Game intel
Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth
Two larger-than-life heroes, Ichiban Kasuga and Kazuma Kiryu are brought together by the hand of fate, or perhaps something more sinister… Live it up in Japan…
I started Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth late on a Thursday, intending to just “check it out” for an hour. Four hours later, my tea had gone cold, my PS5’s performance mode was purring along at 60fps, and I’d already laughed out loud twice and felt that familiar tightness in my chest once. The opening moves fast enough-some quiet time, a scandal, a plane-and suddenly Ichiban Kasuga is standing in a Hawaiian street full of neon shave-ice signs and suspiciously aggro aunties. In the first 30 minutes I went from tutorial knockdowns to realizing the rules I knew from Yakuza: Like a Dragon (LAD7) were cleaner, snappier, and way more positional.
Right away the game nudges you to move. Every turn gives you a small ring to reposition, and that circle-paired with enemy spacing—ended up defining my entire approach for the next 70+ hours. My “aha” moment came when I sprinted Ichiban a few feet to scoop up a traffic cone, clipped a goon from behind, and watched Adachi crash a follow-up from the side for free damage. It’s the same flashy, turn-based chaos I loved in LAD7, but with enough tactical sauce that I stopped button-mashing and started drawing invisible angles across sidewalks.
I adored LAD7’s audacity to go turn-based, but Infinite Wealth is where it fully landed for me. Every character’s turn lets you scoot into a better line, catch a back attack, or drag an enemy into the blast radius of a skill. If you’ve played a lot of JRPGs, think less “grid tactics” and more “improv geometry.” A small reposition often turned a decent hit into a domino of hurt: knock an enemy down, get a teammate’s free follow-up, then chain into a tag-team skill if I’d invested in those specific bonds.
That proximity system is the secret sauce. The game quietly rewards the way you shape the battlefield. Early on, I kept forgetting to nudge characters an extra step before attacking; halfway through, I was bouncing enemies like pinballs between Nana’s AOE gusts and Ichiban’s bat swings. The difference between “fine” and “devastating” is often two yards and a clever angle. And when you pull it off? The screen explodes into wonderfully dumb hype—stats shoot up, teammates cheer, somebody screams a line you’ll tease your friends about in chat.
Kiryu is the wrinkle. He brings a special state that briefly lets you go old-school brawler inside a turn—free movement, real-time combos, the whole “Dragon” swagger translated into this new rhythm. It’s not just fan service; tactically, it’s a pressure valve. Boss summons three adds? Pop the Dragon and clear the trash with a flurry before the turn ends, then snap back to the chessboard. It solved fights that felt like they were slipping away, and it’s honestly one of my favorite “legacy character” integrations in any series comeback.
Does it all sing? Mostly. The one constant grit in the gears is the camera. I had multiple fights where an enemy started their wind-up off-screen, and by the time the camera swung around I’d already missed the Perfect Guard. It’s not every encounter, but it’s enough that I started pre-tilting the camera between turns like a paranoid director. The movement can also cause accidental grabs of environmental junk when you meant to shave a few inches for a flank—minor, but it happens.
Like a Dragon lives on a line between absurdity and sincerity. Infinite Wealth plants its flag firmly in both. One minute you’re doing a kombucha taste-test for a side hustle; the next minute, Kiryu is reckoning with his past in a quiet room that feels like a museum of memories. I’ve been with this series since the PS2 days, and I didn’t expect the new RPG era to handle old ghosts with this much restraint. It does. There are scenes where a joke is the sugar that makes the medicine go down, but when the knife twists, it’s honest and unshowy. It’s less “weeping on cue” and more that slow ache that shows up while you’re brushing your teeth an hour later.
Ichiban remains a top-tier protagonist, full of guileless optimism and dumb, gigantic heart. Against Honolulu’s humid chaos, he works. But it’s Kiryu’s sections that tore me up. The structure lets him face the weight of being Kazuma Kiryu without rehashing the entire saga beat by beat. There are callbacks for veterans, yes, but it’s not homework if you’re new. The writing keeps bio-dumping to a minimum and focuses on universal stuff: mortality, legacy, the strange comfort of old streets.
If there’s a wobble, it’s that the central conspiracy isn’t quite as electric as LAD7’s. It starts a little slow, and some criminal machinations feel like well-trod ground. The difference is the cast. The party is uniformly charming, the banter never wears out its welcome, and the drink-link conversations pull their weight. This is one of those RPGs where the “talk to friends” button is never a chore.
I was skeptical of the setting. Hawaii in a Like a Dragon game? Turns out: perfect. The map is chunky and dense rather than bloated, with district vibes that keep shifting—tourist strips, back-alley markets, sun-faded neighborhoods, and beaches hiding more than sea glass. The streets feel like playgrounds for the RPG systems. Open curves invite you to line up those domino hits, and the city’s geography—lots of corners, kiosks, scooters—gives you a buffet of improvised weapons.
Fast travel is vastly improved. You unlock points at a comfortable clip, load times are snappy on PS5, and dungeon floors don’t drag your night into a tactical marathon. It respects your time without sanding off the edges that give fights friction. I usually ignore auto-resolve options in RPGs; here, I never needed them. The encounter pacing kept me in that sweet spot where “one more battle” is a promise, not a threat.
Then there’s Dondoko Island. The moment I unlocked it, I told myself I’d poke around for 20 minutes. Two hours vanished. It’s a whole mode—a scrappy, satirical island-builder where Ichiban turns junk into charm and wooes tourists for ratings. You gather, craft, decorate, clean up messes, shoo off troublemakers, and watch your little compound tick upward from “sad pier and three folding chairs” to “maybe too many flamingos but somehow tasteful.” The rhythm is cozy, the grind is satisfying, and the wink at life-sim tropes lands. I lost a full Saturday perfecting a beach bar layout so guests would stop complaining about the bathrooms. Zero regrets.
Outside of that? The side content is a firehose. I burned an evening on a chaotic food delivery minigame that feels like a love letter to arcade racing—leaning into corners, grabbing combos, chasing five-star ratings to a goofy soundtrack. The “Sujimon” circuit returns more robust, with more structure and better onramps. It’s still knowingly dumb—yes, you recruit weirdos and they fight—but it scratches that collector-itch and gives you something reactive to tinker with between main chapters.
If you loved job mixing in LAD7, you’ll be very happy. Infinite Wealth expands the palette and smooths out the busywork. Swapping roles isn’t a bureaucratic nightmare, and each job has a clear hook that slots into the positioning meta. I ended up running Ichiban as a bruiser with surprising utility, specced one character entirely around knockbacks to feed the free follow-ups, and gave my designated glass cannon a couple of positioning tools so she wasn’t always stranded. A good build feels like a conspiracy between classes—a slapstick Rube Goldberg machine where every piece knocks the next into place.
The bond system fuels all that. Spend time with your crew, unlock tag-team skills, and you’re rewarded with more than numbers. Those conversations illuminate motivations without stopping the world to speechify. They’re more like catching your friends mid-life, which fits the series’ heartbeat: people getting through, with jokes where they can find them.
I played the PS5 version almost entirely in performance mode. It’s the right call. Combat feels crisp, inputs are responsive, and you get that snappy flow that makes the repositioning meta sing. The Dragon Engine remains a bit of a paradox: story cinematics look phenomenal—faces, lighting, little hand gestures—while the open world sometimes shows its age with flat textures and occasional pop-in. Not a deal-breaker by any stretch, but you’ll notice the gap if you’re coming from shinier open worlds.
Beyond the camera hiccups in combat, I had very few tech issues. One street fight spawned a pedestrian inside a bench, which looked like modern art for a second. Load screens are brief. DualSense feedback is understated—more texture than showcase—but pairing subtle rumbles with the thwack of a perfect bat swing made me weirdly happy. Audio is top-notch; I started with Japanese audio (still my preference) but switched to English for a few hours and the dub is strong, especially for the leads.
Three things bugged me consistently. First, the combat camera. When it can’t find the action, Perfect Guard timing turns into a guessing game. Second, a handful of early chapters take their time to rev engines; the broader plot’s criminal intrigue doesn’t immediately bite. Third, the open world’s visual age shows more in broad daylight than neon night. None of these are fatal. The camera is an annoyance you can play around, the slow start is buoyed by the cast, and the art direction still gives scenes personality even when texture detail dips.
There’s a bigger philosophical thing, too: Infinite Wealth is comfortable being maximalist. It’s a lot. If your idea of bliss is a straight-shot 25-hour narrative with zero fluff, this will test you. But if you’re wired like me—someone who enjoys getting lost in a city that throws ten different toys at you and says, “Play how you want”—this is a playground with a good heart.
After about 10 hours, a boss fight flowed into a sudden two-part duel where the second phase changed the geometry of the arena. No spoilers, but I had to relearn the space mid-fight and leverage knockbacks differently to keep my healer safe. It was the first time the positioning system felt like a puzzle rather than just an advantage—and winning it by one sliver of HP, with a last-second perfect guard, had me standing up off the couch like a maniac.
At 20 hours, I discovered a substory that looked like throwaway filler and quietly turned into a character insight. The punchline was silly; the residue it left about how people self-mythologize wasn’t. That’s the series at its smartest: using gags to sneak something human into your day.
Around hour 35, I fell down the Dondoko rabbit hole. I’d been ignoring a tourist rating that kept dinging my island for “ambience.” I moved three chairs and a lamp, swapped a tacky menu board for a handmade sign, and the graph ticked from 2.9 to 3.0 stars. That fractional bump sparked a two-hour binge of micro-optimizations that weirdly mirrored the main game’s combat heuristics: tweak position, chain a reaction, reap the payoff.
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is the rare RPG sequel that feels both bigger and sharper. It preserves the unhinged heart that made this era of the series sing, then hard-cuts to moments where characters grapple with heavy truths and the room goes quiet. The combat finally embraces positioning in ways that make every encounter an exercise in creative mischief. The city is a character; the side content isn’t just diversion, it’s texture. And Kiryu? He’s given the kind of space legacy heroes almost never get: not a parade, not a pity party, but dignity.
I finished the main story in about 55 hours and I’ve crept past 70, with two more islands of subcontent left to explore and a few job builds I still want to try. When people ask “Is it better than LAD7?” my answer is weirdly simple: it’s the same soul with a steadier hand. That steadiness makes the highs land harder and the lows feel earned. I laughed a lot. And then, when it wanted to, it hurt—honestly, gently, permanently.
Score: 9/10
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