Let’s get this out of the way: of all the open world role playing games to be released in the space of, I dunno, a month, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth is the funniest. Yes, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has some jokes. Sure, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon’s Dogma 2 has wild moments of death, destruction, and chaos that can’t help but make you laugh. Side note, when an enemy picked me up, carried me into the sky, dropped me, and I was caught by my pawn, I knew Dragon’s Dogma 2 was gonna be a good ride. But, intentional comedy wise, Infinite Wealth is it.

The reason it works so well is because Infinite Wealth - like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Yakuza: Like A Dragon before it - treats its absurdity as reality. No matter how weird the side quest is, Kasuga believes it’s real. The characters in the game accept what’s happening. They don’t turn to the camera and shrug. They don’t deny the events they’re seeing. Kasuga wants to help a professor who designed a🌟 giant Roomba that accidentally eats people. Sure, he’s weirded out by the situation, but he accepts it as real the same way you’d do a weird favor for a friend. In Kasuga’s mind, it’s weird but it does not challenge his view of reality. And he doesn’t need to! The a😼udience already knows!

Infinite Wealth's Comedy Doesn't Need A Fourth Wall Break

This isn’t to say that Kasuga ignores what’s happening or pretends things aren’t strange. But rather than constantly pointing out things that are impossible on normal Earth, characters take a breath and go, “Alright. We’ll see what we can do!” No matter how bizarre, Kasuga accepts it. And even moments of unreality in the game, like the turn-based combat, are explained as coming from Kasuga’s perception of the world. We know that these aren’t really turn-based fights, but Kasuga sees them that way, so we do, too. Rather than be a 🅷proxy for the audience in the game, he’s a proxy for the game in the audience. Yeah, I’m proud of that sentence.

It’s also harder than it looks. Not the sentence, the comedy. In a straightforward comedy, it’s pretty simple for characters to believe their circumstances. In Father of the Bride - because that’s a topical reꩵference - Steve Martin’s character only has to accept that his daughter is getting married and that certain aspects of the wedding planning process are over the top. The comedy here works because he is realistically overwhelmed by an exaggerated situation. If he turned to the camera every few minutes and said, “Isn’t this weird?”, it would get annoying fast.

Again, I know that seems easy. But we’ve had decades of games that scream, “A sex toy! WE ARE SO RANDOM!” at the top of their lungs. A lot of games still feel the need to say to the audience, “THIS IS A JOKE! JUST MAKING YOU AWARE! FUNNY!”. Meanwhile, Infinite Wealth literally has a sex toy in the first few hours and the chara😼cters are basically like, “Yeah, seems okay.” Think about the movie Airplane! - another recent movie that all the kids love. Or Naked Gun, which isn’t much more new. Or - I dunno - Angie Tribeca, which we didn’t value when we had it. Oh, you don’t remember Angie Tribeca? Exactly. It’s your fault we lost one of Rashida Jones’ best shows.

Ichiban Is Able To Match Infinite Wealth's Energy

The point being, absurd comedy is effective when the characters don’t think what’s happening is completely absurd. It may be odd to them, but nobody is saying, “That’s not a thing!” When a character in Airplane! says, “Surely, you can’t be serious,” and Leslie Nielsen responds, “I am seriꦰous and don’t call me Shirely,” the joke works because the movie isn’t putting a hat on a hat. He didn’t say, “Did you call me Shirely?!” or “I can’t have heard you right!” or “Don’t be ridiculous!”. He accepted what he thought was real and responded to it in kind.

That’s also part of why Kasuga is a funnier character than, say, Cloud. Cloud was never intended to be funny, so this isn’t a big problem. But, in my opinion, a lot of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7’s funnier moments are held back by Cloud reacting to every situation with what amounts to an eyeroll and a sigh. True, he’s no꧃t outright denying the reality of the situation, but nor is he really embracing it or adding as a 🍎character. He’s just sort of acting like he thinks everything around him is dumb. To be fair, this works at times!

Him flatly responding “Cool” to Yuffie’s wild introduction is funny because he doesn’t deny or question Yuffie’s sudden surrealist change of scenery when she talks about herself. He simply doesn’t think she’s impressive. On the other hand, it can sometimes feel like Cloud is witnessing and responding to his world for the v𒆙ery first time and just doesn’t care. Although, like I said, it’s not a 1:1 comparison because Cloud isn’t meant to be a goof. He’s meant to be a tragic figure that defined me way too much in 1997.

But the way Kasuga reacts to weird situations is the way that people react to weird situations in everyday life. He politely goes along with it. “Oh. Um. Yeah. Sure, I can help!” He believes the situation is happening, even if it isn’t one he completely understands or likes. Even in the most 168澳洲幸运5开奖🌄网:absurd moments of🅘 the game like Sujimon, everyone k♏nows for a fact✨ Sujimon is a thing. Which is great, because the game trusts the audience to get the joke.

Characters talk about it as if it has real stakes for them, even when it’s clearly absolutelyꦛ bonkers. Whether or not Kasuga is imagining Sujimon the way he imagines his fights, he as a character doesn’t deny it or check in with the real world to say &♒ldquo;That just happened!”.

Breaking the fourth wall isn’t horrible. It can and does work all the time. “I bet you’re all wondering how I got here”. But even then in movies such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off - man, I’m killing it with these references - addressing the audience doesn’t negate the emotional stakes for Ferris. He may know there’s a movie audience, but he also knows that he could be in trouble if he’s caught skipping school. And for characters like Deadpool, breaking the fourth wall is part of their reality rather than a method of creating narrative distance. However, when done wrong, fourth wall breaking can feel like a lack of confidence in the world - a need to comment on the situation to make sure the audience gets it.

The more absurd a world is, the funnier it is when the characters act like it’s normal. That’s why Infinite Wealth is incredible. That’s why Infinite Wealth is so funny. It’s a flexible universe in which Kasuga can 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:help a hermit crab fall in love and deal ꦦwith extremely serious mobsters - and both are equally serious to him.