Infinite Wealth? More like infinite content

The best way to sum up infinite wealth is “abundant content”. When I say abundant, I don’t mean that it’s padded or grindy in the way that many “big” games these days are, I mean that there is a colossal variety of fun, novel gameplay mechanics to engage with. In this day and age, there are almost no other games that contain ANYWHERE NEAR this amount of content. Nearly all AAA games have pitfalls of not taking risks, homogenizing and dumbing down gameplay, prioritizing story (which still ends up inferior to Yakuza in most cases), or focusing on quantity over quality. Meanwhile Indie games simply don’t have the resources load up a game with content in a way comparable to what this series can do. This is a shining example of what AAA games SHOULD be, but usually aren’t.

Starting with Yakuza 7, the series made the risky decision to convert itself from a 3d beat em up to a traditional turn based RPG. I believe this decision has paid off in spades. It proved that turn based combat is still perfectly viable in the current year. It’s amazing that RGG nailed turn based combat so perfectly on their first try with 7, and they made several refinements to it in this game. It feels much more fluid than most turn based games, instead of the Dragon quest style of merely clicking through the menu to select your best skill, it’s a system where you have to be mindful of enemy and ally positions, quick time events, etc.

I was concerned that this game would be too easy because there was a chapter early on where I was over leveled (from exploring the map too much I suspect) and I curbstomped the boss. Fortunately it was just that one chapter where the difficulty curve was off, for the vast majority of the run time it hits the sweet spot of not being too easy or too difficult. For me personally, getting the right difficulty is a HUGELY important factor when it comes to JRPGs, because if a game is too easy I feel no stakes or engagement. I would think with this type of game it’s pretty hard to balance the game as well as they did so huge props to the devs.

This next section is kind of a rant not specifically related to LAD: IW but I wanted to include it: If you’re someone who plays many JRPGs, you will likely find the setting refreshing. I’ve been saying for a long time that I want more turn based RPGs that aren’t the usual “medieval fantasy” or “earthbound-like”. There’s no reason that you can’t make a JRPG featuring exclusively adult characters that is also a crime drama set in the present day, if more devs did this their games would stand out more and avoid common tropes. I strongly feel JRPG devs need to take more risks with the setting and not just use the exact same setting that has been used since the 80s.

But anyway, I’ll briefly talk about the amount of content. You get a massive map to explore that is pretty much completely open (aside from strong enemies gatekeeping you out of select areas). Technically, there are three maps in this game. Honolulu, Ijincho, and Kamurocho. Ijincho is mostly the same as it was in 7, Kamurocho doesn’t have that much content, but regardless, a lot of effort went into Honolulu, it does not disappoint. I’ll try to sum up the content you can experience not related to the story.
• The biggest “minigame” by far is the literal animal crossing island you get. You are tasked with restoring a resort which has become a literal dump to its former glory. The amount of detail that when into this mode astounds me. The progression system of cleaning up the island and building it up was addicting. There’s hundreds of items/buildings/furniture you can craft and place on your island. Also, many of the characters you see in the story and substories can become guests on your island. The island also includes online features, but I haven’t actually used those yet. I seriously might come back to revisit this game just for the island, I honestly got attached to it just like people do with their animal crossing and Stardew worlds. The only possible thing I could think of that would improve the resort is if there was just a little more interaction with the guests, but as it stands this is by far my favorite side content I’ve ever played in a yakuza game.
• The second biggest minigame is Sujimon, the Pokemon clone. I liked this one pretty well. It’s just pokemon, there are types and everything, but you capture a bunch of insane men that you fight on the streets. The mechanics aren’t super deep but there’s still quite a bit of content here with raids, trainer battles, evolution, etc. There is also a decently lengthy substory attached to this minigame, you challenge the “discreet four”, and honestly it was one of the funniest and most memorable substories in the game.
• There are dozens of other minigames, ranging from ones that are larger in scale, like the online dating minigame, or the uber eats minigame, to ones that are very small but add a nice touch like darts and batting. You can also play many retro Sega titles (my favorite is Virtua fighter)
• There are approximately forty “substories”. If you’ve never played a Yakuza game, a substory is exactly what it sounds like. You get introduced to some character(s) and go through a miniature story based around them, and occasionally there are fights or minigames associated with them. Not every substory is a banger, but some of them definitely were. On average I think I liked them more than 7 (and they even carried some of the best substories from 7 into this game), and one of them even managed to almost make me cry.
• The map is just full of shit and nice to walk around. There’s items laying around all over the place, mini-bossses for certain areas. One of my favorite little things about this game is that you can make friends with the NPCs, literally. There are 200 NPCs and if you emote at them you can see a brief bio and funny fact about them.

1000 words into this review and I haven’t even started talking about the story yet. I would describe the writing in Yakuza games as quite solid for the most part, but not perfect. There are minor issues that I won’t get into, but IW’s story is way above average for a video game story. It’s hard for me to compare it to 7 or 0, the only other Yakuza games I played. There were some parts I liked more and parts I liked less, but overall the story is quite competent. The structure of Yakuza as a series is unique because despite having more “game” than most video games, the story is primarily told through cut scenes. Normally I rail against cut scenes in video games, but I’m fine with them here, and I’ll explain why. There is an extremely clean partition between “story” and “game”. You can choose to advance the story whenever you want, and when you play a story segment, you know that you’re getting ONLY cut scenes, and then go through a series of battles/dungeon/boss. It’s not this sort of hybrid bullshit where you are tasked with walking for 10 minutes next to a character who dumps exposition. The cut scenes are meaningful to the story, there is never filler. They are also quite well made visually and of course have good voice performances. And if you ever get tired of doing the story there’s more than enough additional content for you to break it up.

I could give a brief list of things I didn’t like about the game, but all of those would involve minor spoilers, so I won’t discuss them here. I REALLY liked this game, it’s close to peak Yakuza IMO and I think I’ve outlined in this review why I’m very impressed with it, and we just don’t see very much in gaming today that compares. 9.5/10