Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and the Art of Letting Go and Moving On

[Spoilers!]

Kazuma Kiryu has cancer. It was one of the first things Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio let slip when they announced Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. A single plot point, a universe’s worth of implications. Kiryu has been the Like a Dragon series’s focal point for twenty years, and even as they swore up and down he was done in Yakuza 6: The Song Of Life, he’s continued to pop up: in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, he showed up at the end of the game to help Ichiban Kasuga and his crew defeat Ryo Aoki and Bleach Japan. Then, he got a Kaito Files-esque spinoff: Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, in which we learned the terms of his exile and employment with the Daidoji Faction. When he showed up in one of the first teasers for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, I was genuinely worried that RGG Studio was incapable of letting go.

It turned out they just wanted to send him off right.

Infinite Wealth is a massive game, encompassing three full locations this time: Honolulu, Isezaki Ijincho, and Kamurocho. Much of the action, especially in the first half, is centered around Ichiban Kasuga’s misadventures in Hawaii: getting mugged by taxi driver Eric Tomizawa, then getting drugged and stripped of all his possessions (and clothing) by erstwhile heiress Chitose Fujinomiya; running afoul of the three major criminal factions in Honolulu; stumbling into a plot involving a new religious movement, the remnants of the yakuza after the so-called “Great Dissolution” from Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and at least two different governments. Much of the story in this first portion is buoyed by Kasuga’s indefatigable good cheer and infectious personality, a fact that multiple characters comment on to varying degrees of pejorativity.

Kasuga is joined by Kiryu in this first section of the game, and it’s Kiryu’s illness that provides the narrative justification for the improvements to the battle system over what was on offer in Yakuza: Like a Dragon: all characters now have a range of mobility you can use to set up strategic combos with, and Kiryu can switch between his three classic fighting styles – Bruiser, Rush and Sledgehammer – to more freely lash out at enemies in close proximity to him. Rush, for example, allows Kiryu to perform up to two combos in a row, while Sledgehammer will let Kiryu grab environmental objects and enemies to bash around.

I much prefer this iteration of RGG Studio’s so-called “Live Command RPG” system, with other added bonuses like followup strikes, opportunity attacks, “smackdown mode” which allows you to one-shot much weaker enemies, and the new “Hype Meter,” which lets each party member build up energy for a powerful “Tag Team” attack, akin to a Limit Break. Kasuga and Kiryu both have their own special Hype Meter moves: Kasuga can perform an “Ultimate Tag Team” when some or all of his allies’ Hype Meters are filled, and Kiryu can temporarily break loose of the turn-based RPG format altogether and beat down enemies around him at will. All of this leads to combat that is fluid, fast and fun, a huge improvement over the slog with a steep power curve that was Yakuza: Like a Dragon‘s turn-based system.

Infinite Wealth sees very little in the way of iteration when it comes to things like its substory design and the inclusion of literally dozens of minigames compared to past Like a Dragon titles, yet despite that, I still rarely felt shoehorned into doing random stuff on the side, or like the game was trying to distract me. By my lights there are only three pieces of side content that are absolute musts: you have to level up your bonds with your party members, you have to crawl through Honolulu and Yokohama’s procedurally-generated dungeons to grind experience, and you have to do Kiryu’s Bucket List missions. All three of these side-items are narratively and mechanically important, and are crucial to your success in the endgame.

But right, speaking of the Bucket List: Kazuma Kiryu is dying. And at roughly the halfway mark, this fact is no longer something Ichiban’s crew can ignore. An unconscious Kiryu has to be rescued from the “clutches” of one of the game’s criminal factions, the Yamai Syndicate (who, it turns out, recognized that something was wrong with the former Dragon of Dojima and provided him with basic medical care until Kasuga’s crew could arrive), and Hanawa, his Daidoji handler, recognizes that his condition is worsening, so he sends Kiryu packing back to Japan. Yu Nanba, one of Ichiban’s close friends and party member from Yakuza: Like a Dragon, accompanies Kiryu home. This is, in my opinion, where the game really elevates beyond its predecessors, while paying homage to the titles that came before it.

Kiryu finds himself laid up at Kasuga’s rooftop shack apartment, and it’s pretty clear that he’s now set on dying. He’s refused treatment for his cancer, believing that who he is as both a criminal icon and a technically-already-dead man according to the Daidoji means he doesn’t deserve to be saved in that fashion. Nanba, a former nurse, turns to some of Ichiban’s allies, like Saeko Mukoda, the Korean Geomijul’s Seonhee and ex-Liumang leader Tianyou Zhao, to try and rouse Kiryu out of this depressive slump. Together with Mokoto Date, Kiryu’s longtime friend on the Tokyo PD, this new party comes up with a whole host of stuff for Kiryu to do before he croaks. Kiryu has no choice but to go along with it, gradually warming up to the idea of the list, as well as learning to lean on Nanba and the other party members for support.

As we roam around Yokohama and Kamurocho, Kiryu reminisces on the past and the effect he’s had on the people and places around him (and vice versa). He slowly realizes through a series of “Life Link” quests (the vibe of which I can only describe as “attending your own funeral in disguise”) that people genuinely liked him, and miss him, and became better people for having him in their lives. And it works. We watch as cracks start to form in the shield of stoicism this 55-year-old man has put up around himself for decades. The changes in his personality are subtle but profound. Through the bonds system he develops close relationships with his party members, and we start to see him lighten up around them, sharing fun tidbits around town with them and listening to their struggles. He gets his own “Awakening” metric similar to Kasuga’s “Personality” gauges: as he levels up his “Soul,” “Tech” and “Body” through various activities he even gets stronger and more collaborative in fights. We watch as a man who has for all intents and purposes given up on living regain the fire that made him the legendary Dragon of Dojima in the first place.

I am hard-pressed to think of another game that does something like this with a major franchise character. This seems genuinely different than even what Sony Santa Monica did with Kratos and his motivations in the rebooted God of War series. And I’ll tell you what: it’s hard to fight trash mobs through tears – even with a turn-based battle system.

Starting in this second half, Infinite Wealth now has to make sure to share its spotlight between Kiryu and Kasuga, who still has to contend with the game’s A plot in Hawaii. It does so by switching parties with each new chapter, and if there’s one complaint I have about the narrative in the back half of Infinite Wealth it’s that things sometimes feel really compressed where pacing is concerned. That said, the game is playing with some thought-provoking ideas that aid in fleshing out the story.

Backing up a bit: at the end of Yakuza: Like a Dragon and The Man Who Erased His Name, we see the so-called “Great Dissolution:” the end of the Omi Alliance and Tojo Clan that have sat center-stage in the series for the better part of two decades. What we didn’t see in these games was the aftermath. What happens to something like 50,000 current and former criminals who are suddenly no longer a member of a criminal organization that could do things like protect them from the law, feed them, house them, etc.? And how does a society that suddenly has roughly 50,000 ex-criminals on their hands react to this fact?

Many provinces in Japan have laws called “Yakuza Exclusion Ordinances” on the books. These ordinances don’t officially criminalize membership in criminal organizations, an act permitted under the country’s constitutional freedom of association article; instead, they put pressure on non-yakuza individuals and businesses to refuse to enter any kind of economic arrangement with yakuza members. This includes renting or selling real estate to yakuza, opening a bank account for one, or collaborating openly with them. The enforcement of these YEOs ranges from voluntary police-civilian partnerships to citations, fines and court orders forcing citizens to comply.^[1]Hoshino, Tetsuya, and Takuma Kamada. “Third-party policing approaches against organized crime: An evaluation of the Yakuza exclusion ordinances.” Journal of quantitative criminology 37 … Continue reading

What Infinite Wealth puts forward is that these YEOs apply to former yakuza members as well, in many cases for up to five years after they leave the organization they belonged to—a fact I was surprised to learn is largely true. Ex-yakuza members face hiring and employment discrimination, are socially ostracized, and are largely unable to open bank accounts or rent apartments themselves. Without significant outside intervention – as demonstrated early on by Ichiban Kasuga in his role as a freelance coordinator at Hello Work – Infinite Wealth asserts that ex-yakuza with nowhere else to go will invariably find themselves pulled back into the criminal life.

It’s not surprising that a Like a Dragon game is engaged in didactic social commentary; this is the formula RGG Studio has been using for a long time. The Judgment series, for example, frequently engages in this kind of heavy-handed citation of simple-yet-surprising (to Westerners) facts about Japan’s criminal justice system, where characters will almost pause to look into the camera and say things like “according to this slightly-fictionalized version of a real Japanese law, something-something percent of people will…” right before engaging in a bare-knuckle brawl to the death with the games’ villains, who almost always have their sticky fingers in the pockets of local politicians.

Here in Infinite Wealth, the social commentary is the natural core of the story. It’s because of these YEOs and the social ostracism they promote that a VTuber called Hisoka Tatara is able to take spy footage of Ichiban as he does his job at Hello Work and twist it into “evil yakuza heavy is helping other yakuza skirt the law!” It’s this atmosphere of social exclusion that pushes this Tatara Channel video into virality, almost immediately resulting in Hello Work firing Ichiban, and his two best friends, Nanba and Koichi Adachi, losing their own jobs as a medical instrument inspector and private security contractor, respectively. It’s the simple fact that “ex-criminals pushed into a corner with nowhere else to go will lead to them returning to a life of crime” that propels Ichiban and his newly-unemployed buddies to re-form the adventuring party and investigate Yokohama’s Seiryu Clan, whose membership has allegedly been swelling. And all of these falling dominoes lead to Ichiban learning that his former boss, Masumi Arakawa, was his actual father, and that his mother – long thought to be dead – is actually alive, and living in Hawaii for decades.

All of this happens in the first hour or two of Infinite Wealth. I didn’t even talk about the subplot where Ichiban asks Saeko on a date and ends up awkwardly proposing to her at the end of it, a disastrous event that leads to some of the funniest dialogue I’ve seen in one of these games.

It should be said that Ichiban Kasuga is just a year younger than Kazuma Kiryu was in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life. At 46, having spent 18 full years in prison and just barely getting his shit together by the start of Infinite Wealth, you’d expect his demeanor and outlook on life to be considerably more dour and cynical than it is, especially after getting hit by the cascade of becoming a viral internet pariah, losing his job and ruining his relationship with Saeko all at once. But that’s just not who Ichiban is. No matter what life swings his way, he rolls with the punches and keeps moving forward. He makes friends out of enemies and inspires them to become heroes in their own right. The taxi driver who mugged him? The heiress who drugged him? Two of his most vital party members by the time his half of the game ends. He inspired the other two aspects of Yokohama’s criminal underworld aside from the Seiryu Clan – the Geomijul and Liumang – to join together in a peace accord. He might actually have the power of god and anime on his side.

The end of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is a pretty typical rising crescendo of battles on both fronts. In Hawaii, Ichiban and crew fight a shark, muscle their way onto a cult leader’s secret island where they’re storing nuclear waste from various countries including Japan, and take the cult leader down in the standard Like a Dragon fashion: by having ideals and muscles so strong nothing can withstand their dual assault. Over in Japan, Kiryu and company once again find themselves ascending Millennium Tower to take on the leader of the Seiryu Clan, who planned to create a “Second Great Dissolution” involving more of the country’s yakuza groups, wherein ex-yakuza would find themselves being shipped to the cult leader’s island to deal with increasingly dangerous working conditions and the ever-present threat of being poisoned to death by improperly-stored nuclear waste. This leads to a series of incredibly emotionally-moving cutscenes that personally rank at the top of my all-time favorite moments in the entire Like a Dragon franchise.

For some fans of this series, Kazuma Kiryu will always be its face – allow no replacements, accept no substitutes. For a while, I was worried that this camp included the folks at RGG Studio themselves. The way Kiryu kept showing up after his supposed end in The Song of Life, coupled with Kasuga’s frankly awkward introduction in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, suggested an identity crisis was taking place at the studio. But with Infinite Wealth, it’s clear that everyone is finally ready let Kiryu go in peace, and let Kasuga move forward in confidence.

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