Another year, another Like a Dragon game. It’s been this way for a while now, to be fair, and playing these titles is not tiring, even if a bit routine. Yet I can’t help but feel that the RGG team itself is starting to get tired and for all of the cool ideas and elements they put in these games, they might be dreaming to make a bunch of non-Like a Dragon games instead.
Infinite Wealth, or Like a Dragon 8, is the second jRPG entry in the series so far, focusing on party turn based combat instead of beat ’em up gameplay. And while it has a lot of really cool things and quality of life improvements over the Yakuza: Like a Dragon, I can’t say that I’ve enjoyed it much.
This title, just like its direct predecessor, attempts to mix all of the ideas and mechanics of the previous titles in the franchise but frame them in the way as if it was a Dragon Quest game. And just like last time, the ideas here are novel and inventive. It’s a “realistic” setting, mixed with ridiculous and over the top elements where angry dudes on the street visually transform into over the top jRPG-like enemies and people cast “magic spells” using mops and coconuts. While the fights themselves have a lot more dynamic elements to it, based on the positions of the people, objects on the scene and quick inputs for blocking or increasing attack power.
Infinite Wealth makes those systems even more exciting and fun with some characters getting abilities that break all jRPG conventions completely. Your party can now perform combo attacks if they stand close together, different kinds of follow up attacks, ability to automatically win a fight against low level enemies. The way enemies appear and get aggressive towards you have been tweaked to be less annoying, with almost no enemies chasing you across the map. The system of bonds between party members (that enables some of those new attack types) have been tweaked and feels more fun. Class system is updated to make it different “jobs” more balanced and also now allows you to transfer a limited amount of skills from class to class, similarly to the job system in Final Fantasy V.
And yet… so many frustrating elements of the previous attempt are kept as is and even some of these new quality of life features feel deeply flawed. Attacks can still miss based on random geometry and ragdoll physics shenanigans. Which is even more frustrating since the game still refuses to kill enemies on low health, if the finishing attack is a combination and the final hit of the combination gets a miss for some silly reason. The auto-battle is as pointless as it used to be and won’t help neither those who are not as in love with turn based jRPG combat, nor those who are but want to grind for a bit at a relaxed pace. The ability to win against low level enemies still initializes the fight and shows the results screen, taking valuable time, unlike Dragon Quest XI. On top of that you may get stuck when doing it, because it requires all enemies to die or get hit by a three-hit combo from the party leader. Given that it plays automatically, the buggy pathfinding along with the already mentioned geometry and ragdolls, can lead to a soft lock. Team combos and weapon attacks can often get in the way or not trigger, as they are position sensitive, yet everyone is constantly moving during the fight. The game does provide a visual guidance of what your attack should result into, but what actually happens is never consistent. On top of that, it’s often hard to even see which enemy you are aiming at during the especially crowded fights, as you might want to be planning a specific attack with a knockdown to send a group of enemies flying, but instead accidentally select the farthest dude in the chain without realizing it.
Still, the base system is rather solid and has a lot of fun elements to it. But maybe you’re here, like me, for the story. That’s where another problem of lies – nothing happens for the majority of the game’s chapters. The game opens with strong storytelling that isn’t really leading up to anything very interesting, but is at least entertaining. And the final couple of chapters are chock full of story. But during most of the game, chapters will come and go with some characters introduced and removed from the story and something happening, but none of it being of any real consequence to the story or being interesting. That is if you’re lucky and you get any story, because the game might instead spend most of the chapter introducing you to a yet another mini-game you probably won’t care about. Want Pokemon? Want Animal Crossing? I don’t, but tough luck, here’s several hours of unskippable tutorials on these mini-games I will ignore.
The game does get back to the story and overcompensates for the lack of it during prior chapters, yet, even here it feels extremely weird. The strongest elements of the story (which is quite boring in general, actually) all have everything to do with Kiryu. Because you see – this is a yet another attempt to “give closure to Kiryu’s story”, for the third time now? Fourth? That did work for me, because of the constant nostalgia bait and “here’s how that character is doing” moments. But also feels cheap, unnecessary and extremely unfair to all of the cast of the last two games. They didn’t quite get a chance to truly shine in the previous title and are treated as supporting cast to Kiryu’s story in this one. Heck, one of the party members gets added to the story in the penultimate chapter of the game, when there’s basically no time or space to do anything interesting with them.
This particular aspect influences the way all other stories work too. Ichiban gets a fair number of substories, but they’re mostly bland in comparison to all of the emotional member berries Kiryu gets. All of the gameplay locations aren’t particularly interesting either and don’t get any meaningful story to them. There is a lot of “shocking twists” and window dressing, but none of that feels memorable or interesting. It doesn’t help that the game also often looks quite bad. Dragon Engine never had a strong suit with the day time (and to be fair, real life tends to also look boring and even ugly at day time), but in this case it feels especially bad since one of the biggest selling points of the game seems to be the tropical mood of the Hawaii. I would also be remiss not to mention the SEGA’s greed with DLCs this time around, as they’ve decided to lock down New Game plus, a classic mechanic for the franchise, behind a paid DLC.
I didn’t dislike Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, even if I was utterly bored through the vast majority of its playtime. It does deliver on cool jRPG combat mechanics and by the end the story picks up, even if the main story itself is really stupid. But the title feels like a weird blockbuster made based on test audience feedback, rather than a game that the RGG studio really wanted to do. I’m fine with having played the game, but I also don’t see myself ever returning to it in the future.