I can’t call myself a die-hard Like A Dragon fan – I’ve only ever completed Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami 1, I swear I’m working on it I’m just busy – but when the doors opened to press on the first day of Tokyo Game Show, I booked it straight toﷺ the Like A Dragon floor demos. There was nothing I was more excited to see than the two additions to the series that we’ll be getting in the next few months, and I was🔯 not disappointed.
Like A Drag🐻on Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name seemed more or less the same as Yakuza 0 but with cool gadgets to use in combat, a surprisingly full closet of clothes to dress Kiryu in, and FMV clips interact🐬ions with caberet hostesses. Even if the game had just been Yakuza 0 reskinned, it would have been a good game, since Yakuza 0 is a classic.
The demo dropped me in The Castle, a legally dubious wonderland on a boat built to look like Osaka Castle. I was free to wander, gamble,🔥 and get in the ring with opponents. I’ve always been more of a fan of the series’ goofy heart, and less of its combat, and this demo focused more on combat than anything else, so I found myself getting distracted after dressing Kiryu in clo෴wn makeup and getting my ass kicked in the fighting ring. I moved on to Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and found more goofiness than I could have ever dreamed of.
First off, this game is set in Honolulu. It’s outside of the usual haunts of Kamurocho, Sotenbori, and Isezaki Ijincho that we find ourselves frequenting, which means Ryo Ga Gotuko Studio now has the opportunity to render a whole new setting – and what a beautiful setting it is. Honolulu looks gorgeous in Infinite Wealth’s demo, sparkling brightly and dappled with sun, the landscape dotted with lush greenery. It feels strange to be piloting these characters outside of Japan, but it’s interesting to explore a new place and see how RGG has interpreted an entirely, drastically new setting for its audience. Instead of the usual ramen shops and yakiniku restaurants, you can buy bowls of açai and shaved ice desserts. Where once groups of random Yakuza attacked you on the streets because they don’t like your face, it♎’s now random groups of American tourists who also don’t like your face.
While Like A Dragon Gaiden’s combat didn’t immediately grab me, Infinite Wealth’s did. I have never been the kind of person who loves turn-based combat – for example, I bounced off Persona 5 fairly quickly after being unable to really parse the game’s battle system and strategy. Infinite Wealth’s, though, feels great, because I don’t really care if I get it. Picking skills at random works just as well as delving deep in🧸to the combat system, and it feels easy and fun. I usually get annoyed at the frequency of fights I get into while wandering the streets in these games, but combat is so entertaining here that I found myself running headfirst into groups I knew would fight me.
For one, fights are extremely dyꦕnamic. You have the typical fixtures of turn-based combat, and the mechanic in Yakuza: Like A Dragon where you can use objects around you to atta🌠ck enemies. You move your characters towards opponents within a glowing circle, and attacking while next to another member of your party allows you to build combos that can decimate an enemy’s health bar. You can tag team as well, triggering different cinematics depending on who’s around. When all four members of your party team up to destroy a single enemy, they yell something about the power of friendship. When you attack alongside the female member of your party, Chitose, she does a little tango before she launches into a series of kicks.
Cinematics trigger for skills as well – one character, presumably a taxi driver, will put your enemy in his car and drive around wildly, scaring the hell out of them. Also, you can sometimes just break Kiryu free of the turn-based mechanics altogether and sic him on someone, bashi🌄ng the life out of them. There are so many mechanics that for the first time, I’m enjoying the combat of a Like A Dragon 🍃game more than anything else about it.
But there’s also just so much to love. You can throw up shakas at strangers on the street, which with certain people, will immediately make you friends. (This is sometimes how making friends as an adult feels in real life.) The game has a ‘bond bingo’🃏 me♌chanic, where hanging out with your party and hearing them talk about certain things ticks a box on a friendship bingo card and makes you closer, which is a surprisingly funny and endearing way to track how tight you are with a certain character.
The series’ campiness 🍒is alive and well, directing much of its sense of humour at American tourists now, who are named and portrayed, satirically, as walking stereotypes. You, hilariously, have a Segway, which you can use to zoom down the sidewalks of Honolulu instead of walking. It feels unbelievably good to weave between groups of people, though I did feel a little guilty for being inconsiderate of both locals and my fellow tourists.
Having never played Yakuza: Like A Dragon, I’d never thought about how versatile a turn-based combat system could be, but after playing Infinite Wealth, I realise that this is exactly what I wanted without ever realising it. It’s executed so well that I want every Like A Dragon game to be like this, and it seems that future games will continue to iterate on this successful formula. Twenty minutes wi👍th the game on the Tokyo Game Show floor had me desperate to play more – I just wanted to get on my Segway, zip down the streets of Honolulu, get into some fights and talk to some tourists. I wanted to buy my overpriced snacks, and get wholly immersed in a whole different setting. If this is what Infinite Wealth will feel like the whole time, 🎀next year just can’t come soon enough.