‘Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’ Review: Another Day in Paradise

In the space of Infinite Wealth’s first hour, everybody’s favorite ex-yakuza himbo, Ichiban Kasuga, goes from gainfully employed job recruiter, to unofficial job recruiter for those with criminal records, to unemployed loser, to internet-cancelled pariah, to McConaughey-esque beach bum, to homesick mama’s boy, to cop-punching fugitive, and, finally, back to his natural state: delusional, self-appointed, street-wise hero. Again, that’s the first hour of the game.

The irony in Infinite Wealth, though, is that the sheer whiplash of Kazuga’s life is the thing that players will cling onto for stability as Like a Dragon takes its antics overseas to Hawaii. While folks of a certain age know a trip to Hawaii is usually what happens when a beloved series is out of ideas, the tropical setting makes for a pretty perfect fit with Like a Dragon, being a Japanese-friendly place that’s nonetheless distinctly American, with all that implies.

And what exactly that implies is pretty important to the story. The expected ooh’s and ahh’s about how pretty Hawaii can be give way to a surprisingly straight-faced look at how the effects of colonization, tourism, inflation, and xenophobia simmer on. And not only is Infinite Wealth the first video game to directly address the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s one of the few pieces of media altogether to give a nuanced look at Hawaii’s unique political landscape, with a plot that ultimately indicts every foreigner—especially the organized criminals—to sully native lands. That makes for a game with a markedly different feel than anything else in the series.

All of that is somehow able to break through even when Like a Dragon is back on its usual hilarious bullshit, where Kasuga is smacking around street thugs with giant Hitachi Magic Wands, delivering poke and pizza in a wild Tony Hawk/Crazy Taxi hybrid mini-game, and his new best friend is a cabbie who scrubs enemies to death. The turn-based RPG combat returns to the series after taking all of 2023 off, and is, once again, hideously unbalanced, even as it makes for one of the most fun, free-wheeling takes on the genre in existence.

Not only is the Pokémon-with-human-weirdos mini-game back, and accompanied by a bizarre take on the Pokémon League, it’s joined by a quest that starts with stopping random thugs from torturing a poor tortoise on its way back to sea and ends with discovering a hidden island with a full-blown Animal Crossing mode where Kazuga must turn a trash-strewn island into a DIY resort. Suffice to say, the state of Ryu Ga Gotoku’s weird streak is strong.

There is, though, a sobering undercurrent to that weirdness. That’s partly due to the game largely abandoning full-blown operatic drama when dealing with ages-old yakuza feuds in favor of a much simpler setup of Kazuga looking for his long-lost mother. But it’s also due to some major plot developments when previous Yakuza protagonist Kazama Kiryu shows up with some heavy news. Said news gets largely sidelined in the game’s first half, but it becomes a matter of urgency in the second. Once it starts to run parallel with some serious twists and turns for Kasuga’s story, the careful tonal balance that the game builds early on falls mildly out of whack.

Still, there’s something to be said for how much of the plot hinges on Kasuga and Kiryu teaching Infinite Wealth’s new Losers’ Club of companions important lessons about what being a good person looks like in the 21st century. The old men of this story must simultaneously adapt to a world they don’t truly belong in and put in an enormous amount of work making that world better for a younger generation of would-be heroes. Infinite Wealth’s greatest accomplishment is how much of that work still involves a deep, eclectic sense of play.

This game was reviewed with code provided by fortyseven communications.