If you see clips of with no prior knowledge about the game or the series it belongs to, you are going to find yourself both very amused ⛎and very confused. Infinite Wealth leans hard into the absurdity that fans of the series love it for.

You can recruit weird dudes to your fight club league and pit them against other weird dudes in a skewed, messed up interpretation of Pokemon. Each ‘job’, or class, that a character has will give them a different weird moveset, which is how you will end up seeing♊ characters scrubbing down their enemies in combat or smacking their opponents with gigantic frozen ahi tuna fish.

The whole party can hop on segways and speed down Honolulu’s streets, smacking into every car on the way. You can play a dating app minigame where a girl will call Kasuga ‘100 percent oomfie material’. I🍌n a twist on Pokemon Snap, your party can hop on a trolley and take pictures of half-naked, gyrating men in butterfly masks along your route.

Now, imagine seeing screenshots or footage of any of these things with no context. Of course it won’t make any sense – but its weirdness sure is c𒉰ompelling.

Of course, you could say this about any game. After all, that sense of humour that so easily brings substories from realism to bizarre in a heartbeat has been present in th൲e series from the very beginning. Every instalment has fan-favourite stories that explore everythi🦹ng from freeing a woman from a laughably weird cult to fighting grown men dressed as babies, complete with diapers.

Infinite Wealth though has achieved a higher level of virality than any game before it, and it’s pretty clear why. It’s the best-selling game in the series, passing one million units sold within its first week. The previous best-selling game, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, sold a total of 1.8 million units over four years. Infinite Wealth is far more popular than its predecessor because it’s been marketed specific꧟ally t⭕o draw in a Western audience.

That means that we are seeing a Western audience brand new to the series discover its bizarre sense of humour in real time. On English-speaking social media, people who have never experienced the sublime pleasure of a great Yakuza substory are seeing clips of one of the weirdest contemporary🐷 video games ever made and asking, ‘What on earth could this game possibly be about? How could all these bizarre things be part of a single cohesive video game?’

Then they want to find out, and they realise that none of it feels cheap or forced for the novelty – this is just what♚ the series is like, and what it’s always been like. Infinite Wealth took what fans loved about the series’ tone and distilled it, giving the game’s base experience a vibrantly unique tone while piling what seems like an impossible amount of extra gameplay on top of it. Every screenshot and video shows you a different aspect of a game that somehow makes all of it make sense, which is a truly incredible feat.

But more than this, it’s built to go viral specifically within its new target demographic, which it’s been marketing heavily to, albeit 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:with mixed results. Infinite Wealth is the first Like A Dragon game set in America, and it uses its new setting🦹 to huge success. Kasuga is a Japanese man surrounded by Americans, and the game⛦ lets you view American culture through the eyes of a foreigner. It satirises the social reality of the country with nuance and skill while never punching down or being mean-spirited, which has given us some of the funniest lines I’ve ever seen.

In one fairly early scene, a police officer looks on while Kasuga and friends get into a fight. When Eric Tomizawa, a Hawaiian local who has mixed Japanese and American heritage, asks him for help defusing the situation, the officer says that he only serves the American public and has no interest in getting involved in a fight between Hawaii’s homeless and “some no-name foreigners”. Tomizawa yells back indignantly, “I am an American, you ass!” It’s a fantastic touch. In another instance, after losing to Kasuga in a Sujimon battle, a rich guy says, “Unbelievablꦡe! This is America, the poor don’t overthrow the rich! You’re supposed to worship me!”

Previous Like A Dragon games gleefully but lovingly made fun of its own bizarre Japanese culture, but Infinite Wealth turns that same hilarious, scathing eye on something that new Western audiences can understand on a deeper level. It highlights the weirdness and the injustice so patently obvious to audiences outside of the country by calling it out so blatantly that you almost can’t believe they just came out and said it like that. That makes Infinite Wealth not just funny, but an incredibly well-made and well-written satirical cultural artefact with surprising and compelling relevancy. Because it picks apart American culture and social ills, English-speaking audiences can get its humour on a level they might not otherwise have, and that makes the memes it produces endlessly shareabl🐈e.

Like a Dragon has always been socially progressive and relevant to the times it was made in, but pointing that sharp eye ༒towards its new target demographic was a stroke of genius. The memes will keep rolling in, and continue convincing newcomers that yes, this game was made for me as much as it was made for Japanese players. I couldn’t be happier about it. Every time I see a video of some guy with coconuts on his head falling out of a tree and immediately start swinging at Kasuga, I relish the fact that my current favourite game is going to reach some newꦚ, confused Twitter user, and possibly create one new Yakuza fan in the process.

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