Amazon Prime clearly knows it’s onto a good thing as it mines the seams of video games for new TV series. Fallout was an astonishing success for the streamer, and you can only imagine how many meetings must have been held with every imaginable publisher for the last few months. One winner is Sega, with the announcement of a Yakuza Like a Dragon series due to appear this October.
If you’ve ever tried to piece together the history and chronology of Sega’s Yakuza games, you likely still have a headache. Going since 2005’s original Yakuza, and most recently releasing its ninth mainline entry, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth in January, 2024, the franchise also sports multiple spin-off games, Japanese-only releases, and the inevitable remakes of older games to confuse anyone who isn’t paying close attention. Oh, and yeah, it switched English-language names over the last five years, ditching the Yakuza moniker for Like a Dragon as its official title.
Amazon Prime’s show is to compromise on that, titled Like a Dragon: Yakuza, flipping around the ordering of 2019’s game name to ensure maximum confusion. However, it’s not the first live-action TV show based on the game, that honor going to 2010’s Kurohyō: Ryū ga Gotoku Shinshō based on the PSP spin-off game, airing only in Japan. It then had a sequel based on the following PSP release, Kurohyō 2: Ryū ga Gotoku Ashura hen. You can find it all on YouTube if you look, and it has some powerful soap opera vibes. It’s safe to say Prime’s version will sport a somewhat larger budget.
Filmed in Japan, and in Japanese, Amazon plans to subtitle and dub the show for international audiences. It will star Ryoma Takeuchi (Kamen Rider: Drive) as lead character Kazuma Kiryu, with direction by Masaharu Take (We Make Antiques) and Kengo Takimoto (Kamen Teacher), in a six-episode show taking place in both 1995 and 2005.
The storyline, as described by Variety, will be “the life, childhood friends and the repercussions of the decisions of a fearsome and peerless Yakuza warrior with a strong sense of justice, duty, and humanity.”
It appears to have the official seal of approval by the video games’ writer and producer Masayoshi Yokoyama, who has an executive producer credit on the program. While making it clear that he had no desire to rewrite events based on games he’d previously made, he seems very happy with the job done by others. “If I were ever sent to the past through some kind of cosmic joke, this is the experience I’d want to create. If I had to go through the wringer anyhow, I’d want to make the most engaging versions of Kamurochō and Kazuma Kiryu I could —and this show has it all.”
Like A Dragon: Yakuza will be dropped in two three-episode batches, one on October 25, the next on November 1, although there’s no information yet on how long each episode will be.
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