The best way I can describe this is Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a 7/10 mechanically and a 10/10 story-wise. It is I think better than 0, the previous high water mark for a plot in the franchise. When I was playing YLAD my dad started watching me play it like it was a movie because he got into the plot.

Mechanically it's a modern take on old-school Dragon Quest. Very simple by design, whatever.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is mechanically like an 8.5/10 but unfortunately the story is also an 8.5/10.

Like it's not ever as bad as the Yakuza stories have gotten. We're not back to surprise rubber bullets or beautiful eyes or anything like that.

It's just the game is sold to you as being a dual protagonist story like 0, and about halfway through the parties split so you get Team Ichiban and Team Kiryu and you start alternating protagonists like 0.

But it's really more fair to say that when you hit that spot Ichiban is done being the protagonist of his own game and it becomes the Kazuma Kiryu show.

And honestly that sucks? It feels like they wrote about 3/4ths of a story about Ichiban's adventure in Hawaii and then decided Like a Dragon Gaiden wasn't enough of a goodbye for Kiryu and just slammed another Gaiden-length game into the side of Ichiban's game.

Kiryu leaves Ichiban's party and goes back to Japan the plot events left for Ichiban can fit into about an hour of exposition across maybe a half-dozen more plot beats, but that's unfortunately spread across 3.5 more chapters.

One of your party members shows up in the penultimate chapter of the game and his reason for showing up is almost literally "everyone else was doing shit and I got bored, also you leaned on how OP I was last game anyways."

Honestly the game I think would have worked better if you had had Kiryu leave and just played out the rest of Ichiban's story in probably a chapter or two, up until he leaves for the final dungeon.

And then when you end on that cliffhanger you swap over and play out the amazing tale of Kiryu versus a v-tuber.

Because so much shit happens so fast in Kiryu's side of things in his 3.5 chapters that it is legitimately hard to keep up when we keep slam-cutting back to Ichiban's sometimes tortuously slow paced side of things.

Also like.... there's one plot hole in particular that bugs the shit out of me.

One of the antagonists we see basically laughing and winning at life, mocking Ichiban for always being one step behind, in Chapter 11 when we last see him before the finale.

And then his next appearances in the game he's like.

Got a full beard and bags under his eyes. He's being hunted by people RL and on social media. He's had the shit beaten out of him and his ankle twisted.

What happened? What got written out??

(I have a theory at one point in the story he might have killed a couple of major NPCs who wind up getting a quiet happy ending and written all the fucking way out of the plot.)

(But someone rightly pointed out that if those two died then Ichiban and the player literally would have spend 3/4ths of a 100 hour JRPG eating shit and losing with nothing to show for it and it got moved along.)

I do want to emphasize again, I am really emphasizing the negative here.

Ichiban's second outing is overall a good game.

It's just its predecessor had a really fucking amazing story and this one is... solidly good but incredibly uneven.

It's an 8.5 but if it could have kept up the momentum it had in Chapters 1-7 I think that it could have been a 9.

It just gets really lopsided in Kiryu's favor.

I think the actual complaint I have about LADIW's story is that it feels.... mean-spirited for lack of a better word?

Honestly I'd say over half the plot is our heroes try to come up with an idea and only sort of gets them closer if it works at all and also often gets them in deeper shit.

It is just them taking forced L after L to the point that about midway through the game, right before the party split, we get a scene that is more or less Ichiban complaining the cast is just spinning their wheels and trying random shit.

It is the cast basically always on the backfoot.