A boring game with the worst writing I have ever seen that sadly wastes some incredibly strong visual design.

The main (only) mechanic loses its charm at about the two hour mark, only occasionally mixing things up, with like the annoying character that asks for his drinks in riddles. However, even then it is kind of a nuisance, never a challenge, it’s never fun nor rewarding. And while this may be the point to a different game, I’ll argue that here it doesn’t make narrative sense. Jill clearly likes her job, she enjoys her day to day and even prefers it over her normal activities outside of it. So the dullness is not intentional. And it doesn’t quite work as means of enjoying the rest of the game, for reasons that I will discuss in a moment. Actually, it lessens the visuals by making it apparent how little animation the is.

However, the game could’ve been fine despite this, if only because it is aesthetically outstanding. Perhaps too much for its own good, as it has seemingly tricked so many people into thinking this is a great game. But here’s the thing, shallow pretty games HAVE to be short. They have to. Otherwise the lasting impression is that of monotony. Yeah, this looks pretty, but so what? Character design can only get you so far. But this game drags to north of the TEN HOUR MARK. TEN FUCKING HOURS. Which makes me think that the developers believed they needed the game to be that long because games were seen as an investment in leisure, which would be bad, or, the writer or writers actually thought that their writing was good enough to merit that length so they over indulge in it, which is absurd. Whoever wrote this can’t write for shit.

And that’s the main issue. Every component one can appreciate in good writing is not missing here, it is utterly attacked. This is a literary crime. World building? Shallow and uninteresting. Characters? Annoying and perpetually horny. Character interaction? A fourteen year old fantasy where girls talk about their tits once every couple of days and only like to make sexual innuendos or talk about their sex life. Intimate drama? Rushed (HOW THE FUCK DO YOU RUSH THESE THINGS, BUT YOU MANAGE TO GIVE ENOUGH TIME TO THE CHILD SEX WORKER TO DESCRIBE THE ONE TIME SHE WAS FISTED?) and poorly delivered. Humorous moments? Do you remember 9gag?

The writing is juvenile, internet obsessed, vulgar, shallow, dumb, and worst of all, overly confident in its quality. If I was the person in charge of the character designs I would sue.

Despite my positive rating, I have a lot of mixed feelings about Infinite Wealth, mainly because it was my most anticipated game for a very long time. That said, the gameplay has been perfected and I really enjoyed it as a game, not so much as a story.

Thematically, it raises some really engaging ideas about how criminals are destined to re-offend because society rejects them. As a parallel, it features a cult that preys on vulnerable people. Yet, these ideas are never reconciled. If the story was better, it would have explored the idea of how people rejected by society join cults to get a sense of community, but this never happened. It was pretty disappointing.

Not to mention, Sega and RGG REALLY have to let Kiryu go. The marketing suggested they were going to have cancer kill him off, but they predictably didn't have the balls to do so. Instead, the Kiryu portions of the game wax nostalgic about his past, essentially becoming what I dub the 'Kiryu Memberberries Game'. I didn't bother doing all of the Date rememberence bullshit because it felt very shallow and nostalgia-baity. I feel like Sega wants Kiryu to be some kind of immortal mascot like Sonic. Yet, they don't get that Sonic is a cartoon hedgehog. He CAN be immortal if you want him to be. Kiryu is meant to be a human! If Sega have their way, we'll be playing Yakuza 400 with Cyborg Kiryu.

Get ready to dunk on Duplo 4 and other games with stable framerates or functional multiplayer in global chat alongside your fellow trailblazing trendsetters slavishly following youtube guides coming up with fun novel builds in this hot new "indie" hack & slash ARPG by hardcore gamers for hardcore gamers (hence why the hotbar limits you to 5 skills), that incidentally spent half a decade in early access with barely any substantial updates during the last couple of years leading up to its recent "1.0 release", which definitely now qualifies it as a robust and most of all complete game. That's why the campaign is still unfinished and you're getting to beta test two new subclasses along with other minor little things like an auction house, while yet more overdue fixes/reworks of old busted stuff littering the game are still underway, allegedly. If that wasn't good enough, it was made in Unity (of course) by incompetents to boot to ensure it runs as poorly as one would hope and so that moving your character has you weightlessly slide across the terrain just like in all your favorite survival crafting games or b**mer shooters, on top of the presentation in many ways being worse than even Path of Exile circa a decade ago. But don't you dare bring any of that up regarding a game with a CGI pre-release trailer and premium currency microtransactions or else you'll be getting plenty of downvotes from folks who for instance think boss attacks being inaudible is perfectly acceptable, or the equivalent of a skill like frozen orb looking and sounding many times worse than its originator from 24 years ago is a-okay. Because ackshually As We All Know it's a lower budget title by an incompetent "independent" studio and that's why they couldn't afford to for example implement animations for your character blocking attacks with a shield, unlike say a game called Diablo released back in 1996.

The time travel premise in this Chronicon successor amounts to a convenient excuse to recycle level geometry and an occasional opportunity to kill dinosaurs, with one dungeon featuring everyone's favorite ephemeral gimmick from Titanfall 2/Dishonored Too, which about sums up how inspired the whole thing is outside of the mechanical back-end and the few trademark Good Ideas there. Can I name any of the characters or even quote a single line of dialogue from the stellar storyline comparable in quality to Hellgate London's you ask? Well of course, my favorite was "ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄCK!!!!" - Spymaster Zerrick. All in all, if you're a fan of clipping your sword through enemies and hearing the same anemic splatter SFX over&over while littering the screen with increasingly larger damage numbers, then this should suffice as a good enough opioid to help distract you until Path of Exile 2 is available to play for the modest price of a 250 eurodollar supporter pack complementary with your closed beta key.

PS: the volume slider for the muzak says "absolute bangers for ye gamers", and that's why even at max it's borderline inaudible ingame and the OST itself is comprised of "relaxing 432hz tunes to fall asleep to" or epic™ tracks with women going OOO and AAA, really gets you PumPd up and ready2slay