Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth makes me miss Persona 2: Eternal Punishment
I think it's funny to do two posts with this title in a row.
I’ve been addicted to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth in a way that I haven’t been for a conventional video game in quite some time1. It’s an incredible sequel to the also-incredible Like a Dragon/Yakuza 7. Having been reminded that it came out this year, I’d probably say Infinite Wealth is my personal2 game of the year for 2024.
There’s a cool thing that the Like a Dragon (LAD hereafter3) games do that I wish more media would, especially as I get older: it features a full party of older adults! For me, there’s one other archetypical example of this: Persona 2: Eternal Punishment.
Going to go on a tangent partly to cannibalize some chunks from an unpublished draft on the Caligula Effect that are coincidentally very relevant to what I’m trying to say here:
The Caligula Effect, its remake/remaster The Caligula Effect: Overdose, and its sequel The Caligula Effect 2 are games written by Satomi Tadashi, who was responsible for writing the first three Persona games (that is, Persona, Innocent Sin, and Eternal Punishment, not Persona 3). In a nutshell, the Caligula Effect is anime The Matrix. The premise is that highly technologically advanced near-future vocaloids are able to somehow use their music to trap people in a virtual world that is meant to free them from their worries/fears/regrets in the real world by creating an idealized utopia for them to inhabit. Our protagonists (who call themselves the Go-Home Club in both games) realize that the world isn’t real and set out on a quest to escape back into the real world. Along the way they are opposed by the vocaloid (μ & Regret for Caligula Effect 1 & 2 respectively) responsible for maintaining the virtual world (Mobius & Redo) assisted by a cast of (Ostinato & Obbligato) Musicians, who are human volunteers participating in the virtual world and artists responsible in part for the music that brainwashes and/or otherwise is keeps people trapped in the false reality via fan worship. If the above sounds cool to you and you don’t want spoilers know that I very very highly recommend both and you should play them and come back. The games are extremely Japanese, the soundscape is thematically J-pop-y, and the localization is not very good, but if those are things you can tolerate, again, very strong recommend.
[Spoiler warnings for every game mentioned so far here.]
I can’t even remember exactly how I found the Caligula Effect, but I was sold on it as soon as I learned of its association with Satomi Tadashi. I’m a big fan of the earlier Persona games—I definitely found them long before they were cool. Revelations: Persona was released in late 1996 and might have taken off then were it not rapidly and titanically overshadowed by the early 1997 release of Final Fantasy VII. I remember being in elementary school shortly after its release and going over to an older friend’s house where he had a Playstation in his basement and was playing Persona, and I became enamored with it. Several years later my family rented a Playstation for a long weekend and I picked out Persona to go with it. We didn’t get a memory card so I’d have to play it in marathon sessions without turning the console off. My longest run was ended by a Toilet Kid.
You can definitely see lots of the Persona DNA in The Caligula Effect, filtered through a lens that also has the context from the social link focus that the later Persona games headed towards—Caligula Effect takes a lot of the same ideas in a different direction.
As Philemon explains at the very beginning, everyone wears a mask. Thematically, both Persona and the Caligula Effect are about how people present themselves to the world (the mask) versus their “true self”. The Satomi games do this somewhat more organically compared to the latter Persona games, which sequester a lot of character exploration to an initial character episode and social link events. To be fair, the Caligula Effect games do this too and both series have the problem where main story character development is never allowed to bring in significant elements from the social link/character episodes that a player may not have seen yet, but the driving plots of the Caligula Effect games have a constant focus on this identity disparity between who people are in Mobius & Redo and who they are in the real world, and also have robust casts of foil antagonists, whereas the recent Persona games do this only against a backdrop of high schoolers doing high school things with main plots that are more disconnected from the characters’ relationship with each other.
This is tied to one of my minor complaints with the latter Persona games, that they’ve so far been constrained thematically to high schoolers, whereas one of the most fascinating elements of Eternal Punishment was that its cast was primarily working age adults. I think you could do a Persona game in the latter style with adult characters but you would have to be more creative in how you approach the mask-vs-true-self dichotomy4; it would need to move away from a coming-of-age discovering of one’s unique/aspirational identity towards a stronger focus on reconciling their competing identities and their place in the world versus their internal aspirations. The Caligula Effect avoids this trap by positing a world where people of all ages and walks of life are placed into a shared virtual context, and its characters are a mix of both and thus more refreshingly varied because of it.
The most extreme example of this is Amiki Sasara. She’s an extremely kind-hearted and doting but kind-of airheaded girl that joins early in the Caligula Effect 2 as your party’s first tank. Her early character episodes deal with her being almost suicidally protective of the other party members. But she eventually explains, if anyone has to die in the course of escaping Redo, it’s best that it’s her—after all in the real world she is 86 years old, her husband has recently died, and her grandchildren are all grown adults. With little left to live on for, she was pulled into Redo while reminiscing over old diary entries.
This recontextualizes an incredible amount about her character and her interactions with the rest of the party, colored also by the fact that you are the only person she has shared this with. Suddenly, things like her awkward inability to use a smartphone—with her blurry profile selfie and signing every text message with her name—goes from being kind of a cute quirk to having an impactful background explanation. She clearly treasures every moment she’s spending with her new friends and quickly reassures everyone who is having doubts about their relationships with their parents and other loved ones. In a lot of ways it’s an incredible subversion of the mask-vs-true-self narrative—her mask is merely her true self out of time, given second chances at youth in a way that makes the idea that she wants to help everyone (including herself!) escape Redo extremely bittersweet.
Another way to frame the difference between Persona and the Caligula Effect is that Persona is about identity exploration prospectively and the Caligula Effect is more about identity exploration retrospectively. The protagonists in the latter Persona games are concerned about who they are growing into being, the protagonists in the Caligula Effect games have to grapple with a complex mix of who they were before, the ways in which their Mobius/Redo manifestations are reflections of themselves, and how their present struggles might change who they become after5.
Eternal Punishment doesn’t explicitly dive too deep into questions of identity related to adulthood but I feel it deserves a lot of credit for gesturing in that direction. And also, it kind of doesn’t have to directly; part of what makes EP and LAD fascinating to me is how it takes later-in-life characters and forces them into unusual circumstances. Younger characters are a little more blank-slate-y, older characters color a story by experiences they’ve already had.
Eternal Punishment and the Caligula Effect have already shown it’s possible to do a duality-of-inner-and-outer-self with age-diverse characters in a modern setting6.
Like a Dragon does some interesting things with its main cast being older. The Yakuza series is more of a complex crime drama/soap opera versus a serious attempt at contemplative philosophy-of-identity exploration7, but LAD still gives us a look at the societal struggles of older adults who are forced to live outside the usual social systems. Aside from the main character, who has just been released from prison after over a decade for a crime he didn’t commit, our first three party members are, in order, a disgraced detective, a homeless ex-nurse8, and a (female) hostess bar manager, all here with “older” omitted from their description. LAD also does some neat things with its class system by tying it to inspirations from part-time jobs in the first one and vacation activities in the second one. It’s also just extremely fun from a meta perspective just imagining these silly brawls breaking out in the street as the main character hallucinates himself as being a video game protagonist9.
Certainly some of this is a reflection of me getting older, but I hope video games, and especially RPGs in the style of Persona and Like a Dragon, continue to have a diversity of age in their characters.
As in sneaking in 5-10 minute short sessions before work and losing an embarrassing amount of sleep to it. I spend quite a lot of time on video games but it’s usually a lot more self-disciplined than this!
I’m a huge, huge sucker for RPGs with class mechanics; was on the fence between picking up this or Metaphor, which is another game I’m sure will trash my sleep schedule.
These games have the same weird problem as Resident Evil where they have one name in the original Japanese and another in the English translation that just continually carried on. The games are made by Ryū ga Gotoku, which is also the name of the series in Japan—Like a Dragon. The games were all called Yakuza in the US and so we get this funny name crossover happening with Yakuza 7, in the US it’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon whereas in Japan it’s Like a Dragon: Yakuza (coincidentally, Resident Evil did the same thing here, also on their 7th entry: it was Biohazard: Resident Evil in Japan and Resident Evil: Biohazard in the US).
Here and also going forward, I mean LAD to mean the more recent games, what might also be referred to as Yakuza 7 & 8.
I think it’s interesting/fun to think about what a latter-style Persona game would need to look like with adult characters. What kind of framing device could you use aside from high school to have a setting where characters from multiple walks of life would be forced together? My pet idea here is a shopping mall, where you might have a variety of stores and offices to pull professions from, all in one common location.
There’s some amount of narrative contriving to get the protagonists to go from wanting to be there to wanting to escape but this is also well-contrasted against a cast of antagonists who all have reasons for wanting to stay and thus needing to stand in our protagonists’ way. The Overdose version of the first game even has a series of chapters that take place from the antagonist party’s perspective.
I’m not sure precisely how true this is, but I’ve heard it explained that the reason high school dramas are really popular in Japan is because it’s considered to be the last point in time where people are free to be individuals before they’re stamped into a more rigidly organized society. I think this is partly true in the west as well, though perhaps it’s slightly more centered around college for many people instead.
Taking bonkers plot points and making them both compelling in a serious way and goofy in heartwarming way is a series staple. Yakuza 0 kicks off with an intrigue mystery over who owns the land rights to an empty alley. LAD’s plot starts to move quickly after it’s discovered the main character has mysteriously ended up with a single counterfeit yen note. One of Infinite Wealth’s most bittersweet side quests ends with a Yakuza faction whose gimmick is adult baby play helping an old man make snow to give his dying wife one last happy memory.
Resume gaps are notoriously deadly to one’s career in Japan.
I originally thought it was kind of lame that there’s a minor plot aside that Kasuga’s hero obsession is causing him to hallucinate all the enemies as being goofy video gamey characters (fortunately it’s only lampshaded once or twice) except that it has a pretty funny payoff in Infinite Wealth where another person is main character for a little bit and there’s a circumstantial explanation for why they’re also hallucinating all the enemies as goofy RPG characters.