I can see the overarching appeal in turning Yakuza: Like A Dragon into a TV series. It's gotten wildly popular in the West in recent years. There are previous adaptations to learn from. And at some level it's a reliable ol' story about a place, a man, his heart and his fists.
If that's all the thought you wanted to put into this show, and that's all you were looking to get out of it, Amazon's confusingly-named Like A Dragon: Yakuza will be all you ever needed from it. Making the decision to tweak the game's timeline and backstory to better suit the format, it's a show about a group of friends who grew up in an orphanage together, and are now moving to the big city to make a name for themselves. It jumps constantly between 1995 and 2005, the former scenes looking back on their formative years and arrival in Kamurocho (that big city), the latter a group of very changed people a decade after some shit has clearly gone down.
As a tale of our hero Kazuma Kiryu becoming the man we know him as today, of soap opera drama and fistfights that sometimes border on the comedic, this is everything a superficial adaptation of Yakuza needed to be. From everyone's wardrobes to the streets of Kamurocho itself, nearly every visual cue from the games has been recreated down to the most minute detail, and it's a joy seeing real people wearing real clothes navigating the fake city's all-too familiar streets.
Once you get past the fact that no actual man could physically fill that suit, Ryoma Takeuchi does a decent job playing Kiryu, the fight scenes are great and the entirety of the show's Yakuza cast are as slapstick and self-deferential as you'd hope. It's a cool TV show! If you have never played the games and just want to sit down and watch something set in Japan that has underworld intrigue, loads of brutal fights and some explosions, then Like A Dragon: Yakuza will absolutely tick all those boxes.
If you have played the games, though--and reader, I know you knew this bit was coming--it doesn't take long for the show to feel a little weird. It succeeds as an adaptation if all you cared about was the show tracing over the game's broadest outlines, but it also fails as an adaptation because the games it's trying to adapt simply cannot be converted to TV, at least in this format.
What the creators of Like A Dragon: Yakuza have done is look at this sprawling, tonally inconsistent and downright weird series and selectively plucked out the only part of it that could ever hope to be adapted: the main storyline. From a practical standpoint, that's understandable! But whenever you talk to someone who has played these games and ask them why they love Yakuza, nobody ever says it's for the main story.
It's Yakuza's bizarre, heart-warming and frequently hilarious sidequests that really prop up the series, taking what would otherwise have been a musty story about gangsters and loyalty and elevating it into the realms of the classically absurd. From giant manbabies to AI-powered phones to running a hostess club to talking to chickens, it's this extra, wild shit that defines the experience, and a limited, linear TV show could never hope to address that madness. It's a miracle the games, even taking their 100+ hour playtimes into account, are able to.
That duality, the straight-laced sitting alongside (and being frequently punctuated by) the absurd, is what makes Yakuza Yakuza. Kiryu isn't Kiryu if he's not splitting his time between grimly serious dialogue and a batting cage. So seeing him portrayed as he is in this TV series, with only the drama, is like seeing yin without yang, light without shadow. He's only half a man, and this is only half a show.
I think a longer, serialised thing might have been the better play here. We could have a central storyline running through everything, but if we want to have a whole episode about managing a baseball team in a small coastal town, then we could have that too.
The half that's there is good! And if you didn't know any better, that's great, enjoy it! But this is a video game website and I'm a Yakuza freak, so of course my thoughts on this adaptation are pegged entirely on the nature of its adaptation, more so than the merits of the show itself. And for me, it's impossible to see the man on screen and not see the giant, unspoken holes in his life as well. You can't be that serious, Kazuma Kiryu, I know we just saw you get some bad news about your personal life, but right afterwards (and off camera) you probably went and raced some little toy cars as a palette cleanser, and that shit looked fun.
