If you ask someone like me, who’s really into the Yakuza/Like A Dragon games, why you should play the Yakuza/Like A Dragon games, fairly early on in the process there’s a good chance they’ll end just defaulting to grabbing you by the lapells and in their best husky Kiryu voice saying something like: ‘Look, just play the damn things’.
That’s because there’s a lot going on in the world of Big Kaz, especially at the advanced stage the narratives of both the character and the world he’s been running around in are at in 2024. Cue a thousand debates about how many of the entries in the series you should play to get the best taste of it and in which order you should eat those courses. A few years ago, I started my journey to LAD-dom with Yakuza Zero, equipped only with the knowledge that it wasn’t all that much like Sleeping Dogs, the main other game about a tattooed gangster using furniture and fists to slap the t*ts off of goons I’d enjoyed to that point in my life.
I can’t quite remember what my true expectations going in were for the Yakuza games I’ve ended up getting to know intimately over the past little bit, but I think they were for something a lot like what the Like A Dragon: Yakuza TV series is, at least through the opening two episodes I’ve watched so far.
There are chain-smoking men in suits who quite like a fight, egoes clashing in the pressure cooker of the underworld, and folks getting knocked down in quite gory fashion by the freight train of life in Kamurocho. All of these are key parts of the Yakuza series, no doubt, but it does feel like the show’s struggling to give quite enough emphasis as fans might like to the other side of this bizarre coin that Ryu Ga Gotoku’s spent years twiddling between its thumbs, carefully deciding when to flip, re-polish or manipulate in other ways that might make it shine even brighter.
There’s some good humour, but it’s mostly reserved for little throwaway gags or the odd subtle sarcastic quip. There’s a neon-drenched and well-rendered version of the series’ most iconic setting, but because of the format, not one that you can interact with, that you can touch and become one with as you wander from eatery to mini-mart to arcade. There’s emotion, but it’s rarely finding much time to breathe as we jump from event to event in Prime Video’s version of how the original Yakuza’s story plays out.
There’s a decent crime drama playing out – one that’s got some potentially interesting stuff at play in the form of stuff like the Dragon of Doijma being an established thing Kiryu’s hellbent on becoming, rather than a unique moniker he establishes for himself through his own actions. As someone who’s always been far too into reading of the character that examine his relationship with determinism, I’m keen to see if that especially goes anywhere. There’s been some solid action, the frequent shifts in time and place are handled a lot more deftly than, for example, the early series of Netflix’s Witcher show, and as with any show of this nature, from a pure visual perspective, everything from the sets to the costumes look slick and stylish.
Some of the characters look and act a bit differently, and there are some new additions, but I’m generally open to that in most cases, provided they’re actually given some decent space to develop a bit in the next four episodes. Would I say I’ve got faith that’ll definitely happen, or that the series will manage to deliver the kind of Like a Dragon experience that the games have hit on after thousands of hours worth of character development and storytelling? Not really, no, but I’d argue Like A Dragon: Yakuza was always likely to be fighting a losing battle in that regard anyway, unless its showrunners opted to go the Fallout TV show route and come up with their own totally fresh tale in the series’ world.
That said, if I don’t get some goddamn Kiryu and Majima karaoke, I can’t promise I won’t react like this when those final credits roll.