Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth Successfully Brings the Series’ Heat and Hilarity to Hawaii

ign.com:

I had assumed that the Like a Dragon formula could only thrive in the Japanese settings inspired by Tokyo, Osaka, and Yokohama, but after having a 20-minute hands-on with the game at Tokyo Game Show I can confidently say that the series’ signature streetfighting and silliness has stayed strong in its switch to a sun-kissed Hawaiian island without missing a beat - or indeed a beatdown.

With Ichiban Kasuga trading his wide-lapel leisure suit for a flowery shirt and flip-flops, my hands-on with Infinite Wealth began on a local beach where I had to immediately beach off a gang of local thugs. While it stopped short of a Ken vs Ken-style dance battle, certainly Ichiban and the gang are more fleet footed in combat this time around, since you’re now able to move each character around in order to get into more optimal positions to attack. This gives the combat a far more dynamic feel than that of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, making the street fighting feel more like a more balanced hybrid of turn-based fighting and the series’ more traditional Streets of Rage-style scraps.

In fact, having main Like a Dragon/Yakuza poster boy Kazuma Kiryu join Ichiban’s party only enhances this feeling further, since the Dragon of Dojima brings both his ability to switch fighting stances as well as his Heat gauge with him. This means that once you’ve built up enough Heat by executing a string of attacks in one of three fighting styles of your choice, you can hit the right trigger to go into beast mode and deliver some real-time combos using the face buttons, much like you would in the more traditional Like a Dragon games. As someone whose preference is generally for the beat ‘em up style of earlier games in the series along with the upcoming Like a