How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?

 

Often have I heard the term 'time is a flat circle' coined, itself being a reference to 'True Detective' apparently, which makes that show a lot more bizarre sounding than I original expected having just looked that up. I cannot pretend I fully understand what that is trying to denote- but from context I get the gist. Eternal Return. Like the dragon game. Not 'Like a Dragon'. The other Dragon game. With the dogma. (Ah, forget it.) What I'm trying to say is- we never seem to progress because we're so damn stuck learning the same lessons, facing the same tribulations, and staring slack jawed at the exact same stupid nonsense we were last go around. Of course, maybe True Detective meant that more in a metaphysical sense- but I think the lens of cynicism works just fine.

The comment that blasted me back a thousand years today belongs to one Joe Tung on the verge of unveiling the brand new debut title of his studio 'Theorycraft Games'- a studio dedicated to developing '10,000 hour games'! as they posit. This title, a MOBA-looking 'action RPG' Battle Royale game that is certainly entertaining a crowed market both in genre and style- but I'd hardly call myself the foremost expert on what kind of crowd this style of game attracts. For all I know everybody is etching at the neck for another LOL style game with an almost identical artstyle but stretched over what appears to be a few quite different game modes. And I assume it's probably to this crowd that our CEO was talking- however even within that box- it's still some pretty ignorant slop that I can't help but gripe over.

Now, Tung here ain't no spring chicken to the gaming world. He's been around the block, so to speak. Being a Bungie alumni who left around about the time of Halo 4 dropping (that game would've made me quit my job too if I'd played it back then) and going for a long stint at Riot games before growing confident enough to shoot off on his own endeavour- Tung left to find a future creating live service games because his backwards-facing ass declares "the Games as a service model is so much better for developers and gamers"- than the traditional fixed boxed price games. Now already I have so thoughts on that- and already I can see both sides of the argument. Although let's get a bit deeper into these wilding claims first before the rebuttals begin, eh?

As I said, our CEO knows a bit or two about boxed products which has informed the decision of his virginal venture out to studio startership. He's been through the proverbial ringer of games industry marketing. He laments the "E3 Build", calling it the "one opportunity" that developers had to talk to their audience before launch, necessitating "Bull**** vaporwave", as has been experienced and acknowledged often over the years. He believes the "$60 boxed product" approach forced "Decisions that were not in the best interest of the player." To him that style of production prioritised "How do we sell as many copies in the first 48 hours that we can?" Instead of thinking "long term" about "What is best for the player" and "how that overlaps with what is best for the company." My, what an egalitarian utopia Tung paints for us through the canvass of Live, bloody, services! Who'd have thought?

So... let's be objective about this for a second- yeah? He believes that the pressure of trying to score customers leads to design decisions that sacrifices the quality of the game in favour of early week one sales. So we're talking vapid set-pieces, frontloading games, stuff like that, yeah? Sure- why not. What the heck do you think Live Service design mentality does ya dunder head? You know, where it's imperative that players stick around and play your game religiously for months in order to justify it's existence? Jason Schierer's expose into 'Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League' highlighted how it was the Live Service expectation in particular that weighed on how the team needed to design content. Making missions that were supposed to engaging but also easily repeatable, which resulted in trash that achieved neither vector. Redfall lacked quite a deep a dive, but it was game that no one felt comfortable making because of how abrasive the live service model was to the style of game the team were used to. Both these high budgets titles were sunk because of the Live Service model.

But we're being objective, right? So let's just say that those were un-suspecting studios who fumbled the bag. What about those who nail it? Well even they suffer in the long run because of the very nature of the game that they are servicing- the content wheel eventually starts to grate up against the artistic integrity of the game. What happens when you need to create cosmetics for people to buy for years on end but you're making a military shooter? Well COD ran out of military colours and insignias a while back and since then we've had Lilith from Diablo as a skin, Homelander, Snoop Dog- whatever brand they can get their hands on has slipped into this former military shooter- now a more high fidelity Fortnite competitor. Apex Legends has similarly sold itself to Final Fantasy. And Overwatch- once defined by it's creative integrity so powerful that every skin denoted some inner lore that was slowly being uncovered- now just pumps out themed brand deal skins every other month because D.VA wants that Porche money! 

What about the gamers, this was supposed to be good for the gamers right? Because sure, they can get themselves into these games for practically nothing and be supported with new content forever- right? But it's not really about offering players 'new content to play' now is it? No, it's about enticing people to play this game as much as possible- and that is something else entirely. Rather than developing cool new game modes or fascinating new playstyles or aspects of the game to enrich the experience, you'll instead see traps to grip onto a player and never let go. Battle Passes that demand weekly, sometimes daily play in order to get to the cooler rewards before the season's end drags them away forever. Limited time events. Deleted early game content. purchasing loops, dark patterns- Live Services feast off of anything they can to arrest the audience- it is the exception that avoids them, not the rule.

I respect that Tung is invested in Live Services so it makes sense that he is going to big them up a little, but declaring them the healthy alternative to the traditional market is ridiculously naïve at best and insidiously deceptive at worst. Look no further than the general rejection that so many high budget live services have recently received to show you that no- this isn't the player and developer friendly world that Tung wants to insist that it is. It's cut-throat, opportunistic, dehumanising, artistically stifling and conceptually bankrupt: all quite literally the further possible example to the industry possible. I quite dislike those that lie.

Dead Risen: reanimated

 How did they not use 'Reanimated'?

I will forever lament everything we didn't get out of the Dead Rising franchise, but from the space of what was possible, rather than the reality of how it would have actually ended up- you get me? For example, that original idea for a follow-up to Chucks story where we played a co-op kind of Souls-like guiding Katey through Mexico? How different, how unique, how interesting! People would've hated that! The people love knowing exactly what they're going to play, they hate not recognising setting, or gameplay styles or even environments sometimes. And yet- they hate things getting to familiar too. Dead Rising 4 I think did itself no favours returning to the exact same mall from the first game, regardless of improvements and expansions upon that map. And being bad certainly wasn't a major sales driver I guess...

Dead Rising is a franchise I'm pretty sure has been dead for a while now- uhh, that pun slipped out of nowhere, I meant to say that it's 'inactive'... you get what I mean! No one at Capcom really saw the point of hyping up the corpse of what Dead Rising 4 turned into. There were no big pick-up DLCs beyond that one where Frank turns into a zombie or something. No references in connected Capcom properties over the years, and this has been the only game to escape their voracious remaking wrath- at least until now- kind off. Because yes, after all these years waiting and totally forgetting about what this franchise did to make us so wary of it- finally we have ourselves a brand new Dead Rising game coming our way and it is... a semi-remake kinda? (Capcom have been bizarrely vague on the matter.)

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster comes to a world that has already endured a console remake of the original Dead Rising, a more-current generation remaster and a direct spiritual successor or two- now what we have appears to be some sort of... 'visual remake', so to speak. Which is to say that Capcom are only touching what the game looks like, and for some reason the voice talent involved- removing the iconic voice of Frank for those who care. (Personally I always thought this franchise clung too desperately to the character of Frank for no reason but that's neither here nor there.) But it appears that beneath the hood all the gameplay aspects are untouched, making this yet another re-release of the exact same game to a new console generation- but with enough bits flipped around they can internally justify charging full price for it? Is that about right?

Now as far as the headspace that Capcom are at is concerned, they see the original Dead Rising as a point within video game history from which experiences blossomed. They see the experience of the original supermarket zombie-slaying game as a cornerstone moment of that console generation, and that every release since has visited that moment to a new generation. And to be fair- I do think Dead Rising was pretty influential back when it launched, pretty much setting a standard for Zombie games that hasn't really been upended to this day. I just played through Dead Island 2 over the past month and that game owes so much to this franchise... and yet- to be honest I think it was Dead Rising 2 that deserves most of the plaudits.

Dead Rising brought us the concept of 'chop till you drop', living the life of dancing circles around hoards of zombies as you lazed about and survived- casually ignoring the many dying survivors as you watch their timers tick down. (Just me?) Capturing the spirit of that one five minute scene in the middle of Dawn of the Dead where the group enjoyed having all those stores entirely to themselves- yeah, that makes for some fun gaming. But what about the actual surviving, the glorification of zombie murdering the creativity now inherent to zombie games? That was really sharpened to a point with the coming of Dead Rising 2 and their combo weapons when you really think about it. Dead Rising's contributions are noteworthy, but 2 really hit it home!

Instead we're headed back to Willamette with all the individual gameplay elements largely untouched? It just seems bizarre living in a world where we've seen Zombie games pushed beyond the wildest dreams of their original. Resident Evil 2 Remake has to be one of the best Zombie games ever released even now! Couldn't they have taken a better look at the movement of the original? The combat? The Ai? (God, please don't let them ship with the same AI from the original!) They don't need to totally plunge the game into the modern realm, but just apply a layer of modern development standards on what originally worked in order to know them up to snuff- then you can call this a remake. Although come to think of it- that does sound like a lot of work, no?

Dead Rising has been a property that has lost Capcom money most recently, and given we live in the industry of 'what have you done for me lately?' maybe the powers that be aren't willing to reinvest their money into a proven shaky franchise despite the years of separation inherent. Seeing that there are already versions of Dead Rising available on this generation of console, I can't help but wonder if Capcom aren't pushing themselves into something of a self-fulfilling prophecy- half-assing a remaster literally designed to poach their own players without offering a substantial reason to switch- the name alone will push units but how many are going to see the much more cost-effective 'triple pack' and just stick with what they know? I wonder...

Due out for this year Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster seems like a canary dropped into a well to judge whether or not we're due for more from this franchise and I have to be honest- I'm really not sure that we are. What Dead Rising brought to our screens is unforgettable, but also played out- as proved by the franchise which couldn't even reignite that spark by going back to the place that started it all for 4. Dead Island has trounced this franchise in creativity- Resident Evil has surpassed it in sheer gameplay- Far Cry is set to do a typical Ubisoft move and steal their classic timed-game formula- Dead Rising gave so much of itself away I'm not sure there's anything left all of it's own to carry forward onto the future anymore. But hey, maybe if this does well we'll get a Dead Rising 2 'Deluxe Remaster'. That might be fun at least.

Banana game

 

No one is ever truly prepared for what life throws at them. Usually that comes in the negative, where waves of misfortune and bad tides slam into you over and over until it washes you away with the seeping. But every now and then the good will descend, and leave you in just as dire a predicament as you struggle to figure out what exactly to do with it. I have been in both straits and I can say neither which is superior. Too easily are the good poisoned foul unexpectedly. That being said, I cannot say for certain whether the bubbling broil of seemingly impending controversy is a boon or hinderance to the developers of the 2024 smash hit epic game- Banana. (No, it's nothing to do with the Minions- for god's sake leave such thoughts far away from you mind!)

Banana comes across as one of those games that is made as part of a student project to prove programming potential- in both it's simplicity as well as the post-ironic "hah hah, so random!" spirit of the concept. It's a cookie clicker clone where this time it's a banana. It's an idle clicker, meaning just by having the thing open in the background you'll be wracking up the big numbers- and that is the extent of the game. Yep, this isn't one of those slightly more complex clicker games where you have to build up teams in order to take out certain big monsters on a quest of some sort. (I'd recommend 'Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms' for that. Pretty fun game!) This is the absolute bottom of the barrel Steam trash garbage-heap-of-game with little to no creative ingenuity or subversive passion put behind it. So why is it worth talking about?

I mean, Steam is inundated with Unreal Engine powered refuse every other second- it's like the spittoon of the video game publishing world- which I suppose is the price to pay for such an inherently low barrier to entry as Steam naturally possesses. But there is a distinction between the rest and Banana- because you see those other bargain basement games are lucky to score a buy purchases by the curious before the game is lost under the deluge- Banana, on the otherhand, is ranking as one of the most played games on Steam currently. And may I just say how happy I am that this phenom occurred after Summer Games Fest, so we didn't have to see Geoff venerate this embarrassment. (Okay, maybe I'm going a bit too hard on the game. Afterall, it isn't Assassin's Creed!)

But what makes the Banana game so popular? Great question- and I'm afraid the answer is not any hidden inherent creative twist that imbues some otherwise hidden value. Well- actually I guess it could be considered that depending on how you define 'creativity'. I suppose it can be considered somewhat creative to conceive of the idea of turning an idle clicker into a Gacha-esque trading card game using the Steam market place. Oh yeah, every few hours you get 'dropped' a badly made PNG of a Banana- as artistically devoid as NFT trash- with various degrees of rarity that you can sell to others for real money. That's right, it's yet another 'alternative source of money' grift games. Because we haven't had enough of those over the past few years.

At the very least this spits in the face of most of those others by showcasing just how easy a concept like that can be realised without even touching WEB3 infrastructure and avoiding crypto currency like the plague. You don't need to have a special online wallet with a special 36 digit key that needs to be maintained on a separate secure device you keep with you at all times- you just need a Steam account. Sure, that means you can't exactly extract those funds any easy way- but you're exactly going to be making the kind of money to pay for your electricity bill either- just funnel that cash back into buying better games, why not? (Even though the kind of money we're talking about is typically petty cash on the dollar unless you score those millions-to-one drops.)

Of course, nothing has managed to halt the copious levels of discourse the game has generated regarding just who is sitting down and actually running this game- namely what sort of systems the developer is putting in place in order to prevent market manipulation. You see, Banana's are handed out through random lottery, rarities, drop chances, all that important data is handled developer side and considering this is an indie title that dropped out of nowhere- there are absolutely no gaurdrails in place, and no repercussions hanging over them, to engage in a little bit of 'table tilting' so to speak. What if they want to drive up the price of a Banana they have a lot of in order to make a little extra scrip? What if they hand out rare bananas to their friends for free? Who would ever know?

Now to their credit the developers, probably still a little stunned by their joke game which was developed in order to riff on another decidedly less successful joke game from earlier this year, promises that they aren't up to anything untoward behind the scenes. In fact, it's apparently going around that they even let go one of their staff specifically for engaging in that exact form of 'giving friends' bananas, market trickery that people were worried about- which demonstrates both their willingness to try and keep the game clean, as well as the relative ease with which the developers could choose to rip their audience off at any time. Which means that if you choose to engage with this, you might just be grappling onto a ticking timebomb, praying it goes off in someone else's face before it blows up in yours.

This honestly gives me flashbacks of all the endless WEB3 currencies that are still coming out every other day, stuffed full of developers swearing hands down that they never would rug pull their audience and in fact have special tools in place to counter that very issue- who then go on to rug pull within the week. It's inevitable. Everytime. Thankfully this game isn't that deep into people's financial pockets, if they decide to screw with the market- all that will be wasted is people's time and the tiny amount of processing power required to keep this game open in the background. But something tells me people will get bored of this game long before that eventual heel turn will cause anything of a huge uproar. Just my suspicion. 

Along the Mirror's Edge

 

Back during the long-awaited gameplay reveal trailer for Perfect Dark, which so soundly leapfrogged my very meagre expectations, there were a great many parallels drawn to what we were looking at. Those of us who were thirsting for another high profile Immersive Sim to drawn our teeth into saw our potential nirvana, Deus Ex fans saw the sequel they never got to Mankind Divided, the handful of people out there still hankering for Perfect Dark Zero's Multiplayer for some incomprehensible reason apparently saw nothing at all and scratched their heads in confusion wondering what all the active stealth gameplay they just saw was about. (I didn't even know anyone remembered that those games had multiplayer.) But there was one distinction I found utterly affronting- I heard someone compare the gameplay to Mirror's Edge.

Now that's not because I think Mirror's Edge is a bad game, nor that I don't see the connection between the first-person wall-running we see presented: they just reminded me that the Mirror's Edge franchise exists! And yes, thanks to 2016's sequel/reboot it is a franchise! And in the spirit of remembering that I actually went out and finally got around to playing that Reboot for the first time, despite how wary I had been about it all those years, to see what it was about those games that still sticks around in people's mind- all the while recalling what it was about the original that still lingers in mine. Because it does hold some place there, strange though it feels to admit it. I suppose that just goes to merit how impressive that little tech demo was.

I came to the original Mirror's Edge years after the fact, trying it out expecting what would amount to little more than a showcase of parkour gameplay across a largely featureless world and story- and whilst that conceptually may hold true- there's a real underground indie game vibe to the original Mirror's Edge I can't help but resonate to. The uncompromising challenge of the later chapters, like a brick wall daring you to crack through, brings the same sort of sensations as Ghostrunner. And that non-typical story about living on the edge and trying to what's best by you and yours in a world that couldn't care less if you lived or died? Why, that's 'Thief' magic straight up! Which, sure, isn't actually 'indie'- but it came from an era before the confines of the 'safety' box were built around the industry dictating how games should play and what stories they should invariably tell.

Mirror's Edge was so simple yet every bit as evocative as the monochrome streaked with red palette would suggest. Some of those later levels, where the you get deeper into the dark heart of the city, deliver some truly arresting, near liminal, environments to scour through. Places pulled from the page of some graphic artist on the verge of going through a midlife crisis and nervous breakdown in the same day. Wrought iron mazes of industry, gleaming blank city faces over a messy, discordant underbelly. Ever sterile. Ever inhuman. Somehow that world managed to get across that existential dread of systemic stifling homogeny and crushingly tyrannical uniformity without voicing a single directed word. Mirror's Edge Catalyst knows no such subtlety. 

Catalyst gives us something of a washed out generic metropolis which loses quite a bit of that stark uniformity of the original. It's designed to feel more 'tangible' as a world, and that philosophy ironically leads to a watering down of everything the original game pointed towards. The battle between conformists and free-running rebels is made the main topic of every interaction, with player's filtering between revolutionary and proto-Watch_Dogs style 'counter culture' activists- only the narrative also attempts to retain the aloof and unassuming Faith Conners as the protagonist leading to a thematic disconnect where Faith kind of feels like she doesn't belong around anyone. Which would itself be a profound theme if Mirror's Edge Catalyst knew what to do with it.

Giving definitive form and shape to a world like this robs the majesty of implication but rewards in the form of an open world which- is fun enough to learn how to free run around. The iconic free running of this franchise is still actually unmatched across the industry and I'll never get sick of pulling off the right moves to keep your momentum going in a particular busy section of a running route. There is something lost of the 'Ghostrunner' style split-second-or-dead gameplay in this new iteration, however. Enemies don't kill nearly as quickly, you have to put more effort into taking one down with their more robust, but equally frustrating, melee combat. There's no commandeering weapons this time around and levels are ever designed specifically to have you fight the enemy or run past them, never both.

Of course Catalyst gives us a more involved main narrative this time around, and whilst the original didn't offer anything spectacular in this department either I at least respected the unique framing device. Catalyst is almost painfully generic stuffed full of inconsequential techno-babble filler quests across a paper thin narrative with twists so utterly readily transparent that not even the characters themselves sound surprised when they occur. When (sorry if you care about spoilers) Faith learns that the only other Asian woman in the entire story, who happens to look exactly like her, happens to be the sister she thought had died years ago her reaction sounds like she already figured that out about around the time the rest of the audience did. And don't get started on the villains plan to, spin the wheel of generic with the 'evil corporation' modifier turned on... control people's mind with nanomachines. How inspired...

In some ways Catalyst serves as a prequel to the original, though in many more ways it's a reboot. Unless we're to believe that Faith's sister is planning to get cosmetic race-change surgery and give up her high-flying CEO job in order to become a beat cop. Attempts to impart an almost mythical significance to Faith's iconic arm tattoo, which she has inked at the end of the game, fall flat when it amounts to being little more than a meaningless drawing her mom did for no reason. Catalyst felt like it was trying to start something, but lacked either the daring or the funding to really go out and give it that shot. Who knows, maybe the EA Mobile Mirror's Edge app contains that missing sauce- but giving that it looks like a cheap knockoff itself- and isn't even in third person- I suspect not. But still, I'll remember the experience for the running- and isn't that all that matters in a franchise like this?

There is no Silksong

 

On this blessed day I want to sit and talk to you all about a video game. Not just any video game, mind- but a Video game that I love. A spectacular video game. A game called Hollow Knight. Why such a topic comes to mind? Honestly I don't know. Maybe I just want to get things off my chest. Maybe I just want to expel some pent up air that has been stuck behind my heart for the past few years in a throbbing sense of expectation that, at last, I'm giving up on. Maybe I'm just trying to remind myself why it is any of us wanted to see this thing expand into a universe in the first place- and maybe in the exploration of that past I might touch on some nugget of why that can never be. Like a pool gazing at the majesty of the stars through the murky gleam of the gutter- maybe through the murk of defeat some deeper truth can be gleaned.

Hollow Knight was one of those games that I heard about in the same breath as other Indie Platformers that just never seemed to gel with me. Celeste and Child of Light and all those other high fantasy titles that expand some small metaphor out into a grand, and sometimes a little bit overindulgent, tale. (Not to denigrate Celeste by lumping it up with those others, mind- I just didn't like Celeste because precision platforming is not in itself a satisfying game mechanic to me.) It would earn the praise and love of many but I filed the game away as more of the same. I'd try games like that and fell off- which is in itself very unusual for me. I completed the bloody RPG Assassin's Creed games- I stick with trash! But, of course, at some point I was to learn how off base I was.

I couldn't say what drew me to buying Hollow Knight- probably a Steam Sale of some sort- but I know exactly what made me play it. I had tried the game out some little bit and gotten as far as the resting place of The Hollow Knight before kind of drifting away. (Yeah, I really wasn't giving it the time of day.) But if there's one thing you should all know about me, it's that I'm stubborn. And ill mannered. So when I saw someone else playing Hollow Knight on a Youtube steam, and they were clearing in a different area to where I was when I last played, (the background was green instead of blue) the petty in my awoke. "Who the hell does this guy think he is- making me look bad? Why, now I've got to reach this green area so I know what's going on! I didn't stop because the game was hard, I can do this!" Which is what sparked my attention, soon-to-become obsession.

Those familiar with the Metroidvania style of gameplay know well the appeal of exploration that opens up in a manner that feels organic. There's a maze of exploration opened up to you not limited by different coloured doors but rather the movement abilities you unlock throughout the game. It required an impressive amount of forethought on the level designer's end to not only intelligently design these roadblocks but to have them comprehensive and foreshadow-able in the early game so players can file away the complication and remember their way back the moment they earn the solution ability. But not every Metroidvania out there goes the extra step that Hollow Knight goes- to combine their movement abilities with honest to goodness battle powerups!

There's another thing unique about Hollow Knight- platforming is not the key most focus of the game. It's actually the platforming combat that steals the show, showcased in eye-poppingly tight and cut-throat boss fights against some of the most impressive grand, dignified and grotesque creates possible to conceived in the nearly monochromatic, simply cutesy whilst emotionally vacant art style. Style, is the word I'd use to describe the game the best. Across it's bug kingdom you'll find so many layers of horror, faded grandeur and primordial blasphemy it's hard not to envision the insectile world of the game as the stage for some sort of grand epic. And in fact- it pretty much is.

Personally I'd always considered one of the highest pieces of gaming artistry to be the Dark Souls franchise for the way it captures fantastic gameplay, memorable set pieces and unique sensation of reward within a deeply woven world narrative that simply could not be told nearly as completely in any other medium. Which is why it is with the utmost reverence that I consider Hollow Knight, a game which derived clear inspiration from Dark Souls along with other properties, as it's equal. Praise I offer nearly no other non-FromSoftware Souls-Like. The story of the Hollow Knight created to hold back the Radiance is weaved so beautifully into the canvass of the world I just want to jump in an experience it all over again everytime I think about it.

Whatsmore, Hollow Knight is complete. So fully realised. It is a story with a conclusion and wrap up that solves every loose end to such a perfect degree that future additions to the story both added a totally new plot thread to play through- largely disconnected to the happenings of the Hallownest- and added another conclusion to the story that ended in pretty much the exact same way. Just cooler. (I think the original true ending is still canon though. For what it symbolically represents.) That freeing aspect made it so that any follow-up could do literally whatever it wanted. Go anywhere. Star anyone. There was no need for the last surviving member of the Hallownest Royal Family to be seen ever again- and yet still we celebrated when we saw our main girl Hornet take centre stage for the doomed 'Hollow Knight: Silksong.'

It's hard to put into words how ravenous fans have been for this follow up- many champion Hollow Knight as one of the greatest games of all time and I don't exactly disagree with that sentiment at all. I think it's a remarkable game with so much to offer I would be a selfish fool not to recommend it. And perhaps that very hunger- the height to which Hollow Knight was foisted upon it's pedestal, is what is standing between us and our game. We know Silksong started life as DLC, but expanding that out to a full game seemed to have required a total reworking that has utterly floored the team- atop with the ever increasing expectation from a people who expect Team Cherry to match a game they literally consider perfection. 

I'm not going to be one of those terminal pseudo-psyche coded naysayers who will insist it simply isn't possible. Expectations have been built so high that Team Cherry are doomed to disappoint. There are so many examples of the buck being successfully risen to in recent years alone. Across the Spider-Verse, Endgame and I hear preliminary reports declare Shadow of the Erdtree is a legendary DLC- the best FromSoftware have ever put out. But those are examples of sheer excellence, and 'sheer excellence' is a heavy spectre to be sitting on anyone's shoulders, let alone that of an indie team. I can't pretend to know what a group of Australians get up to when totally cut off from the Internet, but I know if I were in their position I'd be doing my best Yoshikage Kira- biting my nails until I draw blood, wondering how far I need to stick a that golden arrow up my neck before the problem goes away. Here's hoping that Team Cherry release the game sometime before turning into time travelling serial killer bombers.  

Star Cheating Citizens

 

Star Citizen remains one of my favourite worlds to catch up on, not just because of the crazed amount of research I put into that first demon-sized article about them that I wrote- but due to the fact that I genuinely believe that this has to be one of the longest running games industry lol-cows of all time. To perhaps match the absurdity of Yandere Simulator- although I suspect we might actually a working game out of Cloud Imperium at this point, as opposed to Yandere Dev who I expect to just give up working on the game and announce it's actually totally feature complete literally any day now. There's just really no matching the comedy of basic conceptual errors on the development front that Chris Roberts has stumbled into time and time again which paint a terrible picture for someone who, I genuinely believe, wants to deliver a game. Although at this point, I'll but wanting to keep the cash cow milking is a petty present concern on his mind at all times too. Considering, you know, he's got half his family employed to the nowhere project at this point!

Of course, even though Star Citizen has good and royally scuppered any chance they had of creating that brilliantly effectively open world swansong game that would have supplanted the industry, through pure merit of turning it into such a money-sink hell hole that no casual gamer will ever touch it in a million years- utterly destroying his potential for building fans with even the most well publicised launch in history: that isn't to say there's nothing of value tucked into Star Citizen. I still remember that sneak peak we got at the long belated Squadron 42 campaign mode for the game which looked- I'm going to be honest- really freakin' good! Like a solid Sci-fi themed COD campaign that you blast through on a spare weekend and walk away with the kind of fond memories that last a decade- I would definitely give that kind of game my time of day! Provided, you know, they ever actually release it!

But of course that single player game is not the draw for them- because that isn't where the Cloud Imperium game get off selling their thousands of dollars worth of ships to people in their Alpha which at this point might as well be considered the full game because you ain't getting nothing better anytime soon! Where's the recurrent monetisation going to come into a product you buy once? Nah, they need to siphon your money and funds as much as possible if Roberts wants to keep eating out the lap of luxury for the rest of his natural life- which is why this promising Single Player footage we've seen probably won't start materialising into anything real for at least another year. Until then, the man must protect his baby at all costs.

Which is what leads to a very interesting conundrum involving where the team place their priorities in development. Namely the amount of effort it has recently been revealed that they put into hunting down and removing 'cheaters' from the game with as much prejudice as possible. Now this is nothing new, of course- Cloud Imperium famously have paper thin skin and jealously guard their inner forums like a cadre of degenerate discord moderators, (they probably have a Discord too nowadays, come to think about it) but the fervour of the cheater problem really drove the team into overcharge. Over 600 cheaters have revealed to have been banned in a recent purge- which is valued work for any multiplayer game. Provided the game is finished.

Because you see- Star Citizen still hasn't launched. It still can only be accessed directly from their storefront as part of a 'starter pack' with fluctuating prices throughout the year. These are supposed to be those gooey formative years where the product is given shape and purpose. Systems are ironed out, scope is- well scope should have probably been solved before entering Alpha but this is Cloud Imperium so I guess they're arguing about scope literally every other day- these are the months that should not matter. Of course, bug fixing is important- but you won't find most developers hunting down the riff raff of their Alpha playtests. Then again how many Alpha playtests last multiple years? These are unprecedented waters we tread.

The big 'cheat' which was brutally afflicting the game wasn't really as fundamentally compromising as the old GTA Online cheat engine issues nor the bot spam in Team Fortress 2. All it actually was was an exploit that allowed players to generate vast amounts of ingame currency at little investment of their own- which of course means it threatened the very fabric of Cloud Imperium as a company. How could they possibly allow such a brazen assault at their supposed bottom line as was present in this glitch? How could they go on when such filth dared to undermine the Star Citizen money mill? When people can get what they want without dedicating their entire lives or wallets to the company, that issue overrides all over concerns- because unfortunately that is bottom line of what Star Citizen is. 

The game exists to funnel you into a never-ending cycle of grinding for the sake of grinding. What once existed as a utopian depiction of open space exploration underlying a championing of 'player chase' has rotted and given away to a much more rank and insidious cycle of locking players into loops that incentivises retention and plays up the 'fear of missing out' for the brand new ship the team squeeze out of the increasingly unfocused universe of design which supposedly unifies the brand. There's talent behind the scenes, programmers, artists, modellers- but it feels like there's no head at the top of it all to bring all those pieces together. Even when it comes to design philosophy, everything has denigrated over time to the point where the game feels past it's prime before release.

There was a time when I thought Star Citizen was a scam that was funnelling money out of the dumb and overly excited. There was a time when I considered Star Citizen to be an overly ambitious project undetaken by a team too high on their own supply to realise the pipe dream they'd fallen into. Now I see Star Citizen as a successor to the Grand Theft Auto Online model. A amusement park of promises, pay extortionate prices to test out some preliminary rides, hear promises about how cool the next update will be and then grimace through your disappointment when it doesn't go the way you want it to. Only in that context, where the visage is all you have, wouldn't it make sense to protect that integrity with everything you have?

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth Review

"The bigger the Yakuza, the bigger and better the future they promise"

With grit and perseverance I've finally spent enough of my life energies to reach the very end of the Like a Dragon franchise, for now, and coincidentally enough it has also been a journey following the entire life trajectory of principal main character Kiryu Kazama on his journey through the crime, love, sacrifice and an unending search for redemption. (Redemption for what? It's unclear. Kiryu is the squeakiest clean Yakuza to ever exist, if anything he's doing an apology tour for literally every other criminal who has ever existed and isn't as moral as him.) We've seen Kiryu rise from a little pissant thug beating down a tardy debtor in an alley to a legendary mythical being who is still dismantling men in their peak physical fitness whilst pushing sixty through the sheer force of will power alone. But now, at long last, it seems that the Dragon can finally rest easy.

Infinite Wealth was always marketed to imply the end of Kiryu's journey, and that spectre of finality, in the form of sudden cancer, has been dangling over this game ever since. I've seen these as the twilight entries in the Like a Dragon franchise and fittingly enough both this and 'Gaiden: The Man who Erased his Name' have leant themselves heavily to the idea of being 'retrospective' entries looking back on the various characters that shaped the franchise throughout the years and giving us some needed closure on all of them. Although I must say this game did give me the strange sense that it was the middle entry in a trilogy for some strange reason, perhaps wherein finally Ichiban and co will go up against the Daidoji- but enough guessing at the future, let's finally wrap up all that has been.

From the get-go, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth brings the franchise out of Japan for the first time ever as far as I can recall- which means for the very first time we're entering a country that doesn't speak predominantly Japanese. And right off the bat that means we are treated to some of the frankly worst English dubbing ever known to this franchise- even the native English speakers, all four of them that exist in the cast, speak as though they aren't aware that the recording has already started and they're just reading their lines off a page. It's bad. And it gets worse when you come across the poor Japanese cast members that this game forced to speak in English despite their clear lack of proficiency. That's how you get characters who are native English speakers, like Tomi and Bryce, giving us gem line reads on the par of "Beautiful Eyes!"

And whilst we're on that note- I was absolutely stunned to realise that for some insane reason the Japanese dub isn't being treated as the main dub in this Japanese franchise. The team scored two famous actors for the cast in the form of Danny Trejo and Daniel Dae Kim but their talents only appear in the English dub. Even when these character's speak English (Okay, Kim's Ebina never speaks English by Trejo's Dwight sure does!) They prefer to bring someone else in- despite these line reads already existing as evidenced by the other dub! I cannot wrap my head around this insanity and it makes me wonder if I actually missed out playing this in it's native language, which I've never felt before in a Yakuza game!

But I digress. When you look past the performances and sometimes awful English line reads, what we have is an interesting continuation on Kasuga's story that promises off the bat to further expand on our hero's character. I had wondered how a follow-up story would progress Ichiban, given how that is an aspect that Like a Dragon had struggled with regarding Kiryu for several stories following Yakuza 2, but Lost Judgement relaxed my concerns that the current scenario team knew what they were doing to ensure that at the very least each outing landed with undeniable consequence. Given the springboard topics for Infinite Wealth- I felt justified in anticipation.

And what are those springboards? Kasuga going to Hawaii in order to meet with his mother, the same who sequestered him away as a baby and stuffed him in a coin locker before allegedly being caught and killed by the Yakuza- apparently alive and wanting to meet him finally. A decent hook for an emotional reunion, tempered by the surprisingly sobering motives of the game's second protagonist, Kiryu, who is struggling with advanced terminal cancer that is set to kill him in a few months, but is trying to complete one last mission before he's taken out. Both salient concepts, although I had more interest in what Ichiban would achieve emotionally, which is why I'm a little bit surprised on the otherside that it was largely Kiryu who stole the stage once again. (I guess this is why he only got a cameo in Yakuza 7.)

Picking up several years after the events of 7, Infinite Wealth deals with the realms of cancel culture and the effect of malleable public perception on the lives of the world around them- and on a much grander scale the concept of 'redemption' and the capacity to make up for your past wrongs- expounding on the idea of 'starting again' presented in Yakuza 7. In fact, the very title of 'Infinite Wealth' is more in reference for the capacity to redeem than it is for actual physical monetary gains, despite how ludicrously-loaded running Dondoko Island makes you. These ideals end up actually slotting much cleaner into Kiryu's 'end of the road' journey than in Ichiban's: "already made a fresh start and now just making the most of living up to my father's morals" arc.

Speaking of Ichiban, he finds himself roughly ousted out of his only real purpose in life, trying to help the former Yakuza of the Tojo/Omi alliance disband following 'The Great Dissolution', and it's in this disillusion that we are introduced to a whole new country and a new core cast including one of the most relatable everymen wracked with a sobering backstory in the franchise, Tomizawa, paired next to perhaps my favourite member of Ichiban's cast, the peppy and oft indiscernible Chitose Fujinomiya. Only two brand new additions to the core cast, but strong enough personalities that I demand we see more of them in the future. Especially Chitose, she is my new favourite character after Ichiban. (And Majima.)

As a grand return to the new RPG play systems introduced by 'Yakuza: Like a Dragon', Infinite Wealth does not present as stark a surprise once you get into the game. It does, however, improve on the base formula in order to create robust enough gameplay to be considered competitive to other modern JRPGs, all of which try to offer something unique. New to this game is the 'positioning' mechanic that allows players to freely move their character around a limited space before targeting and picking an action, as opposed to how it was back in Yakuza 7 where you just kind of had to make do with where the AI left you after the last turn. This feeds back into the gameplay systems wherein now tactical positioning is a fundamental part of the gameplay loop!

Before all that positing really meant was that sometimes you'd use an environmental item and if you ran past an NPC on your way to hit another they would interrupt and cancel your turn with a free action. Now they're removed interruptions (which I like considering their only utility in the first game was to punish the unattentive) and added 'back attack free crits' and 'bouncing chain attacks' to feed off the 'follow-up attacks' from the first game. You'll be placing your attacks in order to angle the knockback into another companion who'll score a free chain attack, landing that enemy in the perfect place for a free 'follow-up' action. Three attacks in a single attack turn is significant and you can bet that adds up in the late game when you start speccing out weapons for basic attack bonuses and crit damage boosts.

Enemies too have been buffed up to keep the player on their toes, sporting guard stances that resist knockback and auto-resist damage which require the player to start using new 'Grapple' skills in order to 'guard break'. It's just an intuitive little addendum to the gameplay arsenal that fleshes out the RPG to feel more active than 'stand around and select your action'. Although I will say that this new 'Guard Break' modifier appears to have been added only to new skills brought with the new jobs and haven't been baked into the legacy classes for Yakuza 7- which seems like a bit of an oversight given that they ported over pretty much every class from that game except for the DLC ones. Makes for odd moments of powerlessness in the late game.

One aspect of the new area of Like a Dragon that makes it so dear is the ever lovable character of Ichiban and his totally adorable cluelessness. After spending 15 years in jail he seems to have come out the other side not having aged a single day mentally and still operates with the absurdity of a somewhat dimwitted twenty-five year old. But in that immaturity is a frankness and a morality that is so enviable you'd have to be heartless not to route for the man. There are plenty of fictional characters that are written with that indefinable quirk to draw personalities to them, but Ichiban is one of the few with whom I understand it on more than the fictional level. He is the kind of person with a vision of the world so innocent and robust that you want to be true, for your own sake as much as for his.

All that being said, I have to say I've found Ichiban's sudden obsession with Saeko to be utterly perplexing on a fundamental level. When did he ever express such a deep attraction to Saeko, or when could that have developed even remotely? Throughout Yakuza 7 Saeko seemed like just another one of the group around Ichiban and in fact, considering you never had any stretch of the game with just her as a companion, she seemed the least close to Ichiban out of the original three. Yet Infinite Wealth kicks off with the assertion that he has always deeply crushed on the hostess and has been working up the nerve for months to confess to her. And though I find it slightly contrived, it is just so fitting for a character like this to be a doomed hopeless romantic. (How relatable.) The will-they won't-they dynamic is more a sprinkle atop the narrative than a heart to it, which I appreciate, and it's a potent drop of friction justifying Ichiban's return to solitary adventuring at the start of the game. Especially after he (spoilers for the first chapter) proposes to Saeko after their first date. (Yikes, and I thought my game was off!)

I honestly respect RGG for not just sticking with the Great Dissolution status quo shift from Yakuza 7, but panning out it's consequences further than just the big fight at the end of Gaiden and 7. Those disaffected Yakuza, now legally banned from applying for a job or having a bank account for the next 5 years, are essentially being pushed into the gutter by society and being expected to starve out. Ichiban's arc has always revolved around the 'grey areas' of society, or the 'unfortunate ugly sides of society' that people like to pretend doesn't exist or lash out against. In many ways Ichiban is a representation of that world, always being torn down and left with nothing and being forced to start again in whatever scrappy way that he can. It's such a atypical glance at modern society that speaks to the admirable worldiness of RGG. Maybe the Yakuza brand started as something of a 'cool' and 'romantic' aesthetic with Kiryu, but under Ichiban there's a genuine reality and vulnerability undercutting everything I find enthralling.

Hawaii marks the very first time that the franchise has left the confines of Japan, although don't believe for a second that means they've given up on the core identity of the Yakuza franchise- virtual cultural tourism. Infinite Wealth will still have you touring up and down Aloha Beach, picking up cones of shaved ice to chow down on whilst enduring the odd brief squall overhead in what is this franchise's very first toe into dynamic weather- for what it's worth. Hawaii simply glitters on the modern RGG engine, and given the amount of time the game gives to the simple pleasure of gazing out at the sunset burning across the gentle beach waves- the team are very well aware of how far they have come graphically.

Of course, as with any RGG game that doesn't take place directly in a one-to-one recreation of a modern Japanese city- the setting does mean the studio get a bit wackier with their side activities to flesh out the open world fun. Rather than touch on local Hawaiian customs and cliches in their side games, (which are instead reserved for the 'Tours' system) RGG decided to seek inspiration from other properties. One such being Crazy Taxi which has been converted into 'Crazy Delivery'- a game wherein you speed across the street on an 'UberEats' analogy bike collecting food delivery icons floating along the street and performing huge leaps and tricks to keep up a combo as you deliver orders. Or there is the 'Pokemon Snap' analogy where you ride the slow touring trams around town with your camera out shooting pictures of the local pervert 'Sujimon' who parade around town in Speedos. Oh, and speaking of Sujimon- perhaps the biggest send-up the game does it to the world of Pokémon.

The 'Sujimon' concept existed as a joke-reference to Pokemon in the original- justifying the inclusion of a 'SujiDex' and operating as another extension of the team's love for RPG franchises being shown off on full display. This time around the idea has been expanded out to hilarious extremes- with Sujimon now representing an entire Pokemon-esque capture and battle metagame! That's right, you'll be tracking down and fighting creepy perverts, 'capturing them' by offering them gifts in a minigame more involved than Pokeball throwing has ever been, and then forming them into teams that you fight against other organised groups of Sujimon formed by other trainers in order to rank up your Sujimon league rating and eventually challenge 'the Discreet Four'. (The amount of puns makes my head hurt.)

Now don't get too excited, Sujimon fighting itself is incredibly rudimentary compared to even the most stripped back Pokemon games over the years- it's just about spamming the single attacks that each Sujimon has, occasionally matching opposing types and switching out Sujimon to your reserve team when necessary, and then charging up for a special attack that I always get screwed over by thanks to the spin wheel of 'effectiveness' tacked on there every time you pull a special. It's more the fact the team had the idea to do any of this in the first place that boggles the mind and yes- the Sujimon content can span the length of the entire campaign if you choose to engage with it. There's even a means to challenge bookmarks of your team against other players of the game through the other mega metagame Infinite Wealth heavily advertised, their grand Animal Crossing send-up: Dondoko Island.  

Dondoko Island is perhaps one of the most effective time vacuums this franchise has ever concocted, baring in mind that 'creating Time Vacuums' is literally one of the core principals of their design philosophy. Dondoko presents a pretty much fully realised island resort building and management simulator with resource collection nodes that recharge every in-game day, an expansive crafting system that drops more structures than you could ever hope to fit on one island, an AFK farm and Sujimon training facility and an online Sujimon phantom-team battler and cross-island visits. It is damn near sickening how much effort went into expanding this one game mode. And you know what? The end product is really good so I guess it was worth it.

I lost perhaps half an entire day to Dondoko. Just that rhythmic pattern of doing all your daily activities in order to earn credits that you don't really need because you earn more than that just by keeping guests happy but you'll do it anyway because it's on the screen. Then the day and night cycle which keeps your days strict so you always go to bed thinking about what you want to do tomorrow. The loose franchise-typical metagame narrative that ropes you in with the veneer of a mystery that will inevitably evolve into a 'surprise' sob story regarding the main villains struggles because that is literally the pattern for all of these questlines. And, of course, the simply outrageous amounts of money I was making through Dondoko! The island is a drug. But I guess that was what the team were going for so... mission accomplished?

Of course, when you're done sinking your life into years of side content you'll eventually come back around to the main game where one of the biggest mysteries I had around this game finally becomes unravelled. Learning about the incoming new cast and the returning old cast, with the newly renamed 'Seonhee' to boot, I was rather naturally confused about how Infinite Wealth would balance all of them at the same time. How would you give them all opportunities to grow close as a party as well as to simply be present in the party! How many games give you so many more companions than you need to the point where you end up never using half of them? Too many! Well to my surprise, they thought of this. You see- Kiryu has his own set of chapters as Party leader!

That's right, we have a dual party set up with one team in Hawaii and one back in Japan, both following different threads of the same narrative as you jump back and forth between them. RGG don't always get the chance to tell their stories like this but whenever they do the team make it look effortless. Allowing individual narratives to blossom out and plant seeds that bare fruit at the climax when all the disparate parties, and various themes, come crashing together like a symbol clash. Plus I never had more than a single party member on the reserve bench so I never felt like I was leaving my team out of the action whenever I picked my party!

Having Kiryu lead his own section throughout the game allows the story to really focus in on a series retrospective as we conduct a 'where are they now' with pretty much anyone worth talking about throughout the franchise. We also get to have Kiryu go to many of the key locations throughout the years and give his modern perspective on events that shaped who he is, now recontextualised through a lens of maturity and a newer detachment. Given Kiryu's state of being throughout the game, his illness, there's a sobering sense of finality that never existed before. Even at the most dire circumstances, when Kiryu was up against the wall so badly he had to literally 'die' to save his family- you never felt like he was done. But seeing Kiryu ponder on the importance of the famous Kamuroucho archway that seemed to hang above him all these years, really hammers home the finality of it all. I almost choked up a little bit when Kiryu told Amon that they weren't going to meet again. (How sad is that?) Also, I have to shout out with the way their retrospective even found ways to reference Ishi and Kenzan by calling them 'vivid dreams'. Very coy.

Of course, the split between parties also allows us to go through the 'getting to know you' stage of relationships in this franchise all over again because Kiryu hangs out with Ichiban's old gang whilst he lives it up big with the new team. Actually some of my favourite moments of the game were seeing his gang who knew the important person Kiryu was and sort of marvelled at the legend whilst finding ways to be human around him. Brought best to life during the impromptu Karaoke night for which we got renditions of the two songs that best symbolise our boy- Baka Mitai and Judgement! Is there any better way to christen an old team into a new one with the Dragon himself at their head?

These new teams are put to the test with the specialised multi-tiered dungeons designed half to really put you to the endurance test and half to power level. These are long-form delves covered in boss battles and challenge fights which payout the most cash you'll find in the game, finally rewarding the core activity of the game, and give a more concentrated activity towards testing out Job builds, party makeup and making sure you're equipped for the challenges ahead. They also happen to house some of the game's strongest equipment at later levels, and are imbued with a random generator for rewards that incentivises repeat go-throughs. At the very least it makes for more fun grinding than that one dungeon floor with the XP hobos from Yakuza 7.

Part of what makes this new breed of Yakuza so interesting to me is that Ichiban has been treated with the breadth of intelligent care that a three-dimensional character deserves, rather than having that depth applied retroactively as the team tried to repeatedly with Kiryu. There's always so much more to learn about who Ichiban is, even with his core morals on display- and we get to see those unseen facets brought out by the supporting cast. This story in particular, focusing so heavily on family following the last game's late-story revelation, gives us several angles from which to view the concept. Chitose is largely estranged from her family and relishes in the divide, whilst Tomizawa had his family ripped away from him. Ichiban searches for his family even whilst regularly downplaying the importance of blood family, seeing his Boss as his father more for the person he was than for their likely blood connection.

It's actually surprisingly late into the game that you start unlocking the ultimate abilities of the two protagonists, being Ichiban's group special attack and Kiryu's 'Dragon Resurgence', which allows him to break out of turn-order and just go nuts on his targets. Resurgence in particular stands out so starkly, allowing Kiryu to host an incredible boss fight against the old legends of the franchise wherein he beats them to a pulp in turn based and then finishes them off in a special Resurgence showdown whilst enthralled in a special bizarre dimension flooded with their music. (Extra points for Majima getting 'Bite and Receive you' again!)

Ichiban's is once again just the most loveable spearhead for this franchise, and following his journey to discover his past honestly overshadows even the inevitable grand conspiracy plotline destined to come our way. His personal quest is so strong, in fact, that it creates something of a void in the narrative when it takes a backseat to that conspiracy. Unlike in the original where Ichiban's personal quest is tied so intrinsically to the perpetrators of Bleach Japan and Aoki- this time around Ichiban's quest is very much at odds with the overarching badguys, and he needs to face them in order to reach his personal actualisation. It's a totally valid way to tell the story, however when handled in a particular way it can somewhat feel like two disparate plot-threads struggling to win out over one another.

At the end of the game, those final few chapters, Ichiban fully wraps up his own personal quest and from then on just sort of glides through to the end of the story. Sure, he wants to unravel the evil schemes because it's the right thing to do- but a 'the right thing to do' plot doesn't really do justice to the brand that typically excels at propelling the struggles of the heart, the strife of relationship and the future of your immediate world into a single spearpoint of narrative focus. It's such a stark contrast that it almost feels desperate when in the very last act they introduce a totally rogue familial connection that, to be honest, doesn't even make sense when you stop and think about it. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd read in a medieval fantasy story- children being made out of necessity to appease an overbearing authoritarian father character- it just seems like a dumb way to try and gell the disparate pieces of plot motivation back into one.

Kiryu, on the otherhand, really does feel like he has something to prove in these final few chapters that seem to be the culmination of his journey not just throughout the game but maybe, in a small way, throughout his late franchise journeys as a whole. Faced with the sins of the Yakuza and the consequences of his legacy, Kiryu really is ready to just lay it all down and finally go to rest until the embers of it all starting again from scratch force him to put it back to rest. At the pinnacle Kiryu comes to terms with the very same lesson he taught Nishki all the way back in Yakuza 0 in the woods when they stood at gun's length from one another. Dying solves nothing, only the living can make amends. It's a moment made powerful specifically because we know the strength of the context behind it- coloured by Kiryu's long life of fighting roughly the same battle over and over again. He sees the chance to finally make an impact that sticks and he's fight to his last breath to make it happen. I wonder if it has the same effect on someone new to the franchise with the past two games- but I found it almost breath taking in the moment.

Of course, never one to be outdone, Ichiban does have his moment to shine right at the end of the game by merit of his sheer hopelessness. In a moment that I can only think is designed to compare with the simply incredible Like a Dragon 7 standoff against Aoki where Ichiban has to talk the man down from committing suicide- once more Ichiban gives us a chance to glimpse at the sheer magnitude of his near-inhuman compassion and the impact it has on the seemingly irredeemable. It is a powerful scene in it's own right, hampered for me by the way the main game kind of left Ichiban's tale to rot nearer the end chapters. But I got the chance to touch base with people at Comic Con and many of them found the scene enough to move them to tears so I'll confess- it's a great moment that works for some. 

Summary

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth might just be one of the biggest games the team have ever made, rivalled perhaps only by Lost Judgement. And it carries all the characteristics of an epic in it's scale, ambition, scope and bloat. There's so much genuine worthwhile side content, small and large, that it can almost overwhelming to consider it all- and every bit is imbued with a flurry of passion sparked by a desire to make this the biggest Like a Dragon ever made! From a 'Like a Dragon' universe Vtuber to the surprise return of Kiryu's Yakuza 0 styles, the novelty darts borrowed from Gaiden and the sly little Lost Judgement crossover snuck in there in the later chapters: there's so much loving detail snuck into every aspect of the game. In that desire to do absolutely everything, perhaps some of the most important aspects slipped a little bit- the main narrative is not as strong as it could have been in parts, but the rest of the package picks up the slack significantly. Summarising it all into a single grade is a toughy, especially following Lost Judgement which I consider to be the franchise at it's absolute best. But considering the package as a whole, and weighing the wanting against the over delivered, I find it impossible to give the game anything less than an A Grade, where it misses out on the plus simply for the fact the final dungeon in the game is held off as DLC- which is ridiculous for a dungeon that, light spoiler, doesn't even have a unique boss fight at the end! Infinite Wealth is Like a Dragon at peak- and of course earns my recommendation. However, I'd be lying if I didn't say that after all that, I'm a bit happy to be putting the franchise behind me for at least a year. I don't know what else they could possibly do with these games to be honest without slipping into 'overstuffed' territory. (Personally I'm hoping the next game will be another 'Judgement'.)