Badasses Only: How I Beat the True Final Millennium Tower in ‘Yakuza: Like a Dragon’
Yakuza: Like a Dragon is an ambitious game in many respects, hitting the reset button with regards to its storyline, setting, protagonist, and gameplay genre. Some of those risks pay off, while others need some refinement. Given that the creators of the Yakuza series have since confirmed that future Yakuza games will keep the turn-based combat of Like a Dragon, I will explore some of these changes in a future article for Epilogue. Before I get there, however, I feel the need to share my recent experience completing the True Final Millennium Tower in Like a Dragon, which, by every conceivable metric, is probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever tried to overcome in a video game.
Any Yakuza fan will be intimately familiar with the Millennium Tower, the centerpiece of many plots in the series. In setting Like a Dragon in Yokohama instead of Kamurocho, I expected that I wouldn’t encounter the Millennium Tower in this game. But Like a Dragon clearly gets off on subverting your expectations and making little references to the past Kiryu games, so I was willing to accept the Millennium Tower’s place within even Like a Dragon’s storyline.
But let’s address the name, the True Final Millennium Tower, which is a ridiculous sounding challenge. Whether this name sounds as ridiculous in Japanese is up in the air, but I cannot type out the full title without rolling my eyes a little. In fairness, Like a Dragon completely justifies this name. You first make your way through the Millennium Tower at a late-game story sequence that I won’t discuss here. Later, you have a post-game opportunity to take on the Final Millennium Tower challenge, which requires you to brute force your way up the entire tower, one floor at a time — easily the toughest challenge in the game with no save points to speak of. And then the game draws back the curtain: this Final Millennium Tower is a complete joke. Like a Dragon points directly at the player, laughs, and then introduces the real challenge: the True Final Millennium Tower.
A Sharp Difficulty Spike
I don’t feel the need to describe the differences between each tower ascension with great detail, because the floor layouts and enemy encounters are almost identical each time. The only thing that really changes between tower ascensions is the difficulty level. You can make your way through the tower at pretty much any level above 50-60, but the True Final Millennium Tower is, in the game’s words, for “badasses only.” It recommends that you enter the tower at a minimum of level 99 with a job level (think subclass in any JRPG) of at least 90. Since I got lucky early on in Like a Dragon, grinding my way through an underground dungeon far earlier than the game intended, I haphazardly ignored this recommendation. I entered the True Final Millennium Tower around level 80 and got flattened in the first encounter with two robots. (Because I still find it humorous, I must tell you the names of these robots, “Subjugation-kun.” It’s incredible.)
Needless to say, it was time to take the game’s level recommendation seriously. In pursuit of the game’s 63 achievements, I had already familiarized myself with the Kamurocho Underground, a dungeon that features enemies known as Invested Vagabonds. Whereas you can grind for dozens of hours to reach level 99, you can kill off these Vagabonds and receive over 400,000 experience (and job experience) points from each battle, leveling you up about every-other encounter. With this accelerated grinding strategy, I still ended up sinking about 40 hours into my post-game preparations for this single challenge, the True Final Millennium Tower.
Part of why I needed to sink 40 hours of grinding into Like a Dragon is due to the various jobs that your party members can adopt. Ichiban Kasuga, the protagonist, has the most job options, but you can swap the jobs of all your party members. When I first brazenly entered the True Final Millennium Tower and got stomped, I decided to grind my entire party up to level 99. I extended this grind to each of my party members’ main job class, which I figured was a little excessive but worthwhile to ease out some of the friction of the challenge. At level 99 and my accompanying level 99 jobs, I was able to make it to the final encounter of the True Final Millennium Tower — but even then, with great difficulty. The fact that a maxed-out party still had difficulty is cause for concern, and I lost in the final battle about five times before realizing that my current party wouldn’t cut it. Thus, I took a taxi to Hello Work, where you change jobs, and proceeded to max out several more.
Once I committed to grinding up each job for my characters, I realized that I’d be in the Kamurocho Underground for quite a while. I needed to get Joon-gi Han the Fulminating Forecast lightning ability, for instance, which meant swapping him to the Fortuneteller job and working my way up. Luckily you can obtain all the job abilities that carry over between jobs by level 30, so I could pivot my grind to other jobs every hour or two. Soon, I had elemental attacks for all my party members so that I could exploit any enemy weakness with all four party members. (In practice, one of my party members was healing the party each turn, but the possibility was prepared for.) Thankfully, this preparation paid off in each encounter.
While grinding each character’s jobs, I decided to spend a few extra dollars on the Like a Dragon DLC, which, though receiving negative reviews across Steam, promised to add a few jobs to my roster, thereby opening up my arsenal even further. There’s not a ton to say about these extra jobs other than they are a little unbalanced, which was something I hoped to use to my advantage. In the end, I shelved Kasuga’s Devil Rocker job but kept the Matriarch job on Eri Kamataki. Worthy of note, each job unlocks an “essence” attack. Devil Rocker’s essence attack is hilariously named, “Essence of Fire and Brimstone,” which I found endless joy in using. The benefit to grinding up this DLC was of course extra attacks, but every five levels, your character gets a permanent stat boost that carries over between jobs. Considering I needed every possible point in my favor, this was something that felt both necessary and worth doing.
A New Strategy for Amon’s Essence of Orbital Laser Attack
35 hours later, I saved outside the base of the True Final Millennium Tower. I got one-shotted in the first room. I could not believe it. Because Like a Dragon operates with the infuriating JRPG trope of synonymizing the death of the protagonist with the Game Over state, Kasuga’s death means starting the entire tower over. Thus, I had to begin using the move, “Peerless Resolve,” which gives a protective revive to Kasuga in the event that he gets one-shotted, hopefully giving you that extra turn you need to win a tough fight. With this strategy of prioritizing Peerless Resolve every battle, I was able to reach the final boss of the True Final Millennium Tower once again.
The final boss of the True Final Millennium Tower is the same boss you have fought each time the game has walked you up the skyscraper, Amon — only this time, he’s level 99 and his summons are similarly leveled. Even before my few dozen hours grinding away at character jobs, I had reached this final battle only to get obliterated by his Essence of Orbital Laser attack. This is a move that otherwise only Kasuga uses and is unlocked as a result of maxing out the business management mini-game, which is required for the final achievement. Here, you have a level 99 boss dropping the Orbital Laser – which is literally a satellite beam that comes through the atmosphere and nukes the surrounding area – instantly knocking out the entire party. No matter what I tried, I could not endure this attack. It wiped me out every single time.
Digging around some walkthroughs and Reddit threads, I learned of a commonly accepted strategy for this fight. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who was getting repeatedly crushed. In order to tank this Orbital Laser attack, you have to summon one of the game’s many Poundmates in battle. These Poundmates usually get added to your roster after a story beat, and you can pay to have them unleash some devastating moves. One of the Poundmates that I basically never used, however, is Mr. Masochist. Earlier in the game, Kasuga encounters a man who can no longer feel any pain and therefore is miserable. Without spoiling the story, suffice it to say that Mr. Masochist finds something that stimulates him again, and he becomes available to Kasuga out of gratitude.
Mr. Masochist’s ability, fittingly enough, basically functions as a damage shield, greatly raising your resistance to attacks for a few short turns. Summoning him into battle is practically required for surviving Amon’s Orbital Laser attack, which, from everything I have read, cannot be survived without this method. Even with Mr. Masochist’s ability – and let me remind you, I had since ranked at least three job classes to level 99 on each character – Amon’s laser attack wiped out 2-3 party members each time. This party wipe would have included Kasuga as well but for the Peerless Resolve strategy I was still dutifully employing each battle. In other words, having an over-leveled party with an insta-kill safeguard was not enough; I had to mix in a third variable, Mr. Masochist, to squeeze my way past this unstoppable Orbital Laser.
So I started trying out the Mr. Masochist strategy for the Amon fight – and it was not working. I was losing half my party each time he used this attack, including the loss of Kasuga’s Peerless Resolve protection, causing me to frantically decide whether to recast Kasuga’s protection, revive a fallen party member, or heal Kasuga beyond the meager 300 HP he has been revived with. None of those strategies seemed to be the right one, as I got destroyed at least five times trying to scramble my way back to a fully healed party. I once again turned to online forums and threads of people pulling their hair out at this fight. Infuriatingly, each of these threads is brimming with self-assured people who “got through this fight on their first try,” which I frankly cannot believe. Or, at least, I was so irritated at their smugness, that I did not want to believe them.
My Lucky Victory Against the Final Boss
In my seemingly vain attempts to claw my way through this final fight with Amon, I found one walkthrough for the True Final Millennium Tower that was a godsend. In this walkthrough, it specified the general window of timing for you to summon Mr. Masochist, which is where I was still struggling: either I summoned him too early, thereby weakening his effectiveness, or I was waiting one turn too late, getting wiped out instantly. The trick for summoning Mr. Masochist is multiple in nature, for you first have to wait for Amon to transition into his Beast style of fighting. Once he is in this style, he will soon cast Guard Order, which summons the beefed-up shadow versions of some important bosses you have fought throughout the game. Once these three characters are summoned to fight for Amon, you have a very small window in which you can summon Mr. Masochist. As soon as Amon uses his Evil Grin move, which can inspire fear in your party if not prepared with various preventative accessories, the next move he will always use is the dreaded Essence of Orbital Laser.
Even by the end, with all this deliberate strategy in mind, I still couldn’t reliably time Amon’s Evil Grin. Sometimes he would simply attack, inexplicably, but I have a good reason to believe that he transitions to the Evil Grin move after a certain threshold of his health (somewhere between one-quarter and one-third) is reached. I died three times in a row on my final climb up the True Final Millennium Tower, each time falling prey to the Orbital Laser attack, despite all my preparations. I ultimately got lucky with the successful attempt. I summoned Mr. Masochist as I seemingly always did, and Amon pivoted to his Evil Grin and Orbital Laser attacks the very next turn, enabling three of my party members to survive the otherwise one-shot instant kill. It was this one miraculous moment that I survived.
When I realized that three of my party members were still standing, I went into overdrive mode. I used Eri’s turn to heal Kasuga with the biggest healing item in my inventory – a measly 500 HP out of nearly 2,000 filled back up – which took him out of immediate danger. I then used Joon-gi’s turn to fully revive Saeko, my healer, who then proceeded to heal the entire party back to full HP. Finally, I cast Peerless Resolve once more. I wasn’t ready to celebrate at this point, but I might as well have. Looking back, I can’t remember the last time a video game gave me such an aggressive adrenaline spike as this moment. It was pure fight or flight in the truest sense, and to Hell if I was about to flee.
I had survived the Orbital Laser attack and now could focus on the fight itself. Everything I had read instructed me to focus on taking out Amon first. I’m deliberately not naming all three summoned characters in this fight because I think their identities add some surprise and intrigue when you first encounter them. For the sake of preserving that surprise, these characters are to be taken out by first exploiting one character’s fire weakness, then one character’s lightning weakness, and finally the last character’s ice weakness. It’s a tedious battle because each character takes an entire vat of MP while you endlessly drop the strongest elemental attacks in your arsenal. And right when each of these characters have a sliver of health remaining, they unleash a devastating all-out attack on your entire party. If you’re not careful and obsessively healing each turn, these attacks can wipe the party just like the Amon attack — albeit with less of a guarantee to wipe your entire party at once.
I was not prepared to accept victory even at the moment where the final enemy was within striking distance. As this character unleashed their final attack and my entire party was still standing, I emptied every ice attack I had on this character, gradually securing my victory. I felt nervous until the moment the achievement popped up on my screen. After all the grinding, the failed attempts, I simply could not endure another attempt at this forsaken challenge. But then the fight was over, the cutscene played, and the game went out of its way to tell me I had earned the respect of the developers. I was sitting in my room by myself, but even without an audience, I audibly let out a “yes!” in celebration. At last, I could rest.
Is There A Value in Chasing Difficult Achievements?
I don’t know why I kept going after this final achievement in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, for I had never attempted to pursue any achievements in the other games. Perhaps it’s because the Kiryu games require a ton of investment in side activities like Mahjong, but I wanted to avoid that grind at all costs. Somehow with Like a Dragon, however, I found myself skimming the achievements and naively concluding that this game looked a lot more doable. I cannot overstate how mistaken I was. It took me something like 65 hours to earn the bulk of Like a Dragon’s achievements; it took me a solid 40 for this final one. And I don’t honestly know if it was worth the trouble.
There was a severe risk in pursuing the final achievement for the True Final Millennium Tower, namely that I would burn out and give up. At times, I think the only reason I kept going was the sunk cost fallacy, the idea that you can’t give up on something once you’ve dedicated yourself to it. I was one achievement away (two, technically, since the final achievement requires you to obtain all others) from Steam recognizing Like a Dragon as my twentieth “perfect game.” I didn’t want it to slip through my fingers when victory was within sight. I came dangerously close to burning out and giving up on this final challenge, but somehow, I made it to the other side — albeit with a few scars.
The True Final Millennium Tower is without a doubt the most absurdly difficult video game challenge I have ever accepted or overcome. I feel like I had to sacrifice part of my soul, a newborn infant, and a copy of Superman 64 to make it here, but I can confidently say to anyone wondering if they should go for this achievement, “Don’t do it.” The amount of time and frustration I dumped into this challenge simply so Steam would recognize my efforts with a little digital rectangle that glows and shows off the percentage of who has earned it across all players, it just wasn’t a logical thing to do. But here I am, I survived (barely), and my love for Like a Dragon is thankfully intact.
There’s much talk about the future of the Yakuza series. From the creators’ promise to continue making turn-based combat a feature of the mainline games to their simultaneous reassurance that the Judgment games will carry on the brawler legacy of the Kiryu saga, I have no doubt that fans of both styles of combat will have occasions to rejoice. But to the developers working hard on those next challenges for Kasuga, I plead of you, don’t try to top the True Final Millennium Tower. You might kill me next time if you do. Otherwise, I will happily play whatever whacky weirdness you want to throw at me. Just don’t make it for “badasses only.”
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