Oct 24

Oct 24 Review | Like A Dragon: Yakuza - A Good TV Series. A Poor Adaptation.

The Like A Dragon franchise, at this point, spans 20 years, nine mainline games, two remakes, seven spin-off games, one remake of a spin-off game, a separate spin-off series, and an MMO. In short, it is vast, which makes any proposed adaptation a frightening prospect. Not just because you’re dealing with at least a thousand hours of interconnected narratives and characters, some of which are non-canonical or retellings of historical events. Not just because the series varies massively in tone on a moment-by-moment basis. And not just because these games balance stories of crime melodrama, errand running, and zany hijinx along with virtual sightseeing, arcade gaming, kart racing, taxi driving, fishing, cabaret management, and god knows what else. Yakuza might be one of the hardest games to adapt purely because Kazuma Kiryu is one of the most beloved video game characters of all time.

It makes sense, then, that Amazon and showrunners Sean Crouch and Yugo Nakamura would seek to create a “totally different” version of the iconic stoic hero. As the Director of Ryu Ga Gokoku (the developers of the games) and Executive Producer on the show, Masayoshi Yokoyama, said recently, “The Kazuma Kiryu we created 20 years ago was perfect, and there’s nothing more to add to his character…This project brought forth a new Kazuma Kiryu.” And in that regard, Like A Dragon: Yakuza succeeds. This is a totally different Kiryu, designed and written for the expectations of prestige TV. However, in the process of remaking Kiryu this adaptation has tried to streamline the characters of the first game, resulting in a story which is considerably more convoluted and character development that seems at odds with the franchise’s ideals.

That second part, alone, isn’t a bad thing. This is meant to be a different Kiryu, after all, but when the show goes to great lengths to crib off the iconography of these games and its protagonist, it feels a bit exploitative to shed so many integral motivations and ideas from the character in the name of a streamlined drama.

Ryoma Takeuchi (Kazuma Kiryu), Kento Kaku (Akira Nishikiyama), Hiano Nakayama (Miho), and Yumi Kawai (Yumi Sawamura).

In the first Yakuza game, Kazuma Kiryu was already the Dragon of Dojima when we met him in 2005. The game picks up with him being released from jail for the alleged murder of the Dojima Family Patriarch in 1995. While these two plot points remain in the TV series, the key difference is that in the games, Kiryu has already been a part of the yakuza for a while in 1995 and has a reputation as the Dragon. In the show, he’s young enough to still be living in an orphanage and hasn’t yet joined the yakuza when we first meet him. While this plot point rules out the possibility of there ever being a season of the show set in the 80s around the events of Yakuza 0, a bigger problem is how green this version of Kiryu is when he goes into jail and how green he is coming out. While the games deal heavily with themes of expectations and idealising certain types of men, this Kiryu joins the yakuza somewhat by happenstance without knowing the role of his foster father in the world of organised. Kiryu’s motivations feel much more shallow in the show purely because the past of his foster dad, Shintaro Kazama, is a mystery to him. He doesn’t want to join the yakuza be like Shinataro and become as strong as he was, he just wants to become the new Dragon of Dojima after seeing the original one in an underground fight as a kid. It all makes Kiryu seem quite naive, something he never really shakes for the whole show.

The other big change, and by far the show's biggest problem, is how it seeks to streamline the conspiracy at the heart of the first Yakuza. In that game, the head of Dojima assaults his childhood friend Yumi Sawamura and Kiryu’s sworn brother (and also childhood friend) Nishkiyama kills the crime boss. Kiryu goes to jail by taking the fall for Nishiki. In the show, Kiryu, Nishiki, Yumi and a third friend (and Nishki’s sister), Miho, join the yakuza and start working at a cabaret club, respectively, to make amends for a botched robbery of the Tojo. While Kiryu is away in jail Nishiki is beset by a tragic downfall as yakuza higher-ups exploit his connection to his sick sister, Yuko, before his death. Something similar happens in the show, however, it is while Kiryu is still out and about and Nishiki’s sister has been renamed. In the game, when Kiryu gets out of jail the only people he knows from his past life are Nishki and Yumi, and Kiryu is tasked with tracking down who stole ¥10 billion from the Tojo Clan to prevent a clan war breaking out. He befriends a young girl called Haruka, who claims to be the daughter of Mizuki Sawamura, Yumi’s sister who Kiryu never heard about. Eventually, in the game, it is revealed that Mizuki doesn’t exist and is simply an alias to hide from her abusive husband Jingu, who’s a high-ranking government official. The showrunners, confusingly, seemed to want to excise the government corruption highlighted by the existence of Jingu, and he is totally absent from the show. However, as a result of this, Yumi now has a real secret sister called Aiko who is the person who stole the ¥10 billion and is the real mother of Haruka, effectively robbing Yumi of any real character growth beyond her love interests with Kiryu.

Downgrading Yumi from the mother of Haruka to a worried aunt, and changing her from the mastermind of a heist to a frustrated sister trying to track down her sister feels like a huge step back for one of the best female characters in the series. All this gives her both less to do and makes her and Haruka’s connections to Kiryu feel much less important.

In a bid to slim down the number of topics the first season covers, Like A Dragon: Yakuza manages to both simplify key characters' motivations, while also making the story much more convoluted, especially if you remember the plot of the game. This is exacerbated by the season’s structure. The game primarily takes place in 2005, with only the prologue and brief flashbacks showing us the events of 1995. However, the TV show cuts between these two periods frequently, and they share about equal screen time. While it makes sense from a traditional cinematic standpoint, in reality, it means we are jumping between eras just as one storyline is gaining momentum. What’s more, during both these eras, Yumi will often talk about her “sister” - in 1995 she’s referring to Miho, while in 2005 she’s usually referring to Aiko. The problem is Aiko also appears in 1995 in an underdevelopment plot that feels more like a diversion to chew up some runtime than a worthwhile story beat.. By the time you get to the final episode, I wasn’t able to help but wonder, why the first three episodes weren’t all set in 1995 telling this new origin for Kiryu, while the second half of the season could have been set in 2005, relatively accurately retelling the events of the first game.

Subaru Shibutani as Detective Date and Munetaka Aoki as Goro Majima.

These extra characters, which are poorly grafted into the story and the simplification of Yumi have a profound impact on the themes of the show. In the early Yakuza games, every loss of a loved one inshrines a different core value in Kiryu, without giving anything away, that doesn’t happen in this series. Kiryu learns a lot of the information that he knew at the end of that first game, but gets there largely by chance without having learned the lessons that build the basis of his character going forward. While a lot of this sounds negative, it only feels that way because the games’ narratives feel so cohesive. On its own, Like A Dragon: Yakuza is a perfectly acceptable crime drama, with good performances from Ryoma Takeuchi and Kento Kaku as Kiryu and Nishiki and some great brief appearances from Subaru Shibutani and Munetaka Aoki as Dectective Date and Goro Majima, even if they don’t have much to do. The series also does a good job at translating the chaotic brawling from the games into live-action, even if there are relatively few fight large scale or highly choreographed scenes in the six-episode run.

While Like A Dragon: Yakuza isn’t a total miss, it definitely feels like a missed opportunity. The alternative universe it sets up combined with the potential characters we’d see brought in a second season could result in a pretty explosive and divergent second act, on its own, it simply feels like an underbaked retelling of the first game with little to add of its own.