Review | Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (PlayStation 5)

Going into Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth I was a little apprehensive about it feeling too similar to Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, which released just two months ago. My concerns weren’t completely unwarranted; with Gaiden starting out as Infinite Wealth DLC, there is plenty of shared DNA there.

With a familiar map, as well as reused collectibles and assets, I was having a serious case of Deja Vu.

Thankfully that feeling faded fast.

Upon getting to Hawai’i, which is packed with new characters, enemies, stories and interactions, Infinite Wealth finds its (own two) feet — and stands on them proudly.

The Hero of Yokohama: Story

Far removed from the weird and wild events of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Ichiban Kasuga is now working a desk job helping people find employment. Kasuga is determined to pay back the debt he owes to his late father-figure Masumi Arakawa, by helping ex-yakuza members find work, after the dissolution of the Tojo and Omi families.

The story takes a bit of time to get going, kicking off with a pretty hilarious string of scenes where Kasuga is nervously planning a first date. Friends Adachi and Namba offer up some polar-opposite advice that you have to decide between, to plan how your date will go.

Fast forward a year and the story starts to pick up the pace. Someone has leaked false information about Kasuga having illegal dealings with the Yakuza and posted it online. As a result he loses his job and his purpose.

A series of events leads to Kasuga heading to Hawai’i to find his birth mother, Kishida Akane. He packs his trusty baseball bat, iconic red suit and even his pet crayfish, Nancy… I won’t even guess where he hid that thing on the flight!

As you can imagine, his trip isn’t some fairytale reunion. Things go south pretty quickly for our hero! Kasuga finds himself tricked, robbed and left naked on a beach! After being arrested for indecent exposure, he’s framed by the local police for an unsolved crime.

After giving the cops the slip, Kasuga runs into Kazuma Kiryu, the long-running protagonist of the Yakuza series. It turns out that Kiryu is also looking for Kasuga’s birth mother, in fact it seems like every criminal on the island is hunting for Akane-san!

Infinite Wealth delivers yet another over-the-top, badass Yakuza story, with plenty of twists, turns and gasp-worthy moments. It had me giggling, hyped up and even drew a couple of tears here and there.

Without spoiling too much, the game eventually splits into parallel story-lines, switching between Hawai’i and Japan. While the city of Yokohama holds a lot of nostalgia for the series, it’s a bit grey and drab compared to the tropics of Honolulu. The Japanese section of Infinite Wealth is very much a love letter to Kazuma Kiryu. Numerous characters from past Yakuza games pop up for unexpected cameos and the game spends plenty of time reminiscing over Kiryu’s past exploits.

With its action-packed storyline and larger than life characters, Infinite Wealth is very much a melodrama, but also has no shortage of comedic notes. Kasuga’s big and outgoing personality ends up getting him into all sorts of ridiculous situations — you can’t help but laugh. Whether it be performing a shamanic dance to summon a storm, or getting into a fistfight with a great white shark, he always seems to find himself in the thick of it.

Kasuga is fiercely loyal, wears his heart on his sleeve and is goofy as hell. He never hesitates to insert himself into a situation to help someone in need and his positive personality is infectious, even turning enemies into allies. He’s a great mirror to Kazuma Kiryu’s more stoic and serious personality.

Like a Dragon: Combat

Combat in Infinite Wealth is pure excellence. The variety of enemies, abilities and boss battles is first-class.

Throughout the world, there are roaming bands of criminals, thugs, and bullies. Sometimes these fights are straight up, what you see is what you punch, and other times Kasuga’s wild imagination runs rampant, transforming enemies into something more weird and wacky. You can tell a lot of love and humor has been put into the enemy design. Where else can you fight clowns on stilts, beach bums with oiled-up dad-bods, an American using a pizza as a shield, AND a giant squid… All within the same game!?

Combat is of a semi-traditional turn-based RPG style; selecting from attacking, defending, skills and items. Before your turn you can position your character to try and knock enemies into each other as you attack or maximise the amount of targets you hit with an area-of-effect skill. You can also position yourself close to an enemy for a ‘proximity’ damage boost, within reach of a weapon to pick up and use, or next to an ally for a tag-team combo.

Eventually, your teammates can also perform follow up attacks in addition to their main turn, which is a great way of dealing a little bit of extra damage. Developing your bonds with your crew unlocks tag team attacks. While powerful, these moves are reliant on you first filling up a meter by performing other combat actions.

There are numerous jobs to unlock and equip, altering your costume, stats and available skills. Each character has their individual starting job but can swap out for other non-exclusive jobs.

While the job selection is great, I did have a bit of a gripe with the gender-specific jobs, a bit dated in 2024.

The male jobs are mostly gender-neutral like Action Star, Aquanaut, and Desperado. While the female jobs are more like Idol, Housekeeper and Night Queen (a dominatrix). I’m not opposed to any of these jobs being in the game, but why separate jobs by gender in the first place? A female gunslinger would be a welcome addition, and to see Kasuga donning a maid’s outfit and brandishing a mop as a weapon would be hilarious! The game is certainly silly enough that it wouldn’t feel out of place.

There are dozens of unique skills to unlock based on what job is equipped, each with its own animation. Throwing cutlery as if it were kunai, crotch stomping, hurling flaming nunchucks, and clobbering your enemy with a huge frozen tuna to name but a few.

Special Moves

There’s also two special skills per job that are unlocked by increasing your ‘job level’. These have their own dedicated cut-scene and are far more bizarre than a regular attack. For example, the ‘Essence of Sengoku’ calls upon samurai warriors to cut down your enemy, while ‘Essence of Wok and a Hard Place’ transports enemies into a giant wok where they’re tossed, fried and served on a plate of bok choy.

Each skill was so unique and well animated that I found myself using a wide variety in combat, rather than just sticking to a few favourites.

If I HAD to pick though: ‘Pigeon Storm’, a skill that summons hundreds of hungry birds to swoop on enemies, and ‘Essence of Dolphin Dive’ which recruits a couple of dolphins to deliver a beat-down. I love an animal-based attack!

There’s also a paid app you can use to summon various ‘Poundmates’ to help you in battle. While it can come in clutch in tough battles, if you want to use the app multiple times within the same fight, you’ll be paying through the teeth!

Boss Fights

Boss fights are long, intense, and tough. On more than one occasion I hit a wall and had to load a previous save so I could grind out more levels to get stronger. There are no difficulty settings either, so it’s kill or be killed.

Hot Tip: Having a dedicated healer in your party will reduce your overall damage output, but it might just keep you alive long enough to chip away at those particularly challenging fights.

Boss battles are often broken up by cut scenes with quick time events. These are pure eye candy, with break-neck fast choreography and fantastic animation quality.

There are some really handy quality-of-life features such as being able to quickly skip through the results screens after battle. Party members also still gain experience if they are KO’d in combat, so you don’t have to worry about team members missing vital exp points.

Infinite Playtime: Gameplay

From its main story, numerous side quests, engaging world, fantastic mini-games, and a plethora of quirky characters; Infinite Wealth is crammed full of things to see and do.

Your main method of getting around town is hoofing it on foot. You’ll find a lot more items and secrets this way, and also allows you to befriend the locals by throwing up a shaka sign.

If you’re looking to get from A to B a little faster, then there’s the segway. You can freely control the vehicle, steering clear of gangs looking to fight, or simply set a location on the map and hit ‘auto cruise’ and you’ll be taken to your destination. Remember to keep your segway charged — and uh… Watch out for traffic!

There’s also a fleet of taxis waiting to take your hard-earned cash. Selecting a cab rank on the map will allow you to fast travel there for a small fee.

While exploring the city of Honolulu, you’ll run into a wealth of quirky characters, often taking you down a side-quest rabbit-hole. From helping a boy-band summon a storm for their music video to playing matchmaker between your crayfish and a blinged out hermit crab… No, really. The side content is usually pretty interesting and well worth your time.

Around the map there are dozens of opportunities to better get to know your party members. As your bonds deepen, ‘drink links’ become available, which are essentially heart-to-heart chats. I found these conversations to be some of the more engaging content in the game, with the characters opening up about their issues and looking to you for advice. There’s also the added bonus of improving cooperation in battle, which is pretty important against the tougher enemies.

There are plenty of shops dotted around the city, selling everything you could ever need — if you can afford the prices! Seeing amazing weapons and clothing that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, while my bank balance was still in double digits… I’ve never felt so poor in a video game before!

When you’re trying to scrape together enough cash for that next weapon upgrade, there’s the added wrinkle of only being able to sell your stuff at a pawn shop. They’re few and far between and share the same icon as many other outlets, so it can be frustrating hovering over them one-by-one to find the right location. I can appreciate they’re going for a bit of realism, and I wouldn’t expect to be able to sell my flaming katana at a shoe store IRL, but it’s an annoyance the game could do without.

I don’t understand Japanese so it’s hard to comment on the voice acting with 1000% confidence. But to my ears, the performances sounded fantastic. I mean, I probably wouldn’t be laughing my ass off or wiping away tears from reading subtitles alone. The acting transcends the language barrier.

The same can’t be said for the English dub unfortunately, many of the voices feel mismatched to the characters they’re portraying. Even in the Japanese language mode, there are the occasional English-speaking characters — and boy, the performances aren’t great.

Wealth of Opportunities: Mini Games

It wouldn’t be a Yakuza game without TOO many time wasting mini-games packed in, like Mahjong, Shoji, Karaoke and Darts. This time around, the old SEGA arcade machines have Spikeout, an arcade brawler, and Bass Fishing. Karaoke has been given a new coat of paint, with new songs and cinematics, but mainly these pack-in games aren’t anything special.

There are plenty of other rewarding distractions in the game. Try your hand at being a waiter or a stuntman, help a kid sell lemonade or go on multiple photo-scavenger hunts.

The standouts though, are the ones that take classic video games and put their own spin on them. Here, you can see the love that’s been put in by developers, Ryu Ga Gotoku.

Sujimon collecting is back, but now it’s a full on Pokémon spoof. Rather than just filling the sujidex when you fight new enemies, you now have the chance to recruit them after battle. You can level up and evolve your sujimon and use them to battle other trainers. There’s different battle leagues to enter and even a version of Pokémons ‘elite four’ dubbed the ‘discreet four’.

Battles are pretty straight forward, with each sujimon having one move and one special move to use. There are some hilarious ‘mon designs and I had a blast running around the world, battling other trainers and ‘gacha pulling’ for new sujimon.

The mini-game also leads to a job type for Kasuga, ‘Sujimancer’ where you can summon the sujimon you’ve caught to help you in combat.

The devs weren’t content with just ONE Pokémon spoof though! They’ve even designed a Pokémon Snap type game where you’ll need to take photos from a moving tram. Though it’s not cute critters you’re on the look-out for, but pervert exhibitionists! Snapped images of these masked menaces get uploaded to the police database for evidence in their arrests. Definitely one of the weirder parts of the game!

Crazy Delivery was probably my favourite side game. Inspired by Crazy Taxi, you’ll be biking around Honolulu, collecting junk food to deliver to hungry patrons. You can also perform sick tricks along the way, boosting your score multiplier. It’s pure dumb fun!

Dondoko Island

There’s the Animal Crossing-inspired Dondoko Island. It’ll see you collecting resources, crafting buildings and items and restoring the island to its former glory. You’ll also need to protect the island from thugs who’ve been using it as their personal dumping ground. Throughout the main game, some characters you meet can also be invited onto Dondoko, where they’ll help with its restoration.

Even though I’ve poured hundreds of hours into Animal Crossing, I didn’t enjoy this take on the genre. The controls are clunky, buildable items are all drab and boring, and the fishing, bug catching and combat are very basic. I spent a few hours on the island, getting it in good enough shape to pass the first inspection, but there wasn’t enough to make me want to play past that.

The dating app, Miss Match, could’ve used a bit more thought and effort… Or maybe just left on the cutting room floor altogether. You create a dating profile, search for girls that match and strike up a conversation. The game boils down to just remembering what you put in your profile to not be caught in a lie, and choosing the answers you think they will respond to the most.

If you get a high enough score the girl will agree to meet you at a hotel, get a perfect score and she will actually turn up. A seedy video of a real life human then plays… There’s no nudity but it’s really weird.

There is an element of ‘cat-fishing’ which is the only interesting part of the game. When you don’t get a perfect score, the girl doesn’t turn up to the hotel… But other characters do! I had a granny, a guy in a gimp suit and even a chicken show up!

It would’ve been much more interesting for Kasuga to go out on real dates around the island. They could’ve let you choose the setting and activity to impress the girl, you would get to see actual character interaction and there would’ve been plenty of opportunities for embarrassing Kasuga moments!

As it is, the game is just a bit of blatant fan-service.

A Hero’s End

Packing in a bit too much seems to come part and parcel with Yakuza games, there’s a whole lot in there to distract from the main plot. The characters and story are so damn compelling, that I sometimes felt annoyed when forced to veer away from it for a short time. It’s a good problem to have however, most of the side content is of excellent quality.

Combat is a highlight with its superb enemy designs, intense boss battles, and so many fantastic skills that you’re spoiled for choice. While I did sometimes miss the brawler type action from past entries, the RPG battle system offers infinitely more variety.

There’s a host of characters and plot points that follow on from the first Like a Dragon and The Man Who Erased His Name. While you can absolutely play Infinite Wealth without having experienced the others, doing so will allow you to get the most out of this latest entry.

This is a must-play for any Yakuza/Like a Dragon fan. It’s goofy, heartfelt and exciting. In many ways, it’s a passing of the torch from Kiryu to Kasuga and I’m very much looking forward to where the franchise goes from here.

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth is coming to PlayStation, Xbox and PC on January 26th.

Quest Daily score Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth:

9/10

Quest Daily was supplied with a review copy of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

Review | Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth ‘Goofy, heartfelt and exciting’ (PlayStation 5)

The Hero of Yokohama: Story