. It still suffers from the issue of the 2 minute meta that plagued Endwalker, but the fight design is about as night and day of an improvement as you can get. Even dungeon bosses have me engaged, something that was not true at all of Endwalker where everything in the game was like playing a nap. 

The MSQ was really something else as well. For me I found it fantastic, it was something I really wanted from the game and its more emotional beats really connected with me. The final zone had me in tears the whole time and took me multiple sessions to get through just so I could sit with it. It really was something special for me. You take an MSQ I enjoyed with the best combat design since Stormblood and you have an expansion for me that is miles away a better experience than the last one. As much as the community around the game doom posting constantly, please ignore them and jump in because this is honestly the best the game has been in a long time when it comes to actual dungeon and trial design. I went from wondering if this is going to be my last expansion, to extremely excited about the future of the game.

2: Rise of the Ronin

Hey, notice something missing from the top ten this year? That’s right, for the first time since I hopped aboard the Video Game Choo Choo running down the Gamesline tracks, Game of the Generation Nioh 2 is not on my list. The itch has finally been scratched and it feels nice. Does Rise of the Ronin have issues? Yes, it really does, and it all stems from the open world. I enjoy a good open world game, and the challenges in here are fun, but they really do just feel like an afterthought until you unlock Midnight difficulty. I didn’t even know if this game was fully going to make the top 5 until I jumped back into Midnight difficulty that unlocks after you beat the game. Suddenly the open world is exciting, with all the areas suddenly having multiple ranking officers you need to take out, replaced with both Ronin, which are other players characters, and named officers which act like super bosses. Suddenly the open world isn’t a chore, it’s a highlight with incredibly tense and nail biting fights as you strategically try to isolate one of the named characters while you desperately try to take them down. Suddenly that weakness from your initial playthrough becomes the game’s strength as you truly are tested in your knowledge of your weapons and the game’s systems. It feels incredible and it finally scratched that Nioh 2 itch hard enough that the meme has officially been put to rest.

1: Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

Look, I’m incapable of being subjective here, this is miles away my game of the year, it’s something that truly means everything to me. It’s the final work of a man who really did change my life for the better, and it’s good. Is it the best game in the Suikoden style? No, no it’s not, but it truly does hit all the notes I would want from a game like this. If anything, my only real big complaint is that it plays it far too safe. I never really felt jeopardy for the characters and god were there a lot of them. And shockingly, every line of dialogue is voiced. Normally a game like this would have only the important stuff voiced, but here it’s everything and every character is given enough time and lines of dialogue that you get a feeling for all of them, something I really appreciated. You get just enough to know who they are as a person, but not so much that you’re locked in 100% and can still have enough of the personal interpretation that made Suikoden so special for me as a franchise. When they call this game Hundred Heroes, you can be rest assured of one thing, the title is a complete lie. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred and Twenty Heroes doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue as well. Overall the flow of the game is really good, with only two missable characters and even then the only reason you can miss them is that you spent no time recruiting and completely ignored the very clear sign that you’re at the point of no return.

The game does pretty much everything I would want from a game like this, I get to delight in one of the better war battle systems I’ve seen in one of these games and the duels, which have been a highlight of Suikoden since the first, continue to shine. I love hearing a line of dialogue and extrapolating what they are going to do to choose the proper counter. I love the fact that it matters again and there also not being as many forced losses also feels a lot better than some Suikoden games where you were forced to lose a significant amount of battles. I felt so much delight watching my town open up and grow, with new shops and areas opening up as I recruited members to fill those spaces. While it’s not my favorite castle and town to watch build up in one of these games, it’s definitely up there and filled a hole that had been missing for a long time for me.

The art and music design in the game absolutely shines with every character being incredibly expressive thanks to the amazing sprite work and portraits from Junko Kawano, and the music from Motoi Sakuraba absolutely kills it, and some of the moments where everything all comes together are truly spectacular. The final war battle is a moment of pure bliss with everything you’ve learned and seen in the game coming together for moment after moment of triumph as you push forward, all seeming lost as the music swells heroically as more and more allies show up to help you push forward, making what seemed insurmountable feel impossible to lose as the theme continues to swell, eventually bringing in the vocals as you make a final push to victory. While I have complaints about the game, they pale in comparison to the emotions I felt when the game really hit, and there were a lot of moments when the game hit and hit hard. I am, to this day, sad that Murayama died before his final work could be released, as I think for those of us who truly did care about his work, he would be happy to see the reactions we had to his goofy crew of misfits trying to save their nation.

The post Lorelai’s Top Games of 2024 appeared first on Gamesline.

Tekken 8

Much like Street Fighter in 2023, Tekken’s newest release became an opportunity for me to dabble a little bit more in the space of fighting games. Tekken hits like a truck and it’s just so much fun to play through. Now granted, there was a ton of controversy that came out regarding balancing for a new game, the rollout of DLC characters, and just the general clash between the live service game model for incentives with something as old school as the fighting game and fighting game community. I picked up Lily and it’s been fun getting to try and learn her moveset, which really just showcases the depth in these 

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Already wrote a review on it with all my main thoughts, but truly just a fun continuation to the ever expanding franchise. While a bit lacking in terms of Ichiban’s full progression, this and The Man Who Erased His Name are such a great wrap up of Kiryu’s story. Mechanically, it rules to see RGG refine the RPG mechanics and make it just a tighter experience overall. 

Felvidek

Felvidek was a short game, but something I really needed this past year. At only 4 hours, this turn based tale from the medieval era is such a fun treat! The soundtrack is a great example of tethering anachronistic elements to a presentation that just overall fuels the atmosphere and feel of the experience, but I’ve also said my piece in another review of that game.

Metaphor: Refantazio

It’s like the main games of this year for me I’ve already talked about or something haha. Metaphor was fun! I remember having initial doubts of what this could even be, especially with the sell of “Hashino is going to tackle prejudice.” But overall the story didn’t make me hard quit, and the character work is probably my favorite of anything he’s had his hands on in the last 20 years! Also maybe my favorite implementation of the spectral power brand of JRPG that the SMT/Persona series helped to popularize. 

Balatro

So in drafting this piece I’d been agonizing about what I’ve been playing, and totally forgot that Balatro was a this year game because it’s just been such a dominating force since it came out. What if poker was a roguelike, what if you played bullshit poker for hours on end to make big money. It’s the pinnacle of numbers going up, you hear the music and you chill and vibe until you get pissed off that your Jokers did fuck all for this run. Like a 15 dollar game came up and got a spot in The Game Awards cuz it was that good! Balatro is as prescient to the gaming landscape as Mario in the span of one year, we’re all fucked up in the crib playing Balala now. 

So yeah, I might need to reconsider what it means for me to play video games in 2025! There’s stuff this past year I want to catch like 1000x RESIST and I AM YOUR BEAST, I have the rest of the Trails series to catch up now that Daybreak 2 is out and we’re almost at the end of another arc in this series. Okami is sitting on my desktop like a fucking omen because I know opening that tome of a game up will engulf me unless I actually plan out my time with it. Maybe writing will be the way to keep on some stuff, but truly the biggest hurdle is getting shit started. Of course that’s just me talking about games when this past year alone I have been able to do so much outside of that. It’s weird to notice that dip in interest in something that’s felt so integral to not just your own personality but most of your social circles. But that definitely signals to me at least a need for change, even in just the way I think about how to game in my life currently. I wouldn’t be surprised if the continual murmurings of a potential crash in the market alongside just The State of Everything can make this shit feel non important. But I also wouldn’t have this whole introspection if I didn’t ultimately like it were something I wanted to continue engaging with. So here’s to 2025 hopefully providing more chances to rekindle that interest, especially when 2024 showed that there’s still some gas left in this tank as long as the people up top have any sense. Now if you excuse me I’ll take a sip of this coffee and read my local gaming news sources for updates about studios.

The post Maverick’s Hazy Recollection of 2024 appeared first on Gamesline.

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.

The post It Felt Just Like A Vacation – Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth Review appeared first on Gamesline.

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Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Ep. 32: More Like Infinite GAME Am I Right? appeared first on Gamesline.

Hey everyone, it’s time to join Scott and John as they talk about the week in and around the games industry. John’s been playing more Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth while Scotts digging into the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Demo, Final Fantasy 8, and Helldivers 2. They also speculate about what might be coming from Microsoft and Xbox, rumors about a Mobile Elden Ring, Disney buying equity in Epic, and all the developments around Nijisanji EN.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @TheGamesline, @john_michonski, and @FKASocks.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to our ask box at gamesline.tumblr.com/ask.

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or directly to our RSS feed.

The post The Gamesline Podcast Ep. 31: Starship Troopers at Home appeared first on Gamesline.

A new week, a new episode of the Gamesline Podcast. This week, John and Spencer sit down to talk about everything around the games industry. John’s been digging into Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth while Skull has gotten up to a lot in Infinifactory, Library of Ruina, Lethal Company, and of course Arknights.

In the news, Fate/Stay Night Remaster is coming to the West, a Persona 3 Reload data mine gave us The Answer, and The State of Play gave us a look at Death Stranding 2 On the Beach. We got more news about some Yu-Gi-Oh stuff and found out Microsoft games are going multiplatform all while Love Live School Idol Festival 2 was announced and cancelled all in the same tweet.

If you want to skip potential Like a Dragon Spoilers there are minor spoilers from 1:14:15 to 1:17:10

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @TheGamesline, @john_michonski, and @SolaireHazard.

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You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

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The post The Gamesline Podcast Ep. 30: Like A Podcast: Infinite Wealth appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a very special episode of the pod this week as a very special guest, former Video Game Choo Choo contributor and current VTuber and artist, Trex, joins the boys (John, Scott and Maverick) to talk all about Pinocchio’s lil lies, going our Separate Ways, getting Parasocial with streamer, what would happen if a Pokémon put on The Teal Mask, and Trex digs deep into John’s very special Somnium.

Meanwhile, the Metal Gear Master Collection’s got some pretty embarrassing framerates, Rocket League tells you to chill out, Unity walks back their massive fumble, George Relden Ring Martin and the Author’s Guild sue OpenAI, and all of Phil Spencer’s dirty little secrets come out.

You can find Trex on Twitch at arealpup, and you can follow them on Twitter @arealpup.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @TheGamesline, @john_michonski @FKASocks, and @MaverickDrifter.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to our ask box at gamesline.tumblr.com/ask.

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or directly to our RSS feed.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Ep. 18: Overwatch Babies™ w/ Trex @arealpup appeared first on Gamesline.