hi idk if ur knowlegable about this but i hope u are. what's with the gaiden/infinite wealth situation? are they the same game or two different games? if they're different ones, are they coming out at the same time? are they both rgg8 or is one a spinoff or What.... sorry im just rly confused by new game announcement stuff always

yeah i can answer that! they are two different games. i will try my best to clarify.

RGG Gaiden (Like a Dragon: Gaiden) is what I’d equate to being Yakuza/RGG 6.5 more or less. It’s not going to be as big a production as a typical mainline game, but it’s a canon addition to the mainline story. you’ll play as kiryu (code name “joryu”) and learn what the hell he was up to between RGG 6 (Yakuza 6) and RGG 7 (Yakuza: Like a Dragon). This game comes out November 8th of this year and is already available for pre-order. if you see any content where kiryu’s a secret agent, that’s gaiden.

LAD: Infinite Wealth is RGG 8. It’s a big beefy full mainline game that comes out in spring of 2024 and it takes place after the events of RGG 7 (Yakuza: Like a Dragon). you’ll play as both ichiban and kiryu. if you see any content where Ichiban and kiryu are in hawaii and/or kiryu’s got a weird grey haircut with bangs, that’s this game.

Explanation to the best of my ability on why the naming has been so convoluted is as follows (apologies if this is long and confusing):

The name situation with LAD: Infinite Wealth/RGG 8 is stupidly confusing because they chose to release it with a different name in Japan than to the US– so in the US it’s LAD: Infinite Wealth, in japan it’s RGG 8. This is because they released RGG 7 as “Yakuza: Like a Dragon” in the US and basically thought westerners would be confused by the sudden jump to “Like a Dragon 8” considering there’s only one game that’s been released with the name Like a Dragon in the US, if that makes any sense.

as for why they’re phasing out the name “yakuza”, i believe they only originally named the series yakuza in the US because it’d be easier to immediately get across what the games are about to westerners prior to them having a bigger, more knowledgeable audience in the west. so now that they have a bigger western audience and don’t have to worry as much about all that, they’ve been trying to advertise with the “like a dragon” name and drop the use of “yakuza” for the most part.

sooooo yeah infinite wealth is pretty needlessly complicated because of how they chose to name it differently in Japan vs the US and all that– to the point where yokoyama even tried to explain it in a letter posted to Twitter but it really didn’t help anything at all and I still think it was a kinda stupid call. In my brain it’s just yakuza 8 honestly lmao.