At a whopping 127 hours by Steam playtime, Infinite Wealth is now the longest game I’ve ever played by a huge margin. It took me nearly 40 hours longer than its predecessor, and over 30 hours longer than it took to earn a platinum trophy in Persona 5 Royal. Whatever else you want to say about this game, you can’t say that you’re not getting your money’s worth. The bigger question is whether this incredible level of time investment is worth it. Although this is in many ways a great game, it’s harder than I’d like to say that it was 127 hours well spent.
Let’s start with the good news. The main story is well done, and you could probably get through it in a relatively normal amount of time for a JRPG if you’re focused on it. It has some fun fights and a lot of callbacks that I’m sure are exciting and rewarding content if you’ve played Yakuza 0-6. The new characters are deeply integrated into the plot and have satisfying arcs. Honolulu is a fun city to explore and feels as different from Ijincho as you’d expect.
A lot of the other things that were good in the last game remain fun. The battle system is still great, and made more so by new jobs. The music is great. There are some entertaining side quests, the minigames are gloriously stupid, and so on. You’d expect at least a few things that are horribly underdeveloped in a game this long, but everything is basically fine at a minimum.
The bad news is that while nothing truly feels incomplete, many parts of the game would have benefited from more refinement. Although the minigames are fun, there are only a handful of new ones and there’s nothing as crazy as kart racing or running a public company from the last game. Most of them, like the parodies of Crazy Taxi and Pokemon Snap are solid experiences that run out of new content after 20 minutes and don’t have worthwhile rewards. The highlights are supposed to be Donodoko Island and Sujimon battling, which parody Animal Crossing and Pokemon respectively, but neither of them have the depth to reach their full potential. Dondoko island boils down to spamming buildings all over your island until you get the next cutscene, and Sujimon battling is almost entirely determined by who has the best rarity Sujimon at the highest level. Since each Sujimon only has one move and all moves do pretty much the same thing with different damage totals, there’s little reason to anything other than mash A and occasionally swap for type matchups. You need to complete Dondoko Island and the Sujimon league if you want to complete all the quests, but they’re each long enough that you could have finished an entirely different game instead. That was one thing in the last game when the minigames were as fun as many other full games, but in this case it really didn’t feel worth the time.
Sadly, the minigames aren’t the only place where you get the feeling that the devs didn’t get all the time they needed. The story rushes to make sure every major character returns, but several of them clearly have no reason to be back and barely play any role other than being present. The final battles at the end of the game are well made and difficult, but the evil monologues you’re treated to reveal that the villains never really had any kind of coherent plan, which makes you wonder what the point of it all was and whether there was supposed to be more content that would have tied everything together better. It’s all capped off by one of the main party characters not even being present for the epilogue and instead just getting a single sentence to explain what happened. It’s not quite “and then everybody died, the end”, but it’s hard to imagine an explanation other than not having time to make another epilogue cutscene.
At the end of the day, Infinite Wealth is a great game that just tries to do too much. RGG wanted to have a sendoff for Kiryu while also telling a new story on the scale of the last game, and they really should have picked one or the other. Although they do a better job of integrating those two very disparate goals than you might expect, trying to cram all of that into a game with anything resembling a normal runtime just means that nothing gets the time it deserved. It’s still a good game, but I can’t help but wonder if it would have been better as two separate games that each had a single goal. If nothing else, that would have prevented the need to break the cast up into two small parties and given you more flexibility to build your battle team.
Still, whether or not it would have been better in a different format, Infinite Wealth is the game we have. It’s overwhelming in its scale and underwhelming in some of its systems, but for all its flaws it’s still a good time. I’m glad I played it and would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoyed other RGG games. Unfortunately, there’s no escaping that it needed to focus on doing fewer things better.
Rating: 80%
Time to beat: an extremely long time
MSRP: $70
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