I wanted to love this game.

This was my most hyped up release in years,
the game I was looking forward to the most and now after finishing it, I feel utterly disappointed.
I think I'll start with some technical complaints I have:
- I want RGG to abandon this Frankenstein ass corpse of an engine they're carrying around. The Dragon Engine is an unrefined piece of shit and never have I felt this more than with Infinite Wealth. This thing is priced at $70 but fails to actually feel like a full price game with its complete lack of polish.
- There are no seamless transitions in this game whether you're entering let's say a Substory, a scripted event or a Cutscene. It is always either an abrupt hard-cut or a shitty fade to black
- Companion AI sucks dick and their path finding is straight up broken
- The always re-used animations during in game dialogue sections are getting on my fucking nerves. I understand that you can't mo-cap everything in large scale JRPG's like these, but I would like for SOMETIMES VERY IMPORTANT SCENES to not feel like a fucking Garry's Mod animation on Youtube.

Which now brings me to one of my biggest gripes with this whole experience.
- T H E - P R E S E N T A T I O N -
Everything that isn't part of a motion captured and well composed cutscene looks like absolute horse shit and won't stop drilling THE SAME 5 SONGS FROM LIKE THE LAST 4 GAMES INTO MY HEAD.
I am sick and tired of hearing the melancholic substory theme from Yakuza 0. What's even worse is that every and I really mean EVERY music cue in this game is forced and as agonizingly formulaic as possible. It's not even like these are entirely new issues,
-> the R in RGG does stand for re-use after all, but I am starting to feel ripped off after they have tried to pull this shit a few too many times now.
I also despise the way anything is framed in this game,
Yakuza has lost its style, every interaction between NPCs looks fucking robotic and had me skipping dialogue more times than I wanted to.
Almost every bit of side content felt unrewarding or like a complete waste of my time and the structure of this game only makes this worse, by
A) putting the entire story on halt just to shove minigames you do not give a fuck about down your throat
and B) Constantly putting your next objective on the other side of town, making the exploration of Hawaii feel like an obligatory chore.

I don't even want to start talking about the story, because it is the biggest problem I have with Like a Dragon: Infinite Ass and I would quite literally have to write a book to fully elaborate on why this is one of the worst narratives I have ever seen in the medium.
A game so incompetently written that it actively devalues its previous installments by acting like the consequences that were established after the last 2 mainline entries just do not matter anymore
- While also refusing to elaborate on how we got to certain points in the story or just forgetting to properly tie up its loose ends in the final chapter.
They chomped up more than they could swallow here... This shit is legit missing scenes and the necessary context to make anything that happens matter.
Infinite Wealth tries to do and say a lot, but falls flat on its face, failing to justify its existence.
It is without a single doubt in my mind, the most pointless addition to the franchise,
one that has done nothing but aggravate me with its quantity over quality philosophy.

I feel ripped off, betrayed and lied to....

The only good things about this game are the quality of life improvements to 7's combat, perhaps a few good scenes sprinkled onto a steaming pile of shit and that is it.