It’s not often that I’ll sit down and enjoy a game throughout the entirety of my playthrough. Even the best reviewed games will have parts of it that exist simply to extend the games length for no real reason (I’m looking at you, GTAV). Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth opens 2024 with a bang, showcasing the best of what the series has to offer and more.

Time to move

The gameplay evolution from Yakuza: Like A Dragon is night and day. From the simple addition of being able to move your character during combat, to things like combo moves and showdowns, it’s all incredibly refined and engaging. I’ve always felt like the crazy physics added in Yakuza 6 was always under-utilized, but it’s taken full advantage of here. The game constantly encourages you to be willing to move around and experiment with different parts of the environment. The new jobs keep in line with how silly the game is during combat, though I wish that jobs weren’t separated by gender as the options for female characters are severely lacking compared to male characters. Let me be a Night Queen as Kiryu, dammit!

The grind for leveling up is not nearly as bad as before, with dungeons getting progressively more difficult the further you go down. Enemies will give tons of experience and money, which will let you gain more powerful skills and weapons. Weapon crafting and upgrades will help expand your arsenal, with the most powerful weapons only being available through crafting. Unless you paid for the more expensive deluxe edition of the game, however, don’t expect to use those fancy weapons in new game+ as that is locked behind DLC, and the best weapons in the game cannot be earned in a normal playthrough.

Thing is…

Sunny beaches and sudden downpours await both protagonists, Ichiban Kasuga and Kazuma Kiryu. After a series of unfortunate events, Ichiban is given the opportunity to reunite with his mother in Hawaii. From that point on, the story starts to unravel in a way that reminds me of how Yakuza 0 would constantly keep you on your toes, and how brutality would be shown to remind the player of what’s at stake.

While I am sure that you’re interested in hearing a lot more about the story, it is something that I do think should be experienced when you get your hands on a copy of the game. The story itself does have its own issues where you’ll wonder when a relevant plot thread would be brought up again, only to be very loosely and quickly resolved. It’s not the best story the series has offered, but it’s still an enjoyable ride that’ll have you in your seat till the end.

The biggest appeal as always, is the side content. And boy, there’s a lot of it.

We have Animal Crossing at home

So, let’s go down an incomplete list here of new stuff unique to Infinite Wealth. We’ve got:

• Sicko-Snap: A Pokemon Snap-like that has you taking pictures for the police while riding on a tram.
• Sujimon: Very much inspired by Pokemon but plays nothing like Pokemon.
• Crazy Delivery: Crazy Taxi but worse, I pray that you don’t get Ichiban as your Uber driver.
• Miss Match: Lie on your Tinder profile so you can get laid. Hope you like getting catfished.

And the big one: Dondoko Island. If you’ve ever played Animal Crossing, this is the big minigame added to Infinite Wealth. Your goal is to help this island that is getting filled with trash, and turn it into a five-star resort. The further along you are in the story and substories, you’ll gain new tourists to visit your resort. You can customize the placement of buildings, clean up the island, gain materials, fish, catch bugs, and beat up people who try to keep your area trashy. It’s very time-consuming, but very rewarding if you don’t want to focus on doing dungeons for grinding out money and experience.

There aren’t as many substories compared to previous entries, but the amount of time you’ll take playing through them will end up being about the same. You’ll see familiar faces and meet new people, but the quality of the substories is probably the highest it’s ever been. They’ll range from helping a sick child meet his hero, to helping a baby bird find his mother because he won’t leave your hair. They’re all great fun and keep things light-hearted when the game decides to get a little too dark.

Aloha!

As one of the few people who truly enjoy Yakuza 3, I missed the sunny beaches and island feel of Okinawa. While Yakuza 6 brought us back momentarily for the introduction of the game, there is no city like Okinawa to explore. Honolulu helps bring the idea of not just the player being a tourist, but also Ichiban as well. It’s unfamiliar territory in a country he’s never been to, people speaking a language he knows nothing about, and quickly learning the politics and corruption of those who aim only for greed.

Honolulu feels lived in, and one of the things that helps that is Aloha Links. This little function doesn’t serve too much of a purpose outside of gaining some items, but it doesn’t hurt to just press X to say “Aloha!” while you’re running around beating people with a surfboard.

The PC experience

The PC version of Infinite Wealth is pretty disappointing. While writing this, the day one patch for the game released, adding FSR3 support along with frame generation. After testing DLSS3 frame gen in the previous version of the game (which was completely broken and flashed purple at times), FSR3 frame gen is also somewhat broken. The user interface will continue to update at that lower frame-rate, while if you already aren’t getting 60 FPS, you will end up with graphical issues with hair and shadows not updating correctly. The additional input lag given by these two modes also make it incredibly difficult to time perfect blocks and QTE’s, so I would just ignore the two options completely. DLSS2 is just broken, with ghost trails appearing when the camera is still. Loading times on a Gen4 NVME was also longer compared to playing on Series S, which on there was almost instant. Did I also mention constant stutter when entering battle or picking up items?

I’m not sure if it’s an issue with the Windows Store version of the game, but for the first time in a long while, I preferred to play a game on console. The Series S version of the game isn’t even that bad, it uses FSR2 to upscale from 900p to 1440p from what I can gather, and while the frame-rate isn’t perfect 100% of the time, it’s stable when it needs to be stable in combat and during cutscenes. The stutters that were present in the PC version are completely absent on console as well. I had hoped the day one patch would have fixed this issue, but it still exists at the time of this writing. At least there’s a short shader per-compilation when starting the game for the first time, but the consistent stutter and abnormally long loading times need to be fixed before I’d recommend the game on PC.

Catharsis

My total playtime ended up around 60 hours. I did a decent amount of substories, but my focus was going through the main story and dungeons. When I started the game, I had some difficult personal events happen in my life. Without divulging too much information, playing through a specific portion of the game felt very cathartic for me. Infinite Wealth managed to help me push through the pain of this issue and learn a few lessons along the way to keep myself strong in moments of hardship. Yes, I know that sounds cheesy and probably stupid, but we all have our favorite bits of media that helped us get through hard times.

If you read my review on Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, you’ll know that I wasn’t necessarily too fond of it. While it was a decent supplement for what was to come, I didn’t think I would end up saying that Infinite Wealth would be one of the best RPG’s I’ve played in a long time, yet here we are. The amount of content on offer here is staggering, not to the point of being insanely bloated like Yakuza 5, but still jam-packed for those looking to get their money’s worth.

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth is available for Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, Playstation 4, Playstation 5 and PC on Steam and Microsoft Store. While it’s not available on Xbox Game Pass, you can have an appetizer of the game in Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (which is on Xbox Game Pass!). It includes a demo of Infinite Wealth that can give you a taste of what to expect in the full game.

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Played on

Xbox Series S

PROS

• Great evolution of RPG combat
• Lots of content
• Incredible soundtrack

CONS

• Story could have resolved loose plot threads better
• Karaoke in the english dub is awful, why so much auto-tune?
• Disappointing PC version

9.0 out of 10

AMAZING

XboxEra Scoring Policy

Available on

Xbox Series | Xbox One | PlayStation 4 | PlayStation 5 | Windows PC | Steam

Developer

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio

Released on

January 26, 2024

Publisher

SEGA

Price

£59.99

See on the Xbox Store