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Thursday, July 09, 2026
Soap opera
I am now 7 hours into Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, in the middle of chapter 3. So how does it play? Well, it doesn't. I don't have the feeling that I did much playing in those 7 hours. I mostly watched cut-scenes. I was occasionally able to move freely and do some random trash mob fights, and gather random loot on the street. But up to now there was only a single small "dungeon" that remotely resembled a role-playing game activity. The rest of the "game" consisted of walking to the next point marked on the map and watching the next cut-scene. Sometimes there was no walking, just a sequence of several cut-scenes.
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.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:35 PM Permanent Link
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Most of that sounds truly awful. I'm amazed you lasted for even the 7 hours. I don't think I would have. This sort of thing is why I rarely play anything Japanese. It's a completely different vibe than what I like. I'm probably the only hard-core lifelong RPG player whose entire Final Fantasy experience consists of watching others play for a few minutes and shaking their head ... Every attack was almost a cut scene, as I remember it. At least that particular one.
I love many JRPGs but I truly can't stand the Yakuza series, its just mind-numbingly dumb and at the same time makes me feel like I lost something important in life each time I try playing. @Perkus there are lots of good JRPGs out there, though there are definitely also some awful ones.
Yeah I felt the same way about the first game. So many long cutscenes at the start. Ichiban is a lovable oaf type character which I dont mind but the story was so melodramatic and everything is so over done I just couldn't get into it. Then the humor is all super wacky I couldn't get into those sections either. I was left with a game that I didn't care about the main plot or side plots and then on top the combat was just not good either. It's a super basic type matching system that is so poorly balanced and, at least with the first game, felt super bare bones.
For 90% of the game you can just mash whatever random attack and win fights. Then randomly the game will put you at a boss that has a crazy difficulty spike that requires optimizing your team or spamming a ton of consumables to get through. One particularly infuriating boss fight I ran into was one that started after a series of cutscenes and the boss had 1 ability that would one shot characters no matter what job I put them in and despite me being higher level then the quest recommended. So the fight devolved into me restarting and having to run back to the start point, mash through multiple cutscenes, and then hope the boss just wouldn't randomly use the ability that could one shot characters too many times in a row. I finally "won" when he RNG decided he would only use that ability a couple times.
Then you have so many extra little grating things that stood out, probably because I already wasn't enjoying the story or combat. Stuff like how they play the same music all game long for certain things. Every sad cutscene gets the same music. Every wacky section, every combat, etc. I forced myself to finish the game because I wanted to say I played the whole thing but man I came away kinda of baffled by how much praise those games get.
I can understand the plot and whatnot wasn't for me but even strictly when viewed through its mechanics the pure game part of that game is not good.
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For 90% of the game you can just mash whatever random attack and win fights. Then randomly the game will put you at a boss that has a crazy difficulty spike that requires optimizing your team or spamming a ton of consumables to get through. One particularly infuriating boss fight I ran into was one that started after a series of cutscenes and the boss had 1 ability that would one shot characters no matter what job I put them in and despite me being higher level then the quest recommended. So the fight devolved into me restarting and having to run back to the start point, mash through multiple cutscenes, and then hope the boss just wouldn't randomly use the ability that could one shot characters too many times in a row. I finally "won" when he RNG decided he would only use that ability a couple times.
Then you have so many extra little grating things that stood out, probably because I already wasn't enjoying the story or combat. Stuff like how they play the same music all game long for certain things. Every sad cutscene gets the same music. Every wacky section, every combat, etc. I forced myself to finish the game because I wanted to say I played the whole thing but man I came away kinda of baffled by how much praise those games get.
I can understand the plot and whatnot wasn't for me but even strictly when viewed through its mechanics the pure game part of that game is not good.
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