These days, it seems like every protagonist is edgy and serious–with maybe the exception of cartoon mascots–across movies, games, TV, and wherever else you can imagine. Leave it to the Like a Dragon game series, which is essentially a playable Japanese-crime soap opera when you get down to it, to rethink that idea. Ichiban Kasuga is a refreshing, powerful antithesis to that, and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth put his optimistic, unironic outlook on the world to the test–one he passes with flying colors.
Warning: We’ll be discussing some spoilers from very early and very late in the game. This picture of Ichiban is your chance to back out now.
Like a Dragon: Yakuza introduced us to Ichiban for the first time. As a longtime fan of the series, I was initially suspicious. I wondered, who’s this guy? Who’s this goofy-looking dork with hair like he bit down too hard on a live wire?
He quickly won me and many other Yakuza fans over quickly with his enthusiasm and seemingly bottomless well of optimism that he can pull from whenever he or someone he cares about seems to be cornered.
It was Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, though, that really cemented him as the new protagonist of this series. Sure, Like a Dragon: Yakuza had its share of drama, but Infinite Wealth put him through the wringer. He meets his first party member, Tomizawa, when Tomizawa takes him to a back alley of Honolulu to scam him. Then he meets his second, Chitose, when she drugs him and leaves him naked on a public beach (with only the most rudimentary command of English, too). After those early-game betrayals, he goes through bunches more, including the discovery that one of his warmest recent friendships was a ruse by the person who engineered Ichiban being fired from his job in disgrace.
In the final moments of the game, though, Ichiban tracks that man down and convinces him to turn himself in to the cops. Ichiban carries the guy through Kamurocho to the police station, even as people huck trash at them the whole way.
The game opens on Ichiban trying to help ex-yakuza find legitimate jobs, and ends with him trying to rehabilitate someone who literally tried to destroy every bit of his life, and even those of his friends.
Kiryu will always be my favorite protagonist, but the way Ichiban plays reflects the difference in their approaches. Kiryu is kind of a time traveler, acting like the yakuza depicted in old crime movies. His missions are often about helping people, but they’re often framed more like life lessons. For Ichiban, though, every chance to help someone is like a chance to cannonball off a diving board; he rushes into it against his own best interests and is immediately all-in. He trusts first and forgives quickly. It makes him seem naive at times, as we see in the opening hours of the game. But what it becomes is a rallying point for everyone around him. He’s naive, yes, but he’s also confident, brave, and reliable, and it’s a virus that begins to infect all of the people around him who had been pushed out of society in different way.
Throughout Infinite Wealth, you build relationships with each of your party members, and when you stop by the watering hole they all chill at after a hard day of questing, you have the chance to take that relationship to the next level (no, not like that) by listening to them vent about their own rough histories, and then helping them overcome them.
Kiryu spends games trying to honorably isolate himself from everyone he knows and loves, seeing his presence as a curse on their lives–that the drama coming around them is entirely his fault. Ichiban is the opposite, though, as he works overtime to unite everyone around him.
So many games put you in the shoes of grimdark or tortured people–Alan Wake, Spider-Man 2’s version of Peter Parker, Space Marine 2’s Captain Titus, FFVII’s Cloud, James Sunderland of Silent Hill 2, to name a few recent examples. Some of my favorite game characters are among that list, but even so, Ichiban continues to stand out as special in modern gaming: a video game hero who’s excited to be there, ready to get a team together, and take on all challengers without ever coming across as trite, false, or annoying.
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