At first, Infinite Wealth feels like it's trying to take on way too much, ambitiously trying to tell both an Ichiban and Kiryu story at once. As such, around the mid-game there are a lot of substories that are precariously juggled and feel very fragile; however, once everything meets its eventual climax, I think this might be my genuine favourite in the series to date.

I love everything about this game deep to my core. I love how the battle system is better fleshed out and requires more strategy in the endgame. I love how dungeons only take you so far in grinding and that there isn't a save-all like Robo-Michio in Yakuza 7. I love how lovingly Ichiban's resurgence is written. I love how Kiryu feels like a human being and not just some old invincible legend.

Most importantly I love Like a Dragon and its surrounding series. Boy is it a good time to be a Yakuza fan. And goddamn OG Kiryu fans have been eating well the last 6 months.

This is honestly a hard RGG game to grade; on one hand its gameplay is both reminiscent and so far away from what the core gameplay of Like a Dragon main entry games established at the point of its original release. I love that this game finally made its way almost 10 years later to an international audience but also understand almost fully why the decision to take the plunge took as long as it did also, as well as why Kenzan might take even longer, if ever.

Look, I know a lot of people outside of Japan don't understand enough of Japanese history to consider something like this fruitful, but maybe investing time and money into something they love will help to make them understand by virtue of research and the actual account of Sakamoto Ryoma himself. Even if it means screaming "I know that guy!" every time a Yakuza household face comes on the screen.

My only significant issue is that this game suffers from a lot of the issues present in Yakuza 3, albeit most of them for optional activities. Foremost is the pure grinding of ryo and materials just to meet a single weapon thread to its completion; by the end even with all DLC I just barely managed to meet the requirements for a single gun and sword even with a significant amount of farming (figuratively and literally). Another of these points is the objectively difficult arena mode, which seems to only exist to punish you in the feeble hopes of being a manageable way to get high level materials and ryo.

A lot of this translates to the difficulty of the side content, in that you're expected to grind experience and "orbs" to individually press into each style with the expectation to finally meet a certain master one last time just to beat him. I'm sorry, but every single account I've seen has said that the grind is not even remotely enjoyable and far less reasonable, so forgive me when I say I end my journey at level 47; I seriously don't even want to push to the level 50 trophy at this point.

You know... I was always dubious about catching up with the RGG series knowing how different it was and that the main focus would be on a new protagonist.

As I finally caught up with the series after a long hiatus in November 2023 on the way to being able to finally be in the current with Gaiden, I loved every second of this. That being said, there was always one thing keeping me from giving this the perfect 10 I only once gave Yakuza 0 previously (not to say that RGG isn't consistent, just that there were always minor niggles).

That one thing was the emotional attachment. Up until now, every single entry of this incredible main series made me bawl like a baby in some way or another and I was worried I'd be left feeling slighted, knowing that I rate RGG much more highly on a curve than any other game as it has such a warm place in my heart.

Then the ending happened. And the floodgates opened. God I fucking love this franchise.

Actually played on PS4, which I guess doesn't exist so nearest comparison I suppose; anyway this is the very absolute definition of a coin muncher. Hardly fun when you're dying every which way but at least it isn't one of those Arcade shmups that start you over on the stage every continue.

I suppose that this is honestly kind of revolutionary given the original arcade release was in 1986, in a time where active continues were quite frankly almost non-existant in arcade shmup fare. That being said, it doesn't stop the game being near-extortionate in stealing quarters to the average player at the time, from the complete absense of respawn frames to the sheer boredom of fighting the same two bosses over and over again with only minor differences. You're given 3 lives but given the lack of any invulnerability reprireve in the middle of action a continue can quite literally last 30 seconds.

This is something only truely playable in a setting such as this where the monetary value is only a single purchase; even then this is one of the most frustrating complete arcade experiences I can think of in recent memory.

I picked this up if only to ensure that I will never ever meet a game this year that will ever meet the absolute rock bottom that games of this ilk ever will. I get it: "why buy this piece of self-serving, lazy, shovelware, exploitative trash to make a point?

The only answer I have for you is that someone else took the time to acknowledge its existence here, just as someone presumably different did for every other abominable shitheap.

If my ignoble meager contribution to this "developer" means anything at all it's that no matter how bad 2023's further offerings get, there's always the harsh and cold reality that gaming's climate can always get much worse and that PSN, Xbox Live, the Nintendo store, Steam and every other marketplace you can think of for gaming will always proliferate the consumption of quantity over quality when it comes to a cosmetic trophy or point value, no matter the cost.