[COLUMN] Help, I Can’t Stop Doing Side Quests in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth | by Marty Sliva (Patreon)

I know I should be following the main path. The stakes are enormously high, lives are on the line, and the mystery of why I came to Hawaii in the first place is slowly heading towards a boil. The objective marker is pointing me across the city, and I see a cab stand just down the block – I could hop into a taxi and for a few bucks, I’d be there in an instant.

But this is Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and I know I’m not going to do that. I know I’m going to hoof it across town with my crew of the lovable doofus Ichiban Kasuga, the stoic legend Kazuma Kiryu, and the rest of my wonderful band of misfits. And I know that every hundred feet or so on my journey towards the very important main mission, I’m going to get preoccupied by any number of the game’s infectious side quests, mini games, collectables, and NPCs. But honestly, if you’re not letting your open-world ADHD take the wheel in a Yakuza game, what are you even doing with your life?

I’m just over 16 hours into Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and I’m smitten. I’m in Chapter 7, and while I’d be much further along if I’d just concentrated on the main path, I’m thrilled to constantly get lost inside of the dense, entertaining, and charming version of Hawaii that RGG Studio has created in their latest take on the beloved series.

I’ve become a bit fatigued by open world settings over the past few years. I’ve loved the rise of micro open worlds in indie games like Stray, A Short Hike, and Outer Wilds. But for every masterpiece that gets its hooks like me like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Elden Ring, or Death Stranding, I end up bouncing off of games like Horizon Forbidden West, Starfield, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora after just a few hours.

But Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth manages to avoid the trappings of those latter games and fall more in line with the former by inviting me to be an active participant in its world, and not just a passive observer. Whether it’s something as simple as tossing up the shaka sign at NPCs and gaining some personality points, swimming in the ocean and diving for a bit of treasure, or unraveling the threads of a deep side quest, my actions are weaving into the very texture of Honolulu.

There are a lot of different reasons that the optional Substories work for me across Like a Dragon. At a fundamental level, they’re well written no matter if they’re focusing on something somewhat serious like a kid starting a lemonade stand to pay for a tiara for his favorite employee at an orphanage before she moves away to New York City with her fiance (okay, that started to sound way less serious as I typed it), or something completely deranged like you helping your pet crawfish Nancy find love on the beach in the form of a crustacean with a bedazzled shell. People (and crawfish) have problems, and I’m here to help solve them.

Ichiban’s altruistic obsession with helping out those in need and anyone being taken advantage by those in power provides enough fuel to make me want to check out every single point of interest across the dense map, but it doesn’t hurt that Infinite Wealth’s various progression mechanics do a great job of feeding into one-another, creating the constant sensation that I’m progressing multiple goals with every single act. It all gels together to create that feeling of “just one more mission” at 2am when you know you should be putting the controller down and getting some sleep.

But aside from the stories and rewards, many of the side quests are worth doing just because they’re fun to play. In typical Yakuza/Like a Dragon fashion, there’s a lot of love shown towards video game history on the streets of Honolulu. But instead of these being contained to old playable SEGA arcade cabinets found across town, several of the mini games themselves are clearly pulling from familiar classics, some of which are in SEGA’s library, while others are most certainly not.

While we wait for SEGA’s reboot of Crazy Taxi, Infinite Wealth is here to hold us over with its take on the formula, where Ichiban becomes a delivery driver for an Uber Eats-esque service and needs to get food to hungry customers around town as quickly and stylishly as possible. If only a little Offspring or Bad Religion were playing, I’d be transported back to the year 2000 (RIP Dreamcast, you sweet summer child).

But if you want something a bit-less SEGA and a bit-more Nintendo, you can try out not one, but two separate mini games that pull from the Pokemon franchise. You can hop aboard a trolly for a sightseeing tour of the island, but instead of sitting back and soaking in the views, you need to get your camera out and take pictures of Sickos (their word, not mine, though also my word, which makes this feel like it was personally made for me) as they pop out of bushes, dangle from rooftops, and dance behind trees. But you have to act fast and be mindful of your framing when taking pictures if you want the best score.

If Snap-ping isn’t your preferred flavor of Pokemon, then you can once again collect dozens of Sujimon, level them up, compete in Pokemon Go-esque raids across town, and battle a version of the Elite 4 to become a Sujimon master. In a week where the entire internet is losing its mind over Palworld, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is the real Pokemon-killer that we should be spending our time on.

And 15 hours into Infinite Wealth, I just now unlocked the much-anticipated Dondoko Island resort builder and life simulator, RGG’s take on the Animal Crossing formula. It genuinely feels like an entire game could be built out of just this unfolding side quest, but that kind of absurd attention to detail has always been what we’ve loved about the Yakuza and Like a Dragon games.

But honestly, I wouldn’t be so invested in veering off the main path and seeing every single one of these side stories and activities through if it wasn’t for the complete likeability of my party, particularly Ichiban himself. Within the opening hour of Infinite Wealth, I was reminded of why I fell in love with Ichiban back in 2020’s Like a Dragon, and how he’s the perfect goofball to reside at the center of this world that oscillates between melodrama and absurdity.

As someone who spent the past few months replaying every game in the Final Fantasy VII compilation, including the PS1 original, Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, and 2020’s Remake, it’s refreshing to play as someone as stupidly optimistic and earnest as golden-retriever-turned-human Ichiban Kasuga. Don’t get me wrong – I love the Avalanche crew in FF7, and will die a thousand deaths for squat-master Zack Fair, but there’s just something about winding down back at the Revolve Bar with my Honolulu crew, downing a bunch of beers, unpacking a bit of our trauma, and belting out some god-awful karaoke. And if that’s not worth taking time away from the main mission for, I don’t know what is.