Starting this right after Pillars of Eternity, I couldn't help but notice a major difference in starting a Japanese CRPG compared to a western CRPG: Many western CRPGs start with character creation, and you need to make a lot of choices before even knowing anything about the game. In Pillars of Eternity I could play character classes like cipher or chanter, having no idea what those classes do. I also had to distribute stat points, and was supposed to read and understand a lot of small print to find out things like that the "Might" stat was necessary even for wizards to increase spell damage. In Baldur's Gate 3 that was less of a problem for me, but only because they used D&D 5th edition, a system I am very familiar with. If you never played D&D, good luck guessing in advance what the difference between a wizard, a sorcerer, and a warlock are. There have been a number of western CRPGs in which I started the game, played for a few hours, and then started the game over from zero to make different choices during character creation.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth doesn't have that problem. There is no character creation, you simply start by playing Ichiban Kasuga, the main character, and you have no choice of character class or stat distribution. All that comes much later, where you can change jobs, but at the start you just play him as a generic level 1 "hero". At the start of the game, you get a *lot* of cut scenes explaining the situation, your character, and his motivation, and the gameplay elements like combat are gradually introduced and explained in much detail. If anything, the problem at the start of this game, and many other Japanese CRPGs, is that it takes several hours of handholding tutorial before you are given the freedom to actually really take any decisions.

I have always felt that the optimum would be somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. Some gameplay to explain how things like combat work, and only then having to choose things like character class and stat distribution. But that sort of tutorial shouldn't take hours and hours either. I read that the tutorial of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is about 5 hours, which is somewhat balanced by the game taking 80 hours overall. But I still think that this is a bit much of a tutorial; I certainly wouldn't want to restart such a game and have to go through 5 hours of handholding with little freedom again.