Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth Promises to Be a True Epic

My favorite anecdote from my time with Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth goes as follows: after some time strolling down the beaches of Honolulu City as Kasuga Ichiban, I realized I could shake down palm trees for extra goodies. If you’ve played a Like A Dragon game before, you likely know that small detours like this yield the likes of healing items or things to sell for money, and the same was true of these coconut-bearing palm trees. That was, of course, until I shook one and, rather than being greeted by coconuts, knocked loose a whole man from the tree. For disturbing the outlandishly placed man, I was greeted with anger and eventually violence. In that iconic bit of text that flashes before every fight, his title was finally revealed: “Asshole.” I laughed to myself, thought, “Hey, they said it, not me,” and took him out.

I want to tell you that a single moment like this encapsulates the hours that I got to spend with Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth and the hours I’ve sunk into similar games in the series over the last several years. I’d be lying if I did though. You see, that’s only really part of Like A Dragon’s truth. Its essence is—quite manically and wonderfully—all over the place. About an hour after this moment of my preview, I was in a completely different segment of the game, in a completely different locale to the Hawaiian paradise in which I’d encountered the coconut asshole, and experiencing an entirely different, and markedly somber moment in the life of Kiryu Kazuma, the franchise’s most iconic and recurring protagonist. A half hour before that, I was cleaning up a resort by smashing bags of trash with a baseball bat in a full-blown minigame that satirizes Animal Crossing. A half hour later, I killed a shark slightly smaller than the megayacht I was fighting on. It’d be a miscalculation to suggest Like A Dragon has its feet in two doors at any given time. It is more accurate to say it is its own grandiose and unseemly universe and that we should all be so grateful to be along for the ride.

The Like A Dragon games have always been a sweeping tale, telling big and complicated stories of the yakuza—as well as Japanese society at large—over the decades (centuries even, as of one of the latest spinoffs: Like A Dragon Ishin!), and yet Infinite Wealth feels the closest the series has come to a true epic. It’s poetic that as the series takes one of its largest jumps yet with Kasuga going overseas, Kiryu’s half of the tale sees him coming to terms with the totality of his journey as he slowly succumbs to his cancer. It is at once comic, and also woefully tragic.

For example, the opening portion of my preview, which for the record was split into four segments, was a freewheeling exploration of Honolulu City as Ichiban. I had my run-in with the aforementioned coconut asshole at this point in my demos, but I also got to experience some familiar bits of the Like A Dragon games here, namely the outrageous substories. I spent time at the vocational school, which returns from Yakuza: Like A Dragon alongside the accompanying side character Ikari, and brushed up on my Hawaiian trivia (which I aced) before hitting the streets and eventually finding a rogue filmmaker with a penchant for incredibly dangerous stunts. After scaring off most anyone who would actually perform them, Ichiban is obviously recruited and then made to run down a street as cars barrel down the road at him at high-speed, with the goal being to shepherd him to the finish line unscathed. As always, the story ends in a ridiculous place, with Ichiban’s inane heroics somehow inspiring the stuntmen who (rightfully) fled from the production in the first place to instead devote themselves once again to the filmmaker just as he’s moving on to a scene that involves jumping from the top of a highrise without safety cords. 

Other substories and activities I found in my time with the preview, as well as the demo I’ve since played that comes packaged with Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, include the following: a quest where Ichiban tags in for a waiter who fails to show up to his first shift and becomes familiar with Hawaiian delicacies; a romantic subplot between high schoolers on a field trip that involves a bizarre note-passing tradition and a field of teenage boys buried up to their heads on the beach; a story about exploding Segways that eventually unlocks one that doesn’t explode as a form of transportation; a delivery mini-game that blatantly parodies Crazy Taxi (and builds off of a trash-collecting minigame from Yakuza: Like A Dragon); a minigame best described as Pokemon Snap with huge naked men; and of course, the return of Sujimon. 

Mind you, these were only a handful of the activities that were available to me in 1. an especially early portion of the game, 2. a cordoned-off section of the map that didn’t represent the enormity of Honolulu City in the game, and 3. all within about an hour of playtime. At least part of the final game is going to take place back in Japan as well, with Isezaki Ijincho and Kamurocho understandably playing a role in the events to come as Kiryu essentially tackles a farewell tour. Imagine, if you will, the density of these existing locations alongside Honolulu City now, which Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has already touted dwarfs Isezaki Ijincho by about three times, and is the team’s biggest map ever. 

On the other hand, there is Kiryu’s journey, which made up a relatively shorter bit of my preview, in all likelihood due to the sheer amount of story spoilers I could stumble on. Since the end of Gaiden, Kiryu has been on a bit of an extended vacation, which has been marred by the fact that he’s also dying of cancer. This sequence of the preview mostly contained heavy cutscenes focusing on Kiryu back in Japan with Nanba, Seonhee, and Saeko—party members and allies introduced in Yakuza: Like A Dragon—as they help him cope with the realities of dying. Saeko, who’s stunned to be in the presence of the Dragon of Dojima, argues with Nanba, a former doctor, about why he isn’t fighting to convince Kiryu to accept treatment and lengthen his time with them. Nanba, for his part, admits he wants nothing more than for Kiryu to stick around as long as possible, which is why he comes up with what I expect to be the driving force of Kiryu’s half of the game, the bucket list, in order to convince him of the wonders of living. Kiryu’s bucket list is part progression system and part mission structure, atop being a narrative conceit, to seemingly send off the series’ most impactful character and longest-running protagonist. As Kiryu, players will find points on the map where he can reminisce and gain strength (or some related stat), but beyond that it seems his story will branch off from Ichiban’s campaign against the yakuza and allow him to say goodbye to his loved ones and gain closure. If Gaiden‘s devastating final moments weren’t a bad enough gut punch to the stalwart fans of the series, it seems Infinite Wealth has engineered a final act of Kiryu’s story to drive this farewell home once and for all. So basically, bring some tissues.

Back on Ichiban’s side of the Pacific, Infinite Wealth continues the series’ tradition of wildly fleshed out minigames that are functionally full games onto themselves with the introduction of Dondoko Island, a resort that you get to build up. When you first arrive there, you have to fight off a gang that’s clearly causing trouble for the locals, at which point you earn their trust and are entrusted with the future of the island. From here on out, you’re tasked with clearing the island of trash (by smashing it with a bat), mining for resources (once again, with a bat), and quite literally building structures and furnishing the island a la Animal Crossing. Funnily enough, there’s a crafting animation that is almost assuredly poking fun at Animal Crossing: New Horizon‘s belabored crafting, but the rest of the minigame communicates an obvious fondness for the genre. You can fish and catch wildlife, you can change the camera to a grid with a birds-eye view, and you can lay out the island any way you want. Invest in and attract local businesses and unlock more materials to make your island stand apart, and you will be able to actually visit other players’ islands and allow your own to be visited too. Much like previous mingames of this size, spending the time on Dondoko Island building up an attractive and popular resort benefits Ichiban both monetarily and otherwise, making the investment in the side activity a worthy one. Come for the nightmare mascot, stay for just about everything else about this lovely departure from the Like A Dragon’s shifting definition of normalcy.

When you aren’t dicking around or being emotionally ruined, which I’m learning are just the two modes the Like A Dragon games ever operate under, the turn-based combat introduced in Yakuza: Like A Dragon feels as good as ever. Notably, you are now given a cone of movement before committing to an action, which is about the only real improvement I needed on Yakuza: Like A Dragon‘s remarkably sound bones. That game’s shift to turn-based combat began, quite famously at this point, as a joke that then spiraled into a hail mary reconceptualization of the game inspired by Ichiban’s love of Dragon Quest, but always impressed me with how competently it was built. It was never overtly innovative, but it lent the series a different pace that allowed me to finally hop on board. The only real frustration at the time was how frequently enemies, allies, or objects would get in the way of your attack since you couldn’t move. With that resolved, all that’s left to really do is build. And boy does Infinite Wealth build. 

Instead of going to Hello Work to unlock further jobs, you now unlock jobs by exploring via Alo-Happy Tours in Infinite Wealth. Spend enough time on the water on one tour and you’ll unlock the water-and-surfing based aquanaut job. The jobs only continue Yakuza: Like A Dragon‘s outlandish streak, including pyrodancer, action movie star, and so on and so forth. Besides further jobs and movement, the biggest change to combat is actually a character, namely Kiryu. In a nod to the series’ history, as well as Kiryu’s prowess, he can change between familiar fighting stances that can grant him more strength, change his basic attacks to grapples, or give him enough speed to perform two attacks when performing a single action. Once Kiryu’s charged up, his ultimate ability essentially breaks the game as he frees himself from the shackles of turn-based combat and can move around freely beating on whoever he wants like he’s back in a brawler.

By the end of my preview, laying waste to a humongous killer shark genuinely felt like the very tip of the iceberg that is Infinite Wealth. Though I can’t speak to the meaning of the game’s title in so far as the narrative, I can say that playing even just these isolated slices of the game made me realize the infinite wealth of everything that’s been made to fit in it. The Like A Dragon games finally crossed over into the western mainstream audience some years ago, but this feels like the one that’s going to have the lasting impact. Like A Dragon seems like it’s reached the comically absurd, and yet emotionally poignant, point it’s been building to for all these years. Infinite Wealth may have jumped the megashark on its way, but for what it’s worth, it looks pretty damn good up there.

Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.