Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

The Yakuza series — now called Like a Dragon — has a reputation problem. People hear “Yakuza” and think: Japanese crime drama, subtitles, too much reading, too weird, not for me. Here’s what it actually is:

A game where you can spend three hours running an animal sanctuary, then go to a karaoke bar and sing a power ballad, then get into a street fight with a bear, then have the most devastating emotional scene of any game released that year.

Infinite Wealth sends Ichiban — a former yakuza who’s possibly the most endearing protagonist in gaming — to Hawaii to find his mother, who he thought was dead. She’s dying. And the game does this thing where the tonal whiplash should not work — you go from a genuinely moving scene about a man seeing his dying mother for the first time in decades to a side quest where you help a man propose to his girlfriend by fighting off a gang of thieves in a mascot costume — and it does work. Because the game knows that’s what life is. Life is the funeral and the joke. Life is crying in a hospital corridor and then laughing at something stupid five minutes later. No other game understands this.

The combat is turn-based, like Persona, but it’s more physical — you can pick up nearby objects (bicycles, traffic cones, other enemies) and use them as weapons, and the positioning matters because Ichiban will literally kick enemies into each other if they’re standing in a line. It’s the bridge between a JRPG and a brawler. It shouldn’t work. It does.

You don’t need to have played the previous games. Infinite Wealth gives you everything you need. You’ll meet characters with decades of history and the game will make you care about them in ten minutes because it understands that context isn’t backstory — it’s character. They are who they are, right now, in front of you, and that’s enough.

It’s 80+ hours. You’ll wish it was longer.