BeeRadTheMadLad Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth Review

Ok side content, bad gameplay, utter garbage writing every which way, fraudulent business practices and greed. Business practices aside, if I were to rate the game on its own merits I’d say it's definitely not good and certainly nowhere near being even in the same multiverse of anything that would come within striking distance of justifying a whole digit percent of the hype. It has "improved" combat from the first LAD for the most part, but even that's a moot point because the difficulty curve is just a straight line at 0 and the game tells you what attack to use against every enemy to do the most damage, those 2 ridiculous variables combined mean the "improved combat" is just absurdly dumbed down nonsense - "I press duh automatic win button duh game tell me to press over and over and over again until I win duh game". The writing is utter garbage, so much so that it’s actually astounding. Literally the best written parts of the game is writing from the older games lmfao. It doesn’t help matters that Ichiban’s half of the story feels like it’s pulled straight from a Wattpad fanfic written by a 12 year old, as it ultimately culminates in a guy who ends up being so cartoonishly psychotic that it crosses the line twice and makes his whole story an unintentional parody of itself, only so that Ichiban can give him a chibi-anime ‘power of friendship’ speech and make his all-consuming psychosis literally just magically vanish into thin air. It's like a severely mentally disabled abused puppy's most delusional fantasy of how having battered wife syndrome toward all of your abusers works. As an added bonus, Ichiban’s “romance story” is just as forced and lazily/sloppily written, making even 90’s magical girl anime relationships look deep. The Daidoji’s agreement is relevant only when it’s convenient to the plot, none of the villains are interesting at all, several characters only die because the writers ran out of ideas for them and pulled the equivalent of dropping a piano on their heads, very few plot points actually get resolved or even so much as alluded to at the point where most games would attempt a resolution...do I even need to keep going? It's just a constant barrage of one insult to your intelligence after another after another after another after another... Before I rant any further about what a dumpster fire I consider this game to be, I should mention that in some ways it does surpass its predecessor. Compared to the first LAD it adds movement and positioning to combat (this is a moot point for reasons I spelled out earlier but apparently many fans appreciate its implementation here), makes the trash mobs throughout the city a little more sane to deal with, has a “detection” feature for said mobs so you dont’ just automatically enter a battle the moment you enter a trash mob’s line of site, and has an automatic beatdown function for much weaker enemies. It doesn’t rely quite as heavily on dungeon crawler gimmicks from the 80’s for difficulty as the first game did (hp sponges, instant game over attacks, that sort of thing), though it didn’t really get replaced with anything else and the game holds your hand to such an insane degree on top of everything else that all of these mechanics felt pointless. Unfortunately, the sense of strategy that the new combat features seem like they were intended to add to the game end up getting zeroed out by this, as you can easily just wreck everyone and everything by just spamming the automatic win button the game tells you to press (wtf is wrong with modern gaming?!) which renders everything inconsequential. One warning in particular I’ll give is that if you haven’t played Yakuza 0 - 6 yet, you have a decision to make on doing so and the parameters around that decision are a little different now than they were a couple of years back. Like a Dragon was considered to be a serviceable entry point into the series (at least as far as the main characters were concerned) before this game came out because it mostly features new characters, each with their own mostly new story. IW might muddy those waters more than LAD did, as it starts calling back to the older games earlier and does so more often than its predecessor. I'll leave it up to YMMV as to whether or not it's necessary for you to play the older games before you play this, as I did with LAD. There’s quite a bit of side content, the main features being a Stardew Valley spinoff and a Pokemon spinoff, both of which have the potential to rob the player of hours of time and sleep if those sorts of things are your jam. So yeah, in summary this game = good side content (maybe a bit of an acquired taste), terrible gameplay, unbelievably stupid writing - like I literally couldn't believe how terrible it was, and of course, fraudulent business practices. YMMV on if it’s worth it. Personally I can’t for the life of me comprehend what everyone else sees in this game. Not only does it suck in almost every way imaginable, it's also an extremely blatant scam with app store microtransaction bs metastasizing its way into what was supposed to be legitimate gaming. I have serious doubts about the future of this franchise. There’s nothing like Y0 - Y6 or the Judgment games. Y7 at least maintained a cameo of that unique experience through the story, which actually got good once it picked up. But with 8/IW, the "once it picks up" part simply doesn't happen. It has very little to offer that a billion other terrible jrpgs don’t also offer. It’s impossible for me to see this as anything but RGG having completely and totally lost their way with this series and it’s baffling to me that so few people are calling them out on it and in fact, everyone seems to be encouraging it.