‘Like A Dragon: Yakuza’ review: another disappointing video game adaptation

Some gaming franchises are practically offered up at birth for adaptation. From the word go, titles like The Last Of Us, Until Dawn and Uncharted demanded a live action retelling while it’s no coincidence that Game Of Thrones author George RR Martin was hired to write the lore and background story for Elden Ring.

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It seems remiss, then, that it has taken almost 20 years to bring Sega’s Yakuza (translation: gangster) to the small screen. The first outing of the 21 million-selling Like A Dragon series – like all of the 22 sequels, spin-offs and remakes – was based on Japanese yakuza films, its complex and absorbing crime drama storyline a scriptwriting plot-nobbler’s wildest dream. Just lop out the open-world Street Fighter bits, transcribe the rest and pocket the significant Prime Video cheque.

Amazingly, even though sticking pretty tightly to the first game’s plot, directors Masaharu Take and Kengo Takimoto have managed to fluff it a bit. After a high-octane opening heist in which four wayward orphans – series hero Kazuma Kiryu (Ryoma Takeuchi), Akira Nishikiyama (Kento Kaku), Yumi Sawamura (Yūmi Kawai) and Miho (Hinano Nakayama) – mistakenly steal a pot full of cash from the not-exactly-benevolent Tojo clan and commit themselves to serving the mob in return for their lives, we settle into a dual timeline affair.

In 1995, the four begin working their way through the clan ranks, hunting down a missing ink-stamp that would allow the Tojo boss to steal the land needed for his prized Millennial Tower HQ (has a sub-plot ever sounded more side-quest?) and, in Kazuma’s case, become the clan’s prize street fighter – the Dragon Of Dojima. In 2005, Kazuma emerges from jail to shun the yakuza life while Akira has worked his way to the head of the Tojo clan, facing down a war with arch rivals the Omi over 10billion stolen yen and a bunch of satanic gangland murders.

In short, there’s a lot going on with Like A Dragon: Yakuza. There’s no focussed end point in sight and, as the six 50-minute-ish episodes go on, increasingly less incentive to untangle it all. Threads are easily lost between the shifting timelines and there’s so much sudden, unexpected violence that you become desensitised to any consequences. With a significant portion of the series overly concerned with whether a novelty skyscraper gets built, it’s easy to lose interest. There’s a major twist concerning the identity of a murderous masked devil that you could probably have a solid crack at predicting while you’re still bingeing Rivals ahead of episode one, and only a few moments of basement fight sequence that really quicken the pulse. Like A Drag-On, more like.

‘Like A Dragon: Yakuza’ is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video from October 24

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