"Really hoping Yakuza 8 makes substantial improvements, otherwise they'll need to have a story with an even bigger gut punch then this one." - AlphaOne2, 2023.
Oh how the Monkey's Paw curls this fine day...

Rating this the same as Like A Dragon 7. If you want the short of this, game is very good but wait for a generous sale. I didn't pay full price as I was gifted $20 from a Steam gift card, but thankfully for you these games tend to go on sale often. Give it time and you'll be set, or pirate bay is always an option I'm not a cop do what you please. Especially if you want New Game plus, which man that DLC shit is rancid, but after 90 hours of playtime I'm not itching to get back into this anytime soon. There really is no need to invest in that crap, the base game is plenty. Maybe too plenty.

Gameplay is a noticeable upgrade. The combat in Like A Dragon 7 became utterly exhausting by the end, wearing out its welcome well before the credits. Infinite Wealth has so many, much needed changes that make combat far more interesting. The general flow is still the same, but there's a lot more intentionality to it.
Firstly the big one: moving your character before selecting an attack. You can now plan where to send a enemy flying; where they could crash into one of their friends to hurt them as well, hit a wall for extra damage, or next to a party member where they'll whack them in midair (assuming they have a high enough affinity). You can perform combo attacks if you initiate an attack next to a party member, or move behind an enemy to guarantee a critical hit. Every character, regardless of their job, can now utilize improvised weapons, and with the addition of moving your characters it is much more reliable to make use of your environment. It saves quite a lot of resources when instead of your fire spell, you could simply swing a giant oil barrel and have it explode on a enemy group for massive fire damage.
There's more clarity when utilizing skills. It will highlight the area of effect of your range attacks, plus show arrows on where enemies will be launched to. It does mean that attacks that effect every character is a lot rarer; whether that's a heal, a buff, or a super move. Sounds like a downgrade but it really doesn't make much of a difference since Infinite Wealth has a smoother level curve then its predecessor. They've more or less gotten rid of the obnoxious jumps in difficulty that plague the endgame of 7, so long as you aren't avoiding every single battle. Though if your someone who likes to do extra content then you'll likely end up overpowered for certain battles. I've had boss fights where the boss only got off one or two attacks before they were already dead. Pretty anticlimactic, but it was my choice with how much unnecessary grinding I did in this game.

The job system is mostly the same as 7, with the exception of inheritance skills. In 7, specific skills from every job would be permanently added to a character's repertoire when unlocked. It was not only limiting since you couldn't choose what skills to carry over, but if mastered a lot of jobs then your skill list would become very cluttered with all kinds of skills you don't care for. Infinite Wealth instead has every skill from a job capable of being carried over. Now it's up to you whether your chef can football tackle through a crowd of yakuza, or breakdance so hard that they get a speed increase, or take out two revolvers and start blasting their asses. Unlike 7, it really is not necessary for every character to master every job as you can only equip so many inheritance skills (I wished I recognized that sooner, would've saved a lot of time). Your free to unlock any skills that seem interesting or fit your playstyle, but every character's exclusive job keeps their individuality so party members won't lose their own niche.
A much, much appreciated feature is the smackdown. Think Earthbound where if your statistically overpowered than a low level enemy then you can wipe them out instantly. You do receive a small experience penalty from the battle if won this way, but money and items aren't affected. Plus you really shouldn't be grinding on low level enemies to begin with. All it does is save your time, which with how prolonged this game already is, it absolutely needed this.

They haven't fixed everything from 7. Enemies and party members can still get caught on terrain even with being able to position the latter, sometimes a enemy will move out of the way just as select your A.O.E attack so don't end up catching every foe you were hoping for, going for a basic attack can be awkward if you want to be close enough for the proximity damage bonus but there's a nearby weapon that your character would automatically pickup with a element the enemy resists; just in general there's a air of awkwardness and clunkieness to the combat. Far from refined.
At the same time I feel the combat has really found its niche as a something that's very scrappy and fast paced, and occasionally indiscriminately chaotic. I've had times that I accidentally knocked a foe into a pile of explosive barrels which then exploded and caused a chain reaction that left everyone burning to death. Sometimes I would cause unintentional combos with one character sending a foe towards another party member where they would kick the enemy into the wall, and then yet another one would come over and stomped on their balls for good measure. It isn't impossible to get bored of this battle system, but it's a step in the right direction. More control yet just enough randomness in the player's favor to keep things fresh.

Speaking of steps in... a direction, story... yay.
Apologies in advance for the vagueness in this section, but I don't like discussing the finer details of a plot since it's always more valuable to experience it yourself and come to your own conclusions. And my conclusion is that there's too much. Too many characters, too many themes and morals, too many moving parts, too many twists, and so, so many exposition dumps. God damn do characters love to talk about anything and everything. This is a issue in other Like A Dragon games for sure, and that isn't to say every extended dialouge sequence has no reason for existing. But it doesn't help when certain aspects of the plot come with a air of "Out of touch dad explains what is "hip" with the kids these days". Basically there are subject matters that the writers lack the nuance and knowledge to convey correctly, and if you have any basic understanding on these subjects that it can be hard to swallow. They had too much they wanted to say, not all of which was profound to begin with, and it's very noticeable where things got shafted for time. Especially when they're still talking.
I don't know if I'm just more busy nowadays with preparing my new house to move into (shits expensive), but my attention span for plot dumps and exposition scenes has gotten real short. And it's a shame since there are plenty of dialouge pieces that are entertaining and interesting, but that tends to be relegated to the side content.

It wouldn't be Like A Dragon without its minigames and side stories. We got shogi, blackjack, poker, mahjong, other gambling games that I have no clue how to play, batting cages, fishing, randomly generated dungeon crawling, Pokémon Snap but with "weirdos" in Hawaii, swimming and collecting trash, just straight up Pokémon catching and battling but everyone is just some dude, Crazy Taxi but your a food delivery boy on a bike, a online dating sim where you have to make your own profile and even pay (in-game) cash to make your profile nicer looking, and a seriously in-depth Hawaii resort simulator where you gather resources and build your own island paradise for guests as you protect the resort from trash pirates. That last one might as well be its own game cause my god there's so much to it and I don't have all day to explain the intricacies of that. As a whole I enjoyed these distractions quite a lot more then previous titles. The island resort sim especially caught me off guard with how fun I found it to be.
The smaller side quests were alright, but I felt the more emotionally driven ones fell flat to me. I don't know, I find it harder to care when every side character feels the need to explain their whole life story to me at the start of every quest. And I do mean every character. Am I being too harsh? I don't want to come off as someone who tells others how to write their stories, and maybe I was just getting fatigued playing this game, but it's not a good sign when I start skimming your dialouge because it just isn't engaging me.
You know what was? Bingo. Or rather the Bingo Board, where you get to learn fun factoids of your party members while walking across Hawaii. Finding out what they do in their spare time, what food they like, personal grievances they have, flaws they're working on fixing; can't get enough of that small talk. It also improves their affinity stat, which unlocks more inheritance slots your party members can equip, so it's worth going after these. And I will say that this probably the funniest Like A Dragon game I've played yet. The ludicrous scenarios and the utterly bizzare special moves had me chuckling a handful of times. The less serious sidestories and summons especially had me giggling like a idiot.

I'll be real this review was exhausting to make (kind of like this game). There's so much more I was planning to talk about the story side of things and how conflicted it made me. The bit of good with the story made the bad especially stick out, particularly with how characterization flip flop between pretty great to "...huh?" But with this being my third draft of this piece, I've realized that I just wasn't enjoying myself having to talk about the plot. It's funny because this isn't even a story I find particularly offensive or bad as a whole, it feels more confused then anything. Regardless I do feel this a notably better game then 7, and I hope to see more improvements going forward with the series. Just, give it a few more drafts next time around, and maybe tone down the scale.

You also have a playlist you can create, with all kinds of songs from other games, that you can listen during traversal and I want this to be in every game from now on. Let me listen to Open Your Heart in the Elden Ring DLC you cowards.

This review will mainly focus on the new additions that were brought to Final Mix.

But first, a quick feeling about my overall thoughts on the base game. It's grand.

Okay, with II Final Mix, like in Kingdom Hearts 1 Final Mix, the enemies have gotten their color palettes changed, but you do get used to it after a few playthroughs, so it isn't a huge deal.

Some minor additions first up are additional cutscenes, you get to fight Roxas in The World That Never Was, some unnoticeable things behind the hood, like Drive Form gauge regeneration speed, some time limit changes, etc.

One of the major additions for Final Mix is a new group of Heartless called the Mushroom XIII, which are the mushroom enemies within the first game. These enemies give you certain criteria to beat them. If you get below that threshold, you do have a chance to get helpful items from them, but still its not the thing that would get them to be finished. These offer nice strategy mixups for each one, and you do get good rewards as well from them, and after doing them all.

Another major addition for Final Mix was a new area in Radiant Garden added called the Cavern of Remembrance. This adds a great deal of challenge to the game with new stronger versions of enemies you've faced before and new traversal challenges, which do require you to essentially, have all of your Drive Forms maxed out to unlock all of those abilities to get further into the Cavern. At the end of this area, you unlock rematches with each Organization XIII member. They are now stronger, add additional attacks to their arsenal, and new strategies as well. These are great because of the added challenge, but you can also do them in any order, which helps you out if you're having trouble with one of the bosses you can just go to another boss.

But, they aren't all unlocked if you haven't done a handful of fights before, called the Absent Silhouette battles, another addition for Final Mix. These fights are the Organization members who perished in Chain of Memories and are a good ease to the rematches as they are challenging, but not too bad if you're at a good level.

One of the last major additions is one boss called the Lingering Will. This boss fight is popularly one of the toughest boss fights in the entire series, but it also ties so freaking well to the overall story coming up in the series.

Gameplay additions include a new Drive Form and a new difficulty mode.

You do get a new Drive Form as well which ties into the first game, the Limit Form. This form allows you to use various attack abilities from the first game like Ars Arcanum, Strike Raid, Sonic Blade, etc. Sora's clothes also change to reference the first game too which is a nice hint. This is a great addition since it gives you some more Drive Form variety, and this one does not use any Party Members. Helpful!

The difficulty mode is the infamous Critical Mode. Lots of pain and struggle if you want that extra challenge. A nice little addition to the game if you so desire!

So, overall Final Mix adds some great new challenges to the base game, great new boss battles, but also some great additional context around certain characters too. This is the definitive version of Kingdom Hearts II.