I wondered when the game would open up, and found out that it would do so somewhat around the 15 hour mark, in chapter 5, twice what I played up to now. I'm not sure if I'm not getting too bored of this "game" before. Right now, the best I can describe it, is that it is a soap opera. Things happen continuously to the main character, but the sequence of events doesn't form anything like a coherent story. Funnily enough, the Synopsis section of the Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth page on Wikipedia starts with an editors warning of "This section may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. When this tag was added, its readable prose size was 1,518 words.". That pretty much sums the game up, even a plot summary of the game is a wall of text.

There is a pretty blatant absence of player agency. Everything that happened to the main character up to now just happened in a scripted cut-scene. None of it had anything to do with any decisions I was allowed to take, not that there were many. I can decide what moves to do in combat, but there is no difficulty setting, and the one default difficulty is pretty trivial. I do kind of like the turn-based combat system in which characters move slightly around between turns, and you can modify your attacks with your location; for example you move next to a bike, and then your standard attack is transformed into grabbing that bike and hitting the enemy with it, or if you manage to line them up, you can hit one enemy into another for extra damage to both. There are also some mini-games, although I haven't reached the "major" mini-games yet.

So all I can do right now is watch what happens to the main character, Ichiban Kasuga. It doesn't help that he is kind of a dumbass. Nice guy, strong sense of honor, but not very bright. Spent 20 years of his life in prison for a crime he didn't do, and still gets tricked and scammed several times per chapter in the story. Not the kind of hero I would identify with. In fact, he feels a lot more like a victim than a hero. This might be just me being old-fashioned, and preferring old-style heroes to the new-fangled "cult of the victim". But there is also some sort of dissonance when in the gameplay you win every fight, and then in the cut-scenes you always lose out.