Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth dev says minigame with half-naked "sickos" solved a development problem, even if its producers were like "what the hell is this?"

Anyone who's played Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth probably remembers its outrageous Sicko Snap minigame - a spin on Pokemon Snap that has our protags taking pictures of muscly half-naked men  - but it wasn't included purely for the shock value.

According to the game's director Ryosuke Horii and game design supervisor Hirotaka Chiba who spoke to Automaton about the minigame, Sicko Snap actually fixed a very real problem elsewhere in the Yakuza RPG, even if it made the producers ask, "What the hell is this?" 

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

When developer RGG began implementing trolleys, a common form of public transport in the game's real-life Hawaii counterpart, the team soon discovered that the rides "felt kind of boring" because the sluggish vehicles were too slow and cramped to fit any battles inside. That's when Horii thought of adding a picture-taking minigame to the trolley rides, though it was first focused on dogs, not sickos.

"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," Horii adds. "There’s no good reason one would take pictures of dogs either. We needed something a little more 'out there.'" When the team "tried putting in sickos wearing nothing but a pair of panties," that's when the mini-game finally clicked into place for Horii since "they really stood out against the background nicely."

"There's nothing wrong with dogs, but we weren’t sure if it was the right choice for Infinite Wealth," Chiba adds. As bonkers as Sicko Snap is, it fits right in with the diaper-wearing gangs, queer crustacean substories, and overall zaniness carved into every other Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth moment - and I hope it only continues in whatever the Yakuza studio announces in September. 

Yakuza has seen a “large increase in new fans, including women,” but the JRPG series will continue being about “middle-aged guy things.”