Kiryu Kazuma (Takeuchi Ryôma) needs a new suit. In Like a Dragon: Yakuza’s second episode, the former enforcer, fresh off a decade-long stint in prison, tries on an outfit in a store, only to be harassed in his fitting room by a trio of ruffians. When their leader gets overly pushy, Kiryu wallops the group with an obvious lack of both effort and enthusiasm. After the posers scurry off, Kiryu takes one more look in the mirror. The glass, cracked during the tussle, sends jagged lines across his reflection, embodying his fractured sense of self.
Like a Dragon: Yakuza is loosely adapted from the first entry in Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s Like a Dragon video game series, an expansive and unflinchingly eccentric Japanese crime saga. In the shopping scuffle and other scenes, the Amazon series evokes the works that inspired it by playing with tone, physicality, and humor to poke at the psyches of its characters. But while it evolves into a competent, at times rather deft, drama, it proves too staid to capture the idiosyncratic, fiercely political spirit of its source material—and feels, as a result, less like a reimagining than a sandpapered imitation.
Over the course of six episodes, Like a Dragon: Yakuza cuts between two time periods in Kamurochô, a fictional district of Tokyo. In and around 1995, an era of delightfully gaudy suits and sweats, Kiryu and his found family of fellow young adults—Sawamura Yumi (Kawai Yuumi), Nishikiyama Akira (Kaku Kento), and Miho (Nakayama Hinano), Nishiki’s sister—dream of a fuller, freer life beyond the orphanage they grew up in under the care of the distant Kazama Shintaro (Karasawa Toshiaki). By 2005, the crew has drifted apart, their lives irrevocably warped by the Tojo Clan, the yakuza syndicate that rules Kamurochô. Kiryu and company are tangled in crime and conspiracy throughout Like a Dragon: Yakuza, and while its depiction of the underworld offers some thrills—chief among them a pair of amusing, incendiary heists—the murder mystery that extends from the past to the present quickly grows tiresome.
The series achieves greater urgency in its more intimate moments, which recall RGG Studio’s games in their unhurried pacing, understated cinematography, and measured balance of subtlety and melodrama. Toward the end of the season, during a confrontation between Kiryu and Yumi in the earlier timeline, the camera focuses on their faces in an extended, agonizingly quiet closeup, each passing second eroding their naive idealism. Meanwhile, scenes in which Kiryu, an aspiring fighter, bobs and weaves around clothes hanging to dry outside the orphanage—as Kazama, watering the plants, intermittently aims the hose at him—bridge the ellipsis between Kiryu’s origins and future with equal playfulness and poignancy.
But save a handful of such sequences, and despite the cast’s skillful performances, Like a Dragon: Yakuza largely ropes off the inner lives of Kiryu and his friends. (Nishiki, who’s fueled by a more straightforward, immediately relatable motivation, is an exception.) There’s plenty of talk about family and the relationships that form in its absence—as well as an assortment of images that convey the near-mythical gravity of the yakuza, including an initiation ceremony that Like a Dragon: Yakuza frames with rending romanticism—but the series skirts around the question of what these bonds, forged by blood shared or spilled, actually mean to its characters.
Kamurochô is also left unexplored. The open-world structure of the games grants the district a life of its own: You can sing karaoke, take swings at a batting cage, brawl in an underground colosseum, dabble in mahjong, and more, all while bumping into regular (and exceedingly odd) people and helping them with their problems. These spontaneous, often fortuitous interactions provide a lens into the day-to-day reality of Kamurochô, examining the complex social role and legacy of the yakuza and demonstrating how power perverts not just mobsters, but government officials, cops, the professional class, and, well, practically anyone who wields it.
Like a Dragon: Yakuza, in contrast, is marked by monochromatic, nearly invisible politics that render Kamurochô and most of its inhabitants faceless and dull the show’s resonance. The series is blunter, and less toothy, than the tamest beast in RGG Studio’s distinctive menagerie.
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