After finishingLike a Dragon: Infinite Wealtha couple of weeks ago, I was mostly killing time waiting forFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Luckily for me, that chronological murder involvedBalatroandHelskate, but it was clear that the start of 2024 was going to be all about big, character driven RPGs, especially withDragon’s Dogma 2set to arrive as I roll credits on Sephiroth’s sophomore Shinra saga. But in playing Like a Dragon and Final Fantasy back to back, I have come to the conclusion that they are both very stupid, just in very different ways.
Being ‘stupid’ is not inherently a criticism. I agree with our five star review of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and wrote abouthow personally moving it was for me. But it’s also a game in which you spend a significant amount of timehelping a crawfish and a hermit crab fall in lovein order to unlock the ability to throw them at your enemy. It’s stupid. That’s often the best part about it. Both LAD and FF embrace the idea of being a video game, but I have been struck by how differently the two approach this idea.
The Duality of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth & Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Infinite Wealth, at its heart, is a very grounded story. A man goes to Hawaii in search of his birth mother, and becomes embroiled in international gang warfare heavily linked to the consequences of Japan’s Five Year Rule designed to disincentivise joining the Yakuza, all while his friend struggles through a cancer diagnosis. Though he fights a giant squid on his journey, the core plot is as gritty as they come. And yet this is often posed as a goofy jaunt through paradise, with pulling tricks as a delivery boy, saving cows from an overpowered vacuum cleaner, and taking pictures of men hanging off rooftops in oiled up underwear all heavily encouraged.
Infinite Wealth, for the most part, engages in what you might call ‘believable silliness’. The suspension of disbelief only needs to extend as far as understanding that it really is possible to be as big a himbo as Ichiban Kasuga, and you’re there. Even the ridiculous characters you fight are not real, but figments of Ichiban’s imagination as he pictures himself as a Dragon Quest-style hero. If everyone in the world was cuckoo of Cocoa Puffs, that’s the universe of Like a Dragon.
Environmental Concerns Feature Heavily
In both games, you meet an array of colourful characters across your journey, you have a naive protagonist who finds himself dragged into all sorts of trouble, and both even share an environmentalist angle with Like a Dragon concerned with the dumping of toxic waste and the Avalanche gang committing eco terrorism. But it’s in this final similarity that we find the biggest difference.
Like a Dragon’sproblem is very real. There are people out there dumping nuclear waste illegally, and there are unscrupulous criminals willing to harm the environment to profit off that - the fact Like a Dragon’s first look at American culture included a for-profit church acting in the leader’s self-interest is also tellingly true to life.
Final Fantasy 7’sproblems, however, are not. There is no such thing as mako, no aliens, no mysterious robed figures who shuffle around ominously to alter life events, and while I can’t exactly claim with certainty that there’s no god, I can at least say there’s no god like the cosmic forces of devastation we fight throughout Final Fantasy 7. On the one hand, the whole thing is a metaphor and the real point is nothing to do with mako but a criticism of industrialisation, with mako a stand-in for coal or oil. On the other, the narrative becomes so far removed from its environmental concerns and turns into a tale of stopping an evil monster with interplanetary powers instead.
I still find Final Fantasy 7 to be a moving story because of the strength of its characters, but it does feel as though it throws out some of its core framework in order to be the most exciting video game possible, while Like a Dragon remains true to the story it has always been trying to tell. This gives Final Fantasy 7 more freedom - to pull us into a real-life polygon block game of Fort Condor, to turn us into frogs, to blast grainy TV footage of a tortured card player into our brains as we win a game of Queen’s Blood - but also makes it a little blunter. Like a Dragon is piercing in its emotional beats because it will not compromise on them for gameplay, for the story, or for a cheap laugh.
Like a Dragon’s cutscenes are long, but by the end of the journey, it earns them. Final Fantasy 7 is the same, except you switch out ‘cutscenes’ and swap in ‘boss battles’. Final Fantasy’s philosophy allows it to elevate high octane gameplay moments to a level Like a Dragon cannot reach, no matter how many grunts we kick into a giant shark’s mouth. At the same time, Final Fantasy 7 will never be as grounded as Like a Dragon manages to be, and that can leave a more powerful impression. Neither approach is inherently better than the other - I’m just glad video games are the sort of medium where the two stupidest games of the year can also make you cry.
