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Last year’s gaming calendar was packed with big releases — yet when it all shook out, Sony’s little platformer Astro Bot got the most attention from the “major” game of the year awards celebrations.
That’s fine. Astro Bot is a great game. But also it’s not fine because it totally threw off my personal award season predictions, and I’m going to pretend to be bitter about that for the purposes of this introduction.
2024 was packed with big RPGs, and historically that genre has done very well in end of the year awards. Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 were smashing critical and commercial successes, and I thought last year would follow a similar track. It had excellent titles like Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and Metaphor: ReFantazio that got some recognition, but didn’t quite hit the levels of mainstream success I thought they could. Dragon Age: The Veilguard was a weird and surprising disappointment, somehow upsetting both long-time fans and newcomers alike.
Apparently 2024's RPGs all needed to have a colon in their titles.
In all of my prognostication and needless internet awards speculation, I only barely mentioned the colon-having Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. As the year wrapped up, I hadn’t yet gone deep on the game. I missed it entirely on its release in January and picked it up on sale near the end of the year, but even in just a few hours it charmed me and reminded me all over again why I’m a fan of this series.
Now that I’ve had the chance to play much more of it, I’ve realized what a travesty it is that it wasn’t at the top of the awards pile.
Infinite Wealth is the latest “main” game in the long-running Like a Dragon/Yakuza saga, and a direct follow-up to 2020’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The number of colons is getting ridiculous now. Even my old colon-loving English professor would probably tell me to tone it down, but I can’t change the way these games were titled.
