Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth Used “Weird” Mini-Games To Solve Development Problems

There are multiple titles right now that have a legitimate claim to the title of “Game of the Year.” However, one of the more surprising entries on that short list of games isn’t about a certain robot named Astro; it’s Sega’s Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth. The game was the second in the spinoff franchise about Ichiban, and it not only surpassed what the original title did in various ways, it was a critical and commercial big hit. One of the reasons that gamers loved it so much was simply that there was so much to do with Ichiban and the others in his crew.

However, some minigames made players tilt their heads and wonder, “What the heck am I looking at?” One of those minigames was Sicko Snap, where players take pictures of men who happen to not have much clothes on. Some claimed that it was done to simply “shock” gamers, but that wasn’t actually the case. In a chat with Automaton, game director Ryosuke Horii noted that it was made to help them:

“Sicko Snap was not originally planned, as opposed to minigames like Crazy Delivery and Dondoko Island, which were a part of the original proposal. Sicko Snap was the result of our attempts to solve a problem that arose during development.”

So, what problem was that? The team wanted to use trolleys to help people get from one part of Hawaii to another. That was part of their attempt to game realistic to Hawaii itself. The problem was that the trolleys were slow, and you couldn’t do battles easily there. So, they came up with the idea for a camera minigame. The catch was that, initially, they wanted to use dogs, not “sickos.” So, why didn’t that work out?

“There was the issue of regular dogs on the map being indistinguishable from dogs placed for the purpose of the minigame, but also, it felt kind of ordinary.”

If you’ve played Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth, you know that there’s very little “ordinary” about it. That’s when one of the team came up with the idea of taking pictures of the “sickos” of the area. While the team was also a bit weirded out by the idea, when they implemented it, everything clicked, and a wild but iconic part of the game was born.

As you can see, sometimes you can’t go for “basic solutions” to problems in video game development. You need to get wild.