Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

The series' best reviews, and its loudest self-inflicted controversy, at the same time

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth sends Kazuma Kiryu, the face of this series for nearly two decades, into what the story frames as his final chapter, while firmly handing the lead role to Ichiban Kasuga, the earnest ex-yakuza protagonist introduced in 2020's Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The two end up in Honolulu together, and critics have been close to unanimous in their praise: Metacritic scores range from 89 on PC to 93 on Xbox Series X|S, making this the best-reviewed game the series has ever produced by a clear margin. Steam's own player base mostly agrees, sitting Very Positive at 90.4% across more than 16,000 reviews. And yet the single most-visible piece of feedback on that entire page — the top review, sitting nearly 900 votes ahead of the second-most-upvoted — has nothing to do with the story, the combat or Honolulu. It's about what SEGA chose to sell separately.

Command combat that finally feels finished

Ichiban's turn-based "Dragon Kart" combat system debuted in 2020 as a genuine surprise for a series built on real-time brawling, and Infinite Wealth is where critics broadly agree it stopped feeling like an experiment and started feeling like the series' definitive combat system. Positioning, area attacks and job-based classes all get meaningfully refined over the first game, and reviewers who were lukewarm on the original turn-based pivot consistently describe this as the version that won them over. Honolulu itself gets similar credit: it's RGG Studio's first fully realised open world rather than the string of dense but contained districts the series built its reputation on, and multiple reviews single out the amount of side content packed into it, Sujimon most prominently — a full Pokémon-style parody system with its own gyms, raids and a "Discreet Four" champion ladder that goes well beyond being a one-scene joke.

The dual-protagonist structure is where the writing does its best work. Kiryu's arc, framed as his farewell to the series after his health struggles in prior games, gives longtime fans a genuinely weighty send-off, while Ichiban's earnestness keeps the tone from tipping into melodrama. It isn't flawless — several detailed reviews with well over 100 hours logged independently call the main story the second-weakest in the series' history, citing uneven pacing stretches in the middle chapters — but that's a specific, moderate criticism sitting inside overwhelming praise for the character writing carrying it.

The paywall that became the loudest thing about the launch

None of the above is what dominates Infinite Wealth's own review page. New Game+ has been a standard, free feature in every prior Like a Dragon and Yakuza release, and at launch SEGA confirmed it would instead be exclusive to the $85 Deluxe and $110 Ultimate editions, well above the $70 standard release. A separate $20 Master Vacation Bundle further locks away postgame content, including a bonus dungeon called The Big Swell. The backlash was immediate and, unusually for a game this well-reviewed, came from inside the production itself: Yong Yea, the English voice of Kazuma Kiryu, publicly stated that "no game should lock New Game Plus behind a paywall," arguing it "hurts community goodwill and replayability" and should be a standard or free-update feature for any game built to support it.

Steam's global achievement data backs up how effectively the paywall worked as intended: only about 4.8% of players have the achievement for completing a New Game+ run, and the higher-difficulty NG+ clears sit even lower, around 4%. That's a small number for a series whose most dedicated fans have historically treated NG+ as a routine part of finishing the game properly, and it corroborates what the review text already makes clear — a meaningful share of the people who wanted a second playthrough simply didn't get one included with their purchase.

The side content still carries its weight

Series veterans know this franchise has always sold itself as much on its tangent activities as its main story, and Infinite Wealth doesn't cut corners there. Beyond Sujimon's gym-and-raid structure, Honolulu is dense with the kind of substories, minigames and business-management diversions the series is known for, and reviewers consistently note that the shift to a genuine open world hasn't come at the cost of that density — if anything, having more physical space to spread activities across gives Honolulu room to breathe in a way the series' earlier, more compact districts couldn't. The tonal whiplash the series is famous for — a devastating character beat in one scene, a deeply silly minigame in the next — remains intact and, by most accounts, is handled with more confidence here than in the 2020 original, which was still finding its footing with the new turn-based format.

Verdict

Taken purely as a game, Infinite Wealth earns its critical reputation: Ichiban's combat has never been better, Honolulu is a genuine step forward for the series' open-world ambitions, and the Kiryu-Ichiban pairing delivers one of the strongest character arcs the franchise has written. None of that changes what SEGA actually did at launch, and a review that only covered the game itself would be leaving out the thing its own review base has decided is the real story. Buy the standard edition for a genuinely excellent, complete first playthrough — nothing about the core 60-to-80-hour campaign is missing or held back. Just go in knowing that finishing it a second time, the way this series has always let you, now costs extra.