Back in 2024, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth had the misfortune of arriving into a crowded arena, elbowing for attention alongside a wave of heavyweight RPGs. If it slipped past your radar then, consider this your official nudge: it’s still one of the most generous, gloriously overstuffed open-world experiences Sega has ever shipped — and time has only been kind to it.
This is an easy game to underestimate on paper. It’s a turn-based JRPG built around a former yakuza and a beleaguered ex-detective, set partly in Hawaii, wrapped in the kind of melodrama that would feel absurd anywhere else but somehow lands with real emotional weight here. It’s the sort of title that swings from a gut-wrenching story beat straight into a minigame about running a resort island, and never once apologizes for the tonal whiplash.
What makes Infinite Wealth so quietly remarkable is the sheer scale of it. This is a roughly 84-hour journey if you’re doing more than sprinting through the main story — and most players won’t want to sprint, because the detours are where the magic lives. The open world is packed with side content that ranges from the heartfelt to the deliriously silly, and it rewards curiosity at almost every turn.
Here’s why it holds up so well two years on:
- Density over filler. The map isn’t padded with busywork icons; the diversions feel handcrafted, from combat challenges to full-blown minigame ecosystems.
- A combat system with teeth. The turn-based battles bring positioning and job-class variety into play, giving encounters more tactical bite than the genre’s reputation suggests.
- Storytelling that commits. The narrative is unafraid to be earnest, and it earns its big moments through characters you genuinely grow to care about.
The great irony of its 2024 launch is that the competition worked against it. Surrounded by other big-ticket role-players fighting for the same limited hours in players’ lives, Infinite Wealth risked becoming the game everyone meant to get around to. But titles like this don’t expire. If anything, the fog of hype around its rivals has cleared, and what remains is a confident, richly built world that stands entirely on its own merits.
There’s never been a better excuse to finally jump in. Whether you’re a series veteran or a total newcomer curious about the franchise’s turn toward turn-based combat, Infinite Wealth offers dozens upon dozens of hours of the kind of content that most games would happily stretch across a trilogy. It aged like fine wine because it was built on genuine craft — and that’s the sort of thing that only looks better with hindsight.
