Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealthis the game I’m most looking forward to in 2024, and yet, since previewing it in New York City a couple of months ago, it’s also now the game I’m most afraid of reviewing.
The Yakuza series has always offered fans enough side content to keep them busy past the final chapter with minigames and substories, and Infinite Wealth is already stacking up to be the largest game. Not only in terms of these minigames and side content, but the map size itself. There’s also a new feature that both delights me and scares me the most about reviewing — Dondoko Island.
The life sim minigame where Ichiban cleans up a nearby island, crafts new furniture, and creates new building facilities, has an end goal to get a five-star rating, just like Animal Crossing. You can also spend your time collecting resources, catching insects and fish, and progressing the Dondoko story arc with quirky mascots Gachapin and Mukku. It could be a whole new game in its own right, and I know I’m going to disappear down the rabbit hole with it. The problem is, when we went hands-on with Dondoko Island at the preview, I realised how much of a grind it will be.
While I was eager to dig into island life, first you must clean up the island by smashing up piles of trash. Once I’d cleared out the first area and defeated some goons, I went through the introductions on how to gather resources and craft and other basics. I thought I’d be well on my way to developing my own little island paradise, but in the short time we had with the game, I felt like I made no progress at all.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you think back to Animal Crossing, we had to wait actual days to get all the tools or for certain things to be built, so it’s pretty standard fare for it to be a grind. Every new day on the island, you have to clear out the same areas until you have cleaned them enough to rank up to reduce the cost of a site cleaning to prepare the land for development. I didn’t manage to get enough cash to do this in the preview at all, so I already know there will bea lotof bat-smashing fun in January.
As well as making a five-star resort, there are daily quests to complete, upgrades for your bat, harpoon, and bug net, and from the looks of it, additional areas to unlock on the island to expand your resort. And let’s not forget you have a whole resort to design and build, furniture to craft, and houses to decorate. Players will get creative with it, and I can’t wait to see what kind of themes people come up with.
You can also have familiar characters visit your island as tourists. Whether this is a temporary visit or more permanent, like Animal Crossing residents, anyone who knows me knows I will need to have Majima on my island if he’s an option. It’ll be one of the first things I try to find out. And therein lies the problem: there is so much to Infinite Wealth, I’m afraid I won’t have enough time to do it all.
I know I’ll easily be able to while away my time designing and perfecting my island, but I still have everything else to play through too. Dondoko is just one slice of what the game has to offer. Aside from playing through the storyline, there are the normal go-tos like hostess clubs, retro games, and new minigames. There’s also an evolved version of the Pokemon parody Sujimon minigame.
On top of all that, party mechanics have extra depth now. There’s a new skill inheritance feature so you can use different job abilities across various roles, meaning there’ll be a whole new meta to building parties in Infinite Wealth.
It’s a good job that Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is launching in January, as I’ll need a lot of time to explore Hawaii and enjoy the game to its fullest, and I’ll have pretty much all of 2024 to do it. We’ll all spend months, if not longer, obsessed with Dondoko Island alone. Perhaps my dream island will have to wait until after the review.
