Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth: The Substories Carry It

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio spent fifteen years building a beat-’em-up that happened to have the writing of a soap opera, then in 2020 threw the beat-’em-up part away. Yakuza: Like a Dragon swapped real-time brawling for turn-based combat and asked players to accept a new protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga, in place of the stoic Kazuma Kiryu who had carried seven mainline games. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, released in January 2024, is the proof that the gamble paid off — and the moment where the series has to work out what a sequel to a reinvention looks like, rather than the reinvention itself.

Infinite Wealth answers that question by refusing to pick a single hero. Ichiban returns from the first game, now running an employment agency in Yokohama, but the plot detonates his life within the opening hours and sends him to Honolulu chasing a lead on his birth mother. Kiryu, meanwhile, gets folded back into the story as a second playable protagonist, dying of cancer and settling accounts before the end. The game splits its hours between two cities and two men who represent two different eras of the same studio’s writing, and it never entirely resolves the tension between them — which turns out to be the most honest thing about it.

Two cities, two temperatures

Yokohama is where Infinite Wealth begins, and it plays like a continuation: RGG Studio’s dense, vertical, slightly grubby take on a Japanese entertainment district, populated by the same manic substory energy the series has run on since the first Yakuza in 2005. Honolulu, once the story moves there, is something the series hasn’t done before — a sprawling, sun-lit resort city with its own rules, and the game leans into the culture-shock joke of Ichiban’s crew wandering around in Hawaiian shirts asking directions.

The two settings aren’t just reskins. Yokohama’s substories are the familiar RGG register — absurd, mean, occasionally tender, always over-plotted. Honolulu’s are looser and more comic, partly because the game is aware it’s a Japanese studio’s idea of Hawaii and plays that awareness for laughs rather than hiding it. The dual-city structure means Infinite Wealth is, structurally, two RPGs stitched together, and the seam shows. It’s also why the game runs to well over sixty hours for anyone chasing full completion — a commitment the series has always demanded and never apologised for.

The combat that finally trusts itself

Yakuza: Like a Dragon borrowed its turn-based structure explicitly from Dragon Quest — series director Ryosuke Horii and producer Masayoshi Yokoyama have both said as much in interviews around the 2020 launch — and the first game’s combat sometimes felt like a demo reel for the idea rather than a finished system. Infinite Wealth is the sequel that actually finishes it. Character positioning on the arena floor now matters in ways it didn’t before: characters can be knocked into environmental hazards, chain attacks connect across the battlefield rather than just at a target, and the job system (Ichiban’s crew swap between classes like Hitman, Idol and Breaker, each with its own skill tree and stat profile) has enough depth that party building becomes a real decision rather than a checklist.

The reason this matters is that turn-based combat lives or dies on whether the player believes the numbers are doing something interesting, and Infinite Wealth’s answer is yes — mostly because it never forgets it’s still a brawler underneath the menus. Environmental destruction, thrown bicycles, and the series’ commitment to letting a fight look and sound completely ridiculous while the maths underneath stays coherent is the throughline from the real-time Yakuza games to this. The turn order UI is legible, animations can be sped up for anyone grinding, and boss encounters are tuned to punish sloppy positioning rather than sloppy stat-checking — which is the difference between a combat system with ideas and one that’s just Dragon Quest cosplay.

Where the substories carry the weight

The main plot of Infinite Wealth is, on paper, heavy: Ichiban’s search for his mother collides with a land-development conspiracy, an old crime family, and Kiryu’s terminal diagnosis, and the back third turns genuinely grim. But the substories are where the writing is sharpest, because they’re where RGG Studio has always been willing to be small. A substory about a man who can’t stop crying at commercials, or a chain of quests around a homeless survivalist building a fortress on the beach, does more character work in twenty minutes than the main story manages in two hours, because the stakes are human-sized and the jokes are allowed to land without narrative baggage attached.

This isn’t a new observation about the series — it’s been true since the original Yakuza — but Infinite Wealth leans into it harder than any entry before, structurally, by making the substory count and density in Honolulu genuinely enormous. The game seems to know its plot exists to buy time between substories, and it schedules accordingly: Ichiban’s crew accumulate an entire roster of allies (the Sujimon system, a direct and openly acknowledged parody of Pokémon’s collection loop, recruits NPCs as fightable creatures) almost entirely through side content.

Nineteen years of one studio’s handwriting

It’s worth stepping back to see how far the series has actually travelled to get here. The original Yakuza shipped on PS2 in 2005 as a fairly straight brawler with crime-drama pretensions, and for fifteen years RGG Studio refined that real-time combat rather than reinventing it — Kiryu punched his way through seven mainline entries and a pile of spin-offs, and the substory format calcified into a house style: earnest melodrama in the main plot, absurdist comedy in the side content, both delivered with a completely straight face. Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s 2020 pivot to turn-based combat looked, from outside, like the studio abandoning what had defined it. Infinite Wealth is the game that proves otherwise: the substory density, the tonal whiplash, the willingness to let a fistfight interrupt a heartfelt conversation, all of it survived the genre change intact. What changed was the combat’s relationship to numbers rather than the writing’s relationship to its own characters.

That continuity matters because it explains why Infinite Wealth can get away with a plot this baggy. A studio without RGG’s history of trusting substories over story beats would need its main quest doing more work; this one has spent two decades training players to expect the real content to live in the margins, so a sixty-hour campaign with a wobbly back half doesn’t sink the experience the way it would in a game built around a tighter, more linear RPG spine. The job system leans on the same instinct: rather than a single optimal build, Ichiban’s crew can be reshuffled into Hitman, Idol, Breaker, Housekeeper or a dozen other classes at will, each carrying enough personality — Idol characters buff the party through song-and-dance routines, Housekeeper characters fight with brooms and vacuum cleaners — that switching jobs feels like changing costume in a play the game already trusts you to perform.

Dondoko Island and the craft of the detour

The clearest evidence that RGG Studio understands its own strengths is Dondoko Island, an entire Animal Crossing-shaped management sim bolted onto the side of the RPG. Players clear debris from a derelict resort, build facilities, catalogue local animals, and grow the island’s rating — a complete, if openly derivative, life-sim loop that exists entirely on its own terms, and is exactly why people spend a hundred hours in these games. It’s a smart piece of design because it gives the substory instinct — small, discrete, satisfying tasks — a persistent home that rewards return visits, rather than the substory well running dry once each vignette is cleared once.

The lesson underneath Dondoko Island is one the series has been circling for years: a game this dense in side content needs a real container for that density, something with its own scoring and progression rather than a bare checklist. Previous entries scattered management minigames (the cabaret club, the real estate empire) as isolated systems; Infinite Wealth’s version has enough scope to function as a second game a player could get lost in on its own terms, and the fact that it’s optional rather than gated behind story progress means it never fights the plot for the player’s attention.

What to play next

Anyone who finishes Infinite Wealth and wants more of the turn-based RPG structure without the crime-family plotting should look at Atlus’s Persona 5 Royal, which runs the same Japanese-studio instinct for calendar-driven social systems through a school-life frame instead of a Yokohama street frame. For the wider argument about how Japanese RPGs have been rebuilding themselves around turn-based combat rather than abandoning it, Metaphor: ReFantazio makes a version of the same case with an election clock standing in for Infinite Wealth’s map screen. Both scratch the itch Infinite Wealth leaves behind once its eighty-hour save file is finally closed.

Spoilers below

Kiryu’s illness is the structural hinge of the back half, and the game resists the easy version of the story. Rather than a redemption arc that erases the character’s past, Infinite Wealth lets Kiryu spend his remaining time doing exactly what he has always done — fixing other people’s problems with his fists and his wallet — and the diagnosis functions as a deadline rather than a personality transplant. The late reveal that his cancer, and much of the Hawaii plotline, connects back to a conspiracy involving land rights and a criminal syndicate gives the game its most Yakuza-shaped stretch: corporate villainy, a betrayal from within Ichiban’s found family, and a final boss fight that asks the two protagonists to physically hand off the story to each other mid-battle.

The handoff is a satisfying mechanical answer to a structural problem — two heroes converging on one climax — even if the plot machinery groans a little getting there, with a late-game reveal about the identity of the land-development conspiracy’s ringleader that leans on a character introduced too briefly earlier to land with full weight. What does land is the smaller material either side of it: Ichiban confronting the mother who abandoned him and finding the reunion smaller and stranger than the game’s earlier hours promised, and Kiryu quietly settling debts with old allies from the real-time era before the credits roll. The ending leaves Kiryu’s fate open enough that the series clearly isn’t finished asking what to do with him, which, fifteen years and eight mainline games in, is the most Yakuza thing about it — a franchise that keeps threatening to retire its icon and keeps finding one more job for him to do.