Post Script

How Infinite Wealth’s sprawling universe avoids the perils of the MCU (contains spoilers)

The Dragon Of Dojima is dying, and for real this time. Having faked his death at the end of Yakuza in order to protect his loved ones, there was already a sense that Kazuma Kiryu was living on borrowed time. Now cancer will do what all those boss fights could not. It may feel like RGG Studio trying to have its cake and eat it. Having sold one game on the promise of Kiryu’s dramatic end, it has now managed to eke out at least two more: Infinite Wealth and The Man Who Erased His Name, the 2023 side-story that depicts Kiryu’s missing years. (Spoiler alert: this alleged time of discretion was spent loudly kicking hundreds of men in the stomach.)

You could be forgiven for approaching these developments with a good degree of suspicion. These are the antics commonly associated with the shared universes of Marvel, DC, Star Wars and the Tolkien estate. Bloated behemoths where there’s always another squeeze of the material to be had, whether that’s pillaging imagined pasts for endless origin tales or resurrecting the fan-favourite dead with the power of the Multiverse. Worse still, there’s the siloing of crucial backstory into spinoffs, as The Man Who Erased His Name seemingly does. This is the most pernicious of franchise behaviours: holding our basic narrative understanding hostage until we fork out for supplementary materials. At first glance, it resembles the Disney Plus-ificiation of videogame storytelling.

RGG Studio isn’t shy about these ambitions. Its recent games open with a new studio ident that riffs on Marvel’s – a lightning-fast montage through 20 years of characters, denoting another chapter in an ongoing project. Of course, where Marvel’s is a flipbook of ripped bods and perfect cheekbones, Like A Dragon’s is a quick succession of stocky 40-year-olds in tatty jackets, which lends it a knowing charm. How distrusting can you be of a game that opens with a hero shot of Taiga Saejima in his mangy old parka? This is the first hint that those pitchforks are unwarranted.

Play on and it soon emerges how little the events of The Man Who Erased His Name matter to Kiryu’s involvement in Infinite Wealth. A few supporting characters from that episode are slightly short-changed to keep the focus on Ichiban and his social circle. But the only essential piece of inherited information – that Kiryu is a fundamentally good man who will suffer in silence – is evident from just about any action he takes in the game. This is not the same as attempting to decipher The Marvels without having a Ms Marvel wiki open – or, more pertinently, unpicking Assassin’s Creed without an assortment of comics, novels and episodes scattered over every gaming format going.

Neither is it a cameo for the sake of a cameo – one of those low-effort drop-ins, pandering to Leonardo DiCaprio pointing memes. When Kiryu is sent back to Japan for medical reasons, the Honolulu mystery is pushed almost completely aside; what remains is an interrogation of his legacy. In a very literal sense: detective Date takes Kiryu on covert excursions to former friends and then aggressively questions him on the impact he made to these lives. Think of it as It’s A Wonderful Life with more uppercuts.

It has the strange effect of feeling like a man attending his own funeral, but also a sincere attempt to pick up threads long abandoned and consider how people’s lives continued without you. Have we thought much about Yotaro Nakajima, the manager of Yakuza 5’s Nagasu Taxi, since finishing that game? Honestly, no, we haven’t. But seeing him in good health here, continuing to expound the teachings of a very punchy cabbie he knew years ago, creates an evocative impression of a world outside Kiryu’s own. Could it be that the real potential of a shared universe is not the empty calories of surprised recognition, but a hint of life beyond its authored constraints? The delightful notion that our protagonist was himself just a bit part in another person’s heroic journey?

Compounding that is the sense of time Infinite Wealth has to play with. In returning to the Kamurocho map, the Yakuza series has always successfully charted the geographic passing of time. In step with real-world developments, Sega arcades have now been replaced with GIGO game centres. But Kiryu’s brawl down memory lane also shows what 20 years of gang wars does to the participants. When a trio of beloved faces finally put in a late-game appearance – the closest Infinite Wealth gets to shameless pandering to series fans – they’re allowed to be old and bitter and (dare we say it?) slightly disappointing. Though not for long: fighting them serves up a phantasmagorical moment where your past encounters blaze across the sky, reminding you that these are rivals for the ages.

The greatest of these throwbacks is reserved for our hero himself: grey haired and thin in the face, more melancholic on the mic (Baka Mitai hits especially hard in these circumstances), and forced to find his place in a radically different combat system. Or so you think. Later, after some crucial soul-searching, RGG unleashes him from those JRPG restraints, allowing a temporary burst of realtime bone-breaking. For a few seconds The Man Who Erased His Name is renewed and refreshed: teeth fly, jaws rattle, and Infinite Wealth finds a perfect pocket of narrative and mechanical harmony. Simply existing may earn a superhero applause in a cinema auditorium. Kazuma Kiryu is reaching for something more.

Could it be that the real potential of a shared universe is not the empty calories of surprised recognition?