Author: Game Infliction

As a longtime fan of the series, 2020’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon came as a bit of a shock to my system. Fun as it was, the sudden switch to stop-start, turn-based JRPG attacks was a lot to get my head around after more than a decade of enjoying the series’ signature combo-based beat ‘em up action – a bit like spending over 10 years getting really good at thumb wrestling and then being asked to play chess. Thankfully its follow-up, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, substantially retools the combat system: it’s still turn-based, but the tactical decision-making introduced by its predecessor is enhanced with more flexible movement and proximity-based attacks that better reflect the rough-and-tumble tactility of the traditional Yakuza street fights. As a result, Infinite Wealth’s brawling feels more like the best of both worlds, and its stunning new Hawaiian setting provides the perfect playground in which to unleash its superior style of smackdown.

Main hero Ichiban Kasuga returns from Yakuza: Like a Dragon and remains the loveable human labrador that he was before – unwaveringly upbeat no matter how often he’s beaten down – and this time he’s paired up with series stalwart Kazuma Kiryu, who we find in a more reflective mood due to his recent cancer diagnosis. This odd couple travels to Hawaii in search of the biological mother that Kasuga has never known; however they soon find themselves caught in a compelling conspiracy involving a local religious sect and multiple crime syndicates. The ensuing mystery quickly takes some dramatic twists and turns without ever becoming as tangled as some of the more convoluted plots of the series’ past. Along the way a number of contemporary issues like environmental mismanagement and the spreading of online misinformation are explored, and all of those themes mixed together to give me more to chew on than a konbini bento box.

The core supporting cast from Yakuza: Like a Dragon are also along for the ride, joined by likable locals Eric Tomizawa and Chitose Fujinomiya, and there are some wonderful scene-stealing villains to encounter. That includes a mob boss played by a gruff-as-ever Danny Trejo, whose contract may or may not have stipulated that his character, Dwight Mendez, wields a pair of machetes. Despite the fact that some of the lengthier conversation cutscenes took longer to wrap up than a phone call from my parents, by and large I found the writing in Infinite Wealth to be some of the strongest in the series to date, whether it was during the heightened moments of serious drama or the many lowbrow bursts of comic relief. As was the case with the gang’s previous adventure, I particularly enjoyed the idle banter between them as I roamed the streets – whether they were musing about the limited battery life of Sega’s Game Gear handheld or debating the differences in taste between Japanese and Hawaiian soy sauce.

Marking the first time that a Like a Dragon story has shifted beyond the shores of Japan, Infinite Wealth’s Hawaii doesn’t just feel like an invigorating new setting for the series, but for games in general. Typically the only games set in the exotic US island state involve operating battleships in World War II or steering sports cars around its coastline highways, so it’s nice to play a game that allows you to slip on a pair of flip-flops and explore this fictionalised slice of paradise on foot – or on a zippy motorised Segway, if you really want to look like a tourist. I’m sadly not nearly as familiar with the real Honolulu as I’d like to be, but perhaps because of that I loved roaming around Infinite Wealth’s surprisingly spacious setting, from its sandy shorelines to shiny shopping malls, grabbing local delicacies like shave ice to replenish my health and throwing a friendly “Aloha” to everyone I passed with a tap of a button.

That said, the Honolulu map – which is so vast you could apparently fit nine Kamurochos inside it – isn’t the only location to explore in Infinite Wealth, and after spending the bulk of the story’s first half helping Kasuga’s search through the streets of Waikiki, Kiryu eventually returns to Japan to try and unravel the mystery from a different angle. As a result, for a handful of the campaign’s 14 chapters (totaling around 50 hours) you get to explore both the Yokohama and Kamurocho maps from previous games in the series, each complete with a unique set of substories and side activities that see the gravely ill Kiryu reminisce about his many earlier adventures and make amends with some of the survivors he’s left in his wake. The bulk of these bucket list tasks are optional, and if you’re new to the series you might not get much out of them beyond the token experience points for ticking them off, but I enjoyed the opportunity to take a detour away from the streets of rage for a sentimental trip down memory lane.

Surf and Turf Wars

Along the way it becomes clear that while you can take a Like a Dragon game out of Japan, you can’t take the heaving hordes of weirdo enemy types out of a Like a Dragon game. Despite the fact that the bulk of Infinite Wealth takes place on US soil, I once again found myself indulging in regular battles against hundreds of hilariously off-kilter assailants with pun-based names like Hungry Hungry Homeless and Imp Patient, as though I was locked in an ongoing war with a gang of grown-up Garbage Pail Kids. However, this time around each freaky face-off feels far more lively and intuitive than the comparatively stilted scraps you get into during Yakuza: Like a Dragon, thanks to the added freedom to reposition each of your four team members within a set movement arc at the start of each turn.

This very clever change means you get to inflict bonus damage by moving your character to attack an enemy up close or from the rear, and you can also grab objects like bicycles and explosive barrels and crash them into crowds in order to share the suffering around. In Yakuza: Like a Dragon your team members would occasionally grab makeshift weapons automatically, but here you get to decide exactly which object to use, and there are a lot more to choose from with explosive gas canisters to pick up and throw and even rocket launchers to wield.

What’s more, as the bonds between each member of your party strengthens additional supporting moves are unlocked to create powerful chain reactions, to the point that you can intentionally knock an enemy towards another team member and have them spike them face-first into the dirt like they’re a human volleyball, or sweep kick an enemy off their feet and into the air and have one of your teammates jump-kick them to the curb – not unlike the XCOM-inspired team moves from Marvel’s Midnight Suns and Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope.

Controlling Kiryu offers the closest resemblance to the series’ street fighting of old, since he’s able to switch between three fighting stances: Brawler for balanced attacks; Rush, which gives you two consecutive attacks per turn; and Beast for devastating grapple moves. Additionally, Kiryu is also able to gradually fill his trademark Heat gauge which, when triggered, gives you full control of his movement for a brief period and allows you to unleash a series of simple yet supremely satisfying button-based combos in real-time. Kiryu was my favourite character to use in Infinite Wealth by far, but even when he was absent from my party the combat remained considerably more kinetic than it ever was in Yakuza: Like a Dragon. This game delivers a riotous level of chaos and carnage that makes its predecessor’s more modest turn-taking seem almost polite by comparison.

What’s more, Infinite Wealth consistently adds interesting wrinkles to each fighting arena that forced me to switch up my strategies. One boss fight in a flaming forest had me scrambling for smoldering logs to snatch up and swing around in order to dish out more savage burns than an insult comic, while another skirmish in a room full of poisonous gas added a greater sense of urgency to each of my turns as I frantically hurried to end the fight before my entire squad collapsed. In one late-game battle aboard a tugboat I was able to intentionally knock enemies into the open maw of a great white shark waiting in the waters, then watch as the beast shook them around and then hurled them back into battle bleeding from a latticework of lacerations. Although there are certainly some repetitive random encounters to be found out in the streets, the bulk of Infinite Wealth’s story mission encounters are gripping to play and extremely hard to forget.

Tricks of the Trade

The job system from Yakuza: Like a Dragon returns in Infinite Wealth, allowing you to alter the class of each character to best suit the makeup of your party. Last time around I tried to have an Idol on my team at all times due to their invaluable support abilities, and I persisted with that safety-first strategy in Infinite Wealth and found it just as reliable here. But otherwise, I found the new jobs to be considerably more appealing than those of the previous adventure, and I enjoyed shuffling them around the remaining members of my squad, whether it was Kasuga as a wetsuited Aquanaut Point Break-ing noses with his surfboard attacks, Adachi as a katana-swinging Samurai, or newcomer Tomizawa dual-weilding a pair of pistols as a dusty Desperado. With each job class I added into the rotation, Infinite Wealth’s colourful clashes started to feel even less like standard turn-based scraps and more like fights that had broken out at a cosplay competition.

Some jobs I favoured for their practical value, such as Heiress, which allows you to lob different grenade types that inflict status effects on wide groups of enemies. Others, though, I chose purely based on how entertaining they were to use. I never knew how badly I wanted to see Kiryu impersonate Bruce Lee until he was clad in the yellow Game of Death jumpsuit and fly-kicking and high-pitch-squealing all over my television screen as the nunchuck-wielding action star. Each job expands with a growing number of special attacks as you level them up, and almost every one of these are as damaging as they are dazzling – I never got tired of throwing a frisbee to an enemy goon and watching their confused looks as they caught it… just before they were set upon by a pack of exceptionally aggressive puppies to rapidly nibble away at their health bars, for example.

While there’s a greatly expanded list of jobs to take on, actually playing Infinite Wealth never feels like a chore. One of my biggest gripes with Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s campaign was that my progress stalled when frustrating difficulty spikes in its latter half sent me off to repeatedly grind for experience points for hours on end in order to slowly increase the levels of my party members. This sort of stonewalling of story progress might be fairly commonplace in the JRPG genre, but personally I’m not a fan of playing games that feel too much like work – and neither, it seems, are the designers behind Infinite Wealth.

I’m happy to report that I ran into no such roadblocks in this campaign, and although the challenge and intensity in its marathon final chapter ramps up more often than an inner city car park, I never encountered any overpowered bosses capable of wiping out my team in a single blow or other cheap tricks. Some of the fiercest fights at the pointy end of the story may have felt somewhat attritional but never unfair, and I generally felt like I was always there (or thereabouts) in matching the power level of the enemies I was confronted by without having to go out of my way to play catch up. It helps that you’re typically given a heads up about the recommended level for your squad members and gear before you head into each major battle sequence, so I never found myself inadvertently progressing beyond a point of no return and getting caught with my pants down. I just caught plenty of trenchcoat-clad creeps with their pants down instead.

That said, while I definitely appreciated the more gradual difficulty curve in Infinite Wealth and found it manageable as someone who doesn’t play a lot of turn-based JRPGs, it does strike me as being a little odd that there are no difficulty settings to speak of for your first playthrough of the story. Unlike last year’s Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name or other modern JRPGs like Final Fantasy VII: Remake, there’s no way to throttle the challenge up or down until you beat the story and unlock the more challenging Hard and Legend modes. Why lock the option to increase the difficulty behind over potentially 50 hours of gameplay? Even if you loved a game that long on the first run, it’s a lot to ask to immediately go again.

Conversely, if you’re finding Infinite Wealth too tough the first time around, the absence of an easy mode means your only option is to grind through both of its two randomly generated dungeons in order to over-level yourself to be more resilient to enemy attacks, which seems equally impractical. In this era of improved accessibility, the lack of difficulty options in Infinite Wealth seems slightly behind the times. Still, I suppose at least Sega isn’t charging extra for an easy mode, like it seemingly is with New Game+.

Kawaii Hawaii

It wouldn’t be a Like a Dragon adventure if there wasn’t an enormous amount of supplemental content to enjoy, and in that regard Infinite Wealth doesn’t disappoint. Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s Sujimon system, which basically allowed you to catch and catalogue peculiar men in place of pocket monsters, returns in Infinite Wealth – only now it’s been greatly expanded to include countless limited-time-only raids, training, and stadium battles. Super Crazy Delivery is an addictive arcade time attack minigame that’s effectively what would happen if a driver from Crazy Taxi hopped onto a DoorDash bike, and Sicko Mode tasks you with photographing a series of Speedo-clad musclemen who are hiding in bushes and startling the local dogs. But that’s not as easy as it sounds because you do it as you’re riding around a trolley circuit that hopefully doesn’t go within a thousand feet of any local schools. Each of these are fun and extremely slick, and I’m not just talking about the baby oil that’s dripping off the sickos.

But that’s not all – not by a long shot. One of the more extensive new side activities in Infinite Wealth is Dondoko Island, which could possibly have been called Animal Double-Crossing if Nintendo didn’t have such expensive lawyers at its disposal. This separate resort island that you can travel to from the main Honolulu area allows you to cut down trees, smash rocks, and clear out trash bags in order to gather resources, which can then be used to craft a staggering number of furniture and structures used to beautify your own home and surrounding areas of the island in order to lure new guests.

You can also fish, catch bugs, and fend off occasional attacks from pirates, and the best part of all is that there’s no Tom Nook to continually bust your balls about the bells you owe him. It all works well and seems surprisingly deep, and although my modest interior and exterior design skills haven’t been enough to elevate my island rating beyond a one-star level thus far, I’m keen to invest more hours into it now that I’ve finished the main story – if for no other reason than the fact that Kasuga’s entertainingly manic crafting sequences make him seem less like a carpenter and more like a member of an F1 pit crew.

While I felt that the substories in Like a Dragon Gaiden lacked a bit of spark, it’s clear that developer Ryu Ga Gotuku Studio was saving its best material for Infinite Wealth since it managed to pleasantly surprise me on almost every other street I explored. At one point I stumbled into serving as a stuntman on an action movie set, swerving on foot through high-speed traffic and explosions like I was trapped inside the most frantic and fiery form of Frogger. Later I volunteered to be a contestant on a quirky escape room TV show, and had to sneak through a shopping mall answering trivia questions about the local area for bonus points. That sort of thing made for a stimulating change of pace.

The best part about it all is that you’re constantly earning experience points and unlocking new combat moves and other useful features, whether you’re fighting or not. You can get regular dopamine hits by hitting dopes and meanies, but you can also unlock unique combo attacks to perform with your allies simply by having a beer with them in between brawls – at the same time gaining an insight into their backstories and better fleshing out their characters.

In fact, almost everything in Infinite Wealth seems worthwhile in more ways than one, and there’s a dizzying amount of enjoyable things to do. It seems like Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has put everything but the kitchen sink into Infinite Wealth, but for all I know there might be a giant sink boss possibly named Drain Johnson lurking in one of its dungeons, flanked by his offsiders Tap-tain America and Farrah Faucet. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised, especially since at one point I very much did come up against one unlikely boss in the form of an anthropomorphic cigarette. Defeating it was certainly a new way to kick some butt.

Infinite Wealth also benefits from countless minor design decisions that combine to make for a more seamless experience, such as the ability to fast travel to cab ranks from any point on the map, or the option to see which weapons are in stock at each store at a glance without having to actually visit them. I particularly like how groups of enemies in the world feature colour-coded symbols so that you know which ones to engage with and which to give a wide berth without finding out the hard way. Once you become too powerful for certain enemy types you can just tap the left trigger to instantly wipe them out and snatch some cash and XP, rather than having to go through the motions of wasting time on a fight that you’re always going to win comfortably. There’s not quite an Infinite Wealth of intelligent ideas like these, but there’s certainly a healthy surplus.

The Tekken series is steeped in legacy. From the mechanical skills and knowledge needed to compete at the highest levels, to its iconic music and characters, to inside jokes spanning three decades and an ongoing story dating back just as far, each new entry has a heavy burden to bear. How do you honor that legacy without being chained down by it? That is the question Tekken 8 thoughtfully considers, and the answer it comes up with is a simple, yet profound one: you accept what’s come before, but you don’t let it stop you from moving forward. Whether it be a literal dash forward using the powerful new Heat system, impressive training tools, or the compelling story of a man trying to break generational shackles to create a brighter future, Tekken 8 is always honoring its past while striving to improve its present. And most of all, it’s just some really good-ass Tekken.

They say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and Bandai Namco smartly hasn’t tried to change the parts of Tekken’s combat mechanics that were already great. Movement, spacing, block punishing, and whiff punishing all remain as vital as ever, but two significant additions also twist those mechanics in exciting ways: recoverable health, and the Heat System.

For the first time in Tekken history, other than the Tekken Tag Tournament games, recoverable health plays a major part in matches. Blocking big attacks and taking chip damage, absorbing them with a Power Crush, or being hit after getting knocked airborne will do partial gray damage. The only way to get this health back is by throwing out your own attacks, as you won’t recover at all by just standing still and blocking – you have to go on the offensive to reclaim your life, and this made me adapt my mindset in a wonderful way.

It’s also a huge shift, as Tekken has always been a defensive game. It’s not uncommon to watch high-level Tekken matches of the past and see two characters appear to almost glitch across the screen as they continuously cancel their sidesteps and dashes and block everything while looking for the smallest opening. A lot of that hasn’t gone away in Tekken 8, but recoverable damage gave me the constant pressure to go on offense while I still had health that could be recovered, and never made me feel like I was out of the fight while being juggled across the stage.

The new Heat system pairs with this new offensive mindset perfectly. There are myriad ways to enter Heat, whether it be through landing staple moves from a character’s move list or simply pressing a button, and you start with a full bar of Heat every round, so there’s no reason not to use it. Heat enhances your offense in every facet – you do increased chip damage while recovering more of your own health, you unlock new moves or properties for each character, and you can use the rest of your meter for a powerful combo extender or finisher.

Do you press your advantage when you have your enemy on the ropes, or do you wait for an opportunity to recover health? Do you add a little bit of damage onto a combo now, or maintain stronger pressure after a knockdown later? Since you regain all of your Heat after every round, these are questions you get to answer every round, and Tekken 8 is much more dynamic for it.

That said, one aspect of these changes I could see eventually getting frustrating is how it gives even more offensive pressure to characters who thrive on it, like Hwoarang and the various members of the Mishima family. It’s scary enough to try and keep blocking when it seems like it’s been your opponent’s turn to attack forever, so adding in chip damage and extra tools for characters with overwhelming offense is even more to deal with. But since these tools are universal, you always have a chance to turn the tide yourself, and Heat makes execution for a lot of moves easier, such as the Mishimas’ electric attacks no longer requiring a single-frame input. Heat is both your most powerful offensive tool and a great equalizer.

On top of Heat naturally smoothing out the beginner’s on-ramp a bit, Tekken 8 also has some of the best training tools I’ve ever seen in a fighting game. The new Arcade Quest mode is a great way to slowly ramp up the difficulty of CPU opponents, and the Training Mode is incredibly full featured, with combo challenges, save states (so you can drill specific situations like wall breaks easily), punishment training, moves you can pin to the screen while practicing them, and handy notes and icons that tell you the specific properties of each attack.

But the crown jewel is the integrated replay system. You can watch your own replays back, or even those of other players you find online, and take control of the characters at any time, as long as they were played by a human. That means as soon as you run into a troublesome situation in a match, you can immediately hop into your replays, watch back what you did, and then try a dozen different ways to find something better. It’s a phenomenal addition, and one I’ll be using constantly as I strive to improve.

To simplify things even further, there’s also a control mode called Special Style that binds important moves to a single button press. You can even bind the Special Style toggle to a button that you can press mid-match if you’re getting overwhelmed and just want to do something cool and productive – the menu will pop on screen, even when playing online, so both players will know when someone activates it.

However, Special Style isn’t useful in any way that’s viable competitively. Unlike Street Fighter 6’s comparatively paltry moveset being downsized with its Modern Controls mode, Tekken characters have dozens if not hundreds of moves, and you can’t realistically map a majority of those to four buttons. You can alter some of them by pressing a direction as well, but Special Style is mainly meant for beginners and those who want a quick taste of what a character can do, which it does provide nicely.

New Challengers

Joining the roster’s returning mainstays are three fighters new to the Tekken series. Victor, the French UN Agent voiced by actor Vincent Cassell, Azucena, the energetic coffee entrepreneur, and the enigmatic Reina.

Victor sports some really flashy attacks that look cool as soon as you pick him up, and his vanishing strikes have great mixup and pressure options that are, thankfully, able to be punished if abused too often. His connection to the story is a nice addition to the lore as well, framing him as a character who has been in the background training other longtime roster mainstays.

Azucena, as befitting of her occupation, is always moving. Both her personality and moveset are always baiting you to attack, and then hammering you hard for it. She’s destined to be polarizing due to her taunting nature and obvious early strengths, but even after fighting against her many times, I am more excited to learn ways around her pressure than I am frustrated to face her.

The third and most intriguing new character is Reina, who seems to act as a bridge between Tekken 7 and 8 in both gameplay and story. Seemingly appearing from nowhere, she shares many moves with the recently deceased Heihachi, the patriarch of the Mishima family who was killed by Kazuya at the end of Tekken 7, and she’s my favorite addition to the roster by far. She’s aggressive, flashy, and has some simple tools that will be very hard to master.

More Than Just Heat Mode

Continuing an extremely welcome trend of recent fighting games, Tekken 8 has enough single player content to keep you busy for dozens of hours without ever even touching multiplayer. The cinematic story mode, subtitled The Dark Awakens, is a roughly three-to-four-hour mix of cutscenes and story battles, and while I can’t give away many details, there are a few surprises that should delight longtime Tekken fans, including multiple playable characters. It seems like a good way to showcase Special Style, too, as story weaves in and out of fights and in-game slow motion is used to punctuate big moves – I actually found using it more enjoyable than the regular controls for most of the story since I wasn’t browsing a move list every time I played as a new character. There’s plenty of time to dig deep and try hard in all the other modes, so I was glad to just be able to have fun quickly for this campaign.

As far as the actual story goes, I mostly enjoyed my time with it. There are some very “capital A Anime” moments, and not everyone gets a chance to shine, but Bandai Namco gives attention to important character arcs that span several games, and there are clear fan-service moments that land successfully. It’s simple enough to understand as a newcomer, too, as the relationships and stakes are laid out pretty clearly from the jump and the Gallery mode includes several summary videos of past games. One of the only negatives presentation-wise is that the real-time action looks so good that the transitions into pre-rendered cutscenes can sometimes be jarring, especially with some slightly smeary effects and different color grading layered on top of them.

In a return to Tekken tradition, there are also character endings for the entire roster that unlock by playing through a quick series of five battles. These are mostly played for goofs, and they do vary in quality, but there are a few that had me legitimately laughing out loud. I won’t spoil any, but make sure you play through Kazuya and Dragunov’s endings in particular for some fun moments.

New to the series in Tekken 8 are two modes: Arcade Quest and Super Ghost Battle. Arcade Quest is actually my favorite of the single player options; mimicking a crawl through various arcades, your customizable avatar moves through different opponents while slowly learning Tekken 8’s mechanics. You can spend as much time as you want in each location challenging characters, all of whom sport different playstyles to test your mettle against. There’s a passable story that preaches the importance of having fun in a stressful genre, but it really works as a lengthy tutorial for those who may be a bit hesitant to immediately jump online. Arcade Quest gives you a ton of encouragement as you go, and it should provide players intimidated by Tekken’s high difficulty a reason to stick around without meeting some of the vitriol you’d see with real-life bad actors.

Super Ghost Battle is a mode in which you can challenge a CPU that’s built from learning actual information about players. You can train your own ghost by fighting against it in order to learn your own tendencies, or even download and play against ghosts from other players. It’s a great way to check yourself as you continue to grow into a given character, and also a fun way to take on other real-life people without having to actually schedule play time. I’ve already had friends tell me that they beat up my ghost in a nice bit of catharsis after I won a set against them online.

The last single player mode of note is the Jukebox. It lets you replace the music for any stage as you see fit, including the track they switch to in the final round, and even includes both some of the menu music and classic tracks from Tekken’s past. And if you don’t feel like fiddling, you can set it to shuffle the soundtracks of Tekkens 1 through 8, Tekken Tag Tournament 1 and 2, and even Tekken Revolution. It’s an embarrassment of riches for longtime fans of the series like me, and a great way to honor its legacy. Plus, now I can listen to the awesome Tekken 3 Character Select music anytime I want. And I want. Please put this in every fighting game.

Online

The biggest factor in the longevity of any modern fighting game is how well it plays online, and I’m happy to say that it’s here Tekken 8 trumps Tekken 7 in every way. Based on the limited online time I’ve had pre-launch, netcode seems much improved, and every match I’ve played against someone in the US (even thousands of miles away) has felt great. I also tried my hand against players in South Korea and Europe, and while the quality wasn’t ideal, the matches were definitely playable – albeit with some jittery artifacts. There are several rollback settings to change the feel of your inputs as well, although I preferred the default. Regardless, it’s great that the option is there if you want it, and Tekken 8 includes cross-play as well!

Also, in an extremely welcome change from Tekkens past, online rematches are now considerably faster. Instead of bumping you out to the versus splash screen as you wait for another load, it will put you right back in the action as soon as you confirm a rematch. It’s a great update, and one of those things that makes you forget how long it actually used to take once you get used to it.

As far as online modes go, the big focus here is the Tekken Fight Lounge, a battle hub where you can run around with your custom avatar to meet and inspect other players, throw down some emotes, and access all the online options, including Ranked Matches, Quick Matches, Custom Rooms, and the welcome return of Tekken Ball. It’s easy to navigate as you can pop open the menu to quickly hop from room to room, but it’s also just a cool looking space to run around in its own right. And if it’s not for you, you can just as easily find all the online modes from the main menu.

Unfortunately, one bizarre omission while in custom rooms is that you can’t spectate matches or go to the practice mode. You can spectate anyone just fine from the Fight Lounge, but if you’re in a room with friends, as of now, there’s no way to watch each other’s matches. Tekken 8 gets so much right about the online experience that this is a weird thing to not have available. Hopefully it gets added in a post-launch patch.

Palworld developer Pocketpair has released an update for the Xbox and Windows PC version of the game that addresses some of the issues players are having.

The smash hit ‘Pokémon with guns’ survival and crafting game launched in early access form on January 19 on Steam as well as Xbox consoles and Windows PC, but the Xbox version lags behind the Steam version in a number of key areas.

For example, Palworld players can create and join dedicated servers that enable up to 32 players to play in the same world and create guilds together. But on Xbox and Windows PC (so, everyone playing on Game Pass), Palworld players cannot create or join dedicated servers, which means online co-op is limited to 2-4 players. Crossplay between Xbox and Steam is also currently unavailable.

Palword Xbox players had assumed they were playing an older build of the game, given some of the missing features, but Pocketpair denied this was the case, insisting both versions will always be different until crossplay is enabled. The lack of parity across Xbox and Steam, Pocketpair said, had to do with updates having to work their way through Microsoft’s certification process, whereas on Steam there is no such hurdle.

Here are the Xbox Palworld patch notes in full:

[The following issues have been fixed]

<Xbox>

・When starting the game app, it goes black and cannot proceed further.

<Microsoft Store PC version>

・When starting the game app, it goes black and cannot proceed further.

・Controller is not recognized

・Key guide display is not displayed correctly

・Exit game button is not implemented

Pocketpair is yet to properly explain Palworld’s lack of dedicated servers on Xbox and Windows PC. Last week, Pocketpair said: “We’d like to have dedicated servers on Xbox but it’s unfortunately not up to us and is quite difficult to negotiate at this time!” a Pocketpair representative said. “But… we are trying!”

It’s unclear what Pocketpair means when it says the addition of dedicated servers on Xbox is “not up to us”, when other games do have dedicated servers on Xbox. IGN has asked for comment but has yet to hear back.

While Palworld is a smash hit, it is not without controversy. Pocketpair has said its staff have received death threats amid Pokémon “rip-off” claims, and Nintendo moved quickly to remove an eye-catching Pokémon mod. Palworld’s enormous launch has seen its servers struggle, too.

Check out IGN’s Palworld Early Access Review in Progress to find out what we thought.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.