Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, unsurprisingly, is a game that features money, and it turns out one of the ways you can earn a lot of it very early on is by dedicating a huge number of hours to becoming a master of mahjong, with one player claiming to have become a millionaire by the game’s second chapter by doing exactly that.
If you’re playing RGG’s latest release, odds are you’ve been sucked into at least one minigame-based time sink so far, with the likes of Dondoko Island and the pursuit of Sujimon-battling glory being the most obvious candidates to have dragged you astray. Then again, maybe you’ve gotten really into trivia, talk radio, or, in this case, a certain tile-based strategy game.
Yup, a reddit user with the handle tigerwarrior02 has been busy playing just a little bit of mahjong during their 40 hours or so with Infinite Wealth so far. Rather than heading to Hawaii, they’ve elected to stick around “in Yokohama with the boys” just after starting chapter two and claim to have managed to turn “the ¥10,000 you have at the beginning of the game into (so far) nearly ¥12,000,000”.
How? Well, by playing more than a few games at Vista Mahjong in Isezaki Ijincho’s Chinatown, and gradually working their way up from the one star table everyone starts at, to the royal table that’s reserved for the best of high stakes players. “This isn’t the first time I’ve done this, by the way,” the player writes, “At the very beginning of [Yakuza: Like A Dragon] I had ¥10 [million] from mahjong. In Lost Judgement, the same, and the same in [Like A Dragon Gaiden].”
This time, however, tigerwarrior02’s goal looks to be a bit more lofty. Before eventually heading on holiday and actually, you know, playing the rest of the game, the player says they plan to “get to ¥30 [million] and buy the Great Fortune Gold [Undies] from Love Magic”. However, they don’t plan to do what you might expect with this pair of pants that’ll set them back just over 29 million yen, revealing: “I’m not going to wear [them] or anything, that’d make the game too easy. [I’ll] just [do] it to prove I [can].”
If you’re interested in trying something similar, the player has kindly shared some helpful videos and guides to playing mahjong in Yakuza games that they say set them off on their journey to mahjong mastery a number of years ago.
That said, as pointed out in the thread, you’ll be in for a rude awakening once you reach Hawaii, as it seems to be a mahjong-free area, though I can’t claim I’ve verified that myself, given I’m not a mahjong master and hidden gambling dens are something of a Like A Dragon/Yakuza specialty.
If you’ve been able to drag yourself away from the mahjong tables long enough to really start scything your way through Infinite Wealth, make sure to check out our guides to its best jobs and how to unlock them, as well as substories like the one that sees you tasked with delivering a love letter to someone buried neck-deep in sand.