Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth Is an Impressive Achievement in Storytelling

Things weren’t looking good for Ichiban and friends. A corrupt police officer and half a dozen of his cronies cornered us in a sleazy dive bar, and we were horribly underleveled. With a single button tap, the tables turned—or, more accurately, exploded into hundreds of pieces. I summoned Chitose “Buster” Holmes, a formidable henchwoman with spiked metal balls attached to her hands. She works for a hero delivery company, and proceeded to decimate the bar, pound the sheriff down to size, and show me how brilliant Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s battles could be. I needed that reminder after a rough start and some confused storytelling.

Then came the chaser: an intensely moving scene that expertly wove challenging real-life topics with some of the most thoughtful character development in video gaming. (No spoilers.)

In less than 15 minutes, developer Ryu Ga Gotoku (RGG) delivered a one-two punch that hammered out my wavering confidence in Infinite Wealth, and it didn’t falter again. Despite getting off to a rough start and having a few experimental ideas that don’t quite land as they should, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is RGG Studio’s best work to date and a superb RPG.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth opens four years after Yakuza: Like a Dragon, RGG’s first attempt at turn-based RPGs and the debut outing for our hero Ichiban Kasuga—and a lot has changed. In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, charm born from awkward intensity and ignorance characterize Ichiban, a 40-year-old man robbed of the chance to stop being a young adult. That passion remains in Infinite Wealth, but lived experience, grief, and earnest conviction refine it into something more powerful and believable.

He finally grew up, in other words, and reached a level of emotional maturity that even some real-life adults never manage to find.

Meanwhile, Kazuma Kiryu, Infinite Wealth’s second protagonist and the hero of Yakuza 0 through Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, has all the opportunites of an aging person with no security network and few opportunities for advancement. (That is to say, none.) It’s no secret that Kiryu is dying from cancer in Infinite Wealth—Sega even made it a focal point of the game’s video advertising—but RGG uses it for more than just a shocking plot twist and combines it with commentary on aging in surprisingly sensitive ways.

Infinite Wealth’s new setting in Hawaii is big and beautiful, and it also feels like unnecessary change for the sake of change. One of the Like a Dragon (previously Yakuza) series’ strongest points is how it uses focused stories as reflections of a cultural problem, and while these scenarios are always rooted in Japanese society, the insights and lessons from them are universal. RGG used Yokohama in Yakuza 7 and Lost Judgment as a platform for examining social injustice. Hawaii just feels like a tourist trap, especially in Infinite Wealth’s first half.

Okay, Ichiban is a tourist there, so a tourist’s perspective makes sense. He was new to Yokohama in Yakuza: Like a Dragon as well, though, and that didn’t stop him from championing the homeless and other vulnerable people that society overlooked. Infinite Wealth is missing the rich connection between people and place that usually gives Yakuza games their identity, and hardly anything that happens in Hawaii couldn’t have happened in Japan. I suspect the choice was partly an experimental one and partly thematic—experimental, to see how the series might function in another setting, and thematic, to emphasize the contrast between Infinite Wealth’s two halves.

While I don’t think Hawaii adds much outside of that contrast, RGG did employ a different kind of storytelling here instead, one that’s much more interesting than a fresh setting and elevates the series to its highest point yet. Rather than cultural touch points, Infinite Wealth goes deep into connections between people—eventually.

Infinite Wealth borrows Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s narrative structure for better and worse. It begins with a false start before hurling Ichiban alone into a dangerous new setting with nothing to his name. The broader narrative centers on two MacGuffin hunts for roughly 10 hours, first as Ichiban looks for his mother, Akane, and then as he tries tracking down the person who stole his passport—and, by extension, any possibility of him returning home.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon gave Ichiban a mission that shaped his actions in the game’s opening act. Infinite Wealth doesn’t have that kind of structure, and the early chapters move, somehow, more slowly than the previous game’s did. RGG’s exceptional character writing and Sega’s equally exceptional localization mean Infinite Wealth is still enjoyable in these opening hours. It’s just more of a slice-of-life Yakuza visual novel than anything else.

Everything changed near at the end of Infinite Wealth’s third chapter after a series of scenes that helped coalesce all the ideas I had about what point Infinite Wealth wanted to make into a solid vision.

While Ichiban’s Hawaiian odyssey touches on corruption, redemption, and a host of other concepts, it’s primarily about moving on and all the different forms that challenge can take—a café owner struggling after separating from his partner, for example, or a young salaryman on the brink of absolute despair who finds a reason to keep living.

Mostly, though, it’s about Ichiban and Kiryu figuring out how to move on in a post-yakuza world. Ichiban finds his way forward through unfaltering kindness and optimism, traits that shape everyone he meets along with himself. In this way, he could find fulfillment, perhaps even a sense of atonement after what happened to his father figure Arakawa at the end of the previous games, and some much-needed clarity for his future. It’s the kind of setup that could easily veer into soapy, shallow melodrama, with Ichiban as some kind of Hallmark Channel hero making sure everyone has a happy ending. RGG swats the suggestion of such shallowness away every time with the depth and sensitivity of the game’s writing and performances, though.

Kiryu’s story is the moon to Kasuga’s sun, so to speak. While Ichiban’s tale is one of healing and life beginning again, Kiryu’s delves into what it means to acknowledge there are no more new beginnings. Proper explorations of grief, illness, and loss in media are rare, even outside video games. So often, hits such as Dead to Me or The Good Place dilute their subjects with humor to keep them from getting too heavy, and even Apple TV’s recent (and excellent) Shrinking is guilty of that at times. RGG doesn’t shy away from it with Kiryu. You see the world and everything he stands to lose just as he does, colored with the fear, anger, resentment, and bitter resignation that he feels. It’s handled brilliantly at almost every turn.

RGG called Infnite Wealth its magnum opus several times during the game’s marketing campaign. It’s good promotional talk, but it also happens to be true. Infinite Wealth has a few pacing issues and some of the general plotting problems common to the series—a reliance on conspiracy as a primary storytelling device and overly dense explanations for certain events. However, RGG balances two emotionally weighty and intense stories so deftly and uses them to complement each other’s themes so smartly—there’s really nothing else like it.

I do recommend playing the Japanese dub, though. Sega made an unfair decision in casting Yong Yea, a 29-year-old with limited life experience, to play Kiryu, a world-weary man in his sixties with just months left to live. There’s just no way someone so young has the emotional gravity to pull it off. The performance isn’t terrible, but it does lack the nuance and depth of Takaya Kuroda’s exquisite work in the Japanese voice dub.

Infinite Wealth is still a Yakuza game, so it’s not all heavy narrative and distressing situations. Outside the main story and substories, Honolulu and Yokohama tempt you with an enticing range of games, mysteries, and chances to get rich quick. Both cities have Persona 3–like labyrinths where you can grind job levels and amass wealth that’s not quite infinite, but gets pretty close. Ichiban gets Dondoko Island, an Animal Crossing–adjacent, life-sim experience that’s so in-depth that I didn’t even have time to experiment with it. You can surf, deliver food in a ridiculously fun Uber-themed riff on Crazy Taxi, or even hunt for garbage and trade your finds for luxury items, because of course you can.

Dating is also back, though I wish it weren’t. A savvy businesswoman persuades Ichiban to experiment with her dating app after mocking his virginity and encourages him to “get experience” by learning how to chat with women. The problem is that a successful chat ends with Ichiban convincing a partner he’s in love with them, even though he has no intention of getting serious with anyone other than Saeko, his close friend back in Yokohama. Ichiban casually toying with people’s emotions is so tonally at odds with the rest of Infinite Wealth and his own character development that I really can’t imagine why anyone thought this was a valuable addition to Ichiban’s adventure.

On the bright side, you can just ignore it. There’s an almost overwhelming number of things to do and see in Infinite Wealth, and more impressive still is how none of it feels like pointless busywork. Everything ties in with Ichiban’s growth somehow, whether it’s bumping up bond levels or refining his personality, so if you’re the type who doesn’t want to just goof around with meaningless fun, it’s actually worth taking a break from the main story and seeing the sights, literally and metaphorically.

While Infinite Wealth is an impressive step forward in world design and narrative development, RGG’s approach to turn-based battles is surprisingly conservative, albeit still satisfying. Infinite Wealth refines most of Like a Dragon’s features, though they still feel a bit loose. Movement and positioning play a more important role in planning battle strategies this time, though you still can’t actually control movement in combat. Each character has a proximity range that extends a few feet around them in all directions.

Attacks to enemies in this radius deal more damage, you can inflict “back attacks” from behind that almost always turn into critical hits, and if you chuck an enemy close enough to a party member, they may perform a heavy-hitting follow-up attack.

“May” does some lifting in that sentence. The combo system feels very imprecise, to the point where I couldn’t predict whether an ally might pitch in or not. Enemies sometimes went sailing past while my friends watched, though in the best circumstances, they’d throw a timely punch and knock a foe in the path of an oncoming car.

Annoying as this impreciseness is, Infinite Wealth’s combat system has enough strengths that overshadow the problems, which is good, considering how many fights you’ll end up in. You can’t switch the end of a grass skirt in Honolulu without running into a band of sinister surfers and provocatively-clad bodybuilders, but while I often find these throwaway battles tedious in older Yakuza games, Infinite Wealth’s combat system makes them fun, even after the 300th time.

RGG struck a better balance with normal attacks and skills this time. High MP costs still mean you have to use special abilities wisely, but your basic attacks are more useful this time around. If you knock an opponent into an object, they take a decent amount of extra damage. Honolulu’s a crowded place, so there’s almost never a situation where you can’t solve a problem by knocking a thug into a wall or a trash can instead of spending MP.

Regular battles may not all reach the same heights as that bar fight with Chitose “Buster” Holmes, but they still leave you with that feeling unique to the series: a warm sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that comes from bouncing a criminal off the pavement and watching them fly 6 feet into the air.