If you are a fan of SEGA, whether it’s for Sonic, Hatsune Miku, Streetfighters, or something else, you may have been keeping tabs with what they have been doing recently! From the new game Sonic x Shadow Generations released in October, to SEGA announcing the arrival of a new Ryu Ga Gotoku game (usually known as Yakuza, and as of recently Like a Dragon), you had probably heard of Amazon MGM Studios creating a live adaptation of Yakuza, titled ‘Like a Dragon: Yakuza’! 

Yakuza is a game series created by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios and published through SEGA. The plot starts with the murder of a yakuza patriarch, a Japanese mafia’s family boss of the Tojo Clan known as Sohei Dojima. The protagonist, Kiryu Kazuma, had taken the fall for the crime his sworn brother Akira “Nishiki” Nishikiyama committed in order to protect their childhood friend Yumi Sawamura before she went missing. Serving 10 years in prison for a crime that he didn’t do, Kiryu was released right in the middle of a crisis within the Tojo Clan when they lost a total of 10 billion yen. With his time, Kiryu unravels the mystery with the help of Haruka Sawamura, a young girl who was caught in the middle of the crisis.

Directed by Masaharu Take, the live action is a 6 episode series that is loosely based on the original first game, 2005’s Yakuza, and its 2016 remake, Yakuza Kiwami. The Prime Video show follows the plot very loosely, however they still show the main beats of the plot. Changing relationships between several characters, like for an instant Nishiki no longer hating Kiryu was one of the many major changes. They also changed some lore regarding other main characters, like how Majima, another member of the Tojo Clan, had lost his eye. They also replaced and added characters around the series, for example, replacing Nishiki’s sister and removing Reina, a bartender of the bar Nishiki and Kiryu both liked to hang out at. 

Putting any major changes aside, even though I was fully on board with the changes, the show was a good crime drama and would be a great standalone series, and feels like an encouragement to go play the actual games! The visuals were a great match to what both the day and night life looks like in the games, and while watching it was nice seeing existing characters be portrayed in real life with their iconic outfits. Overall, it was a great reimagination of Kiryu’s lore from when he was a child. Despite having some pacing issues with certain fights and the way they show the lore between 1995 and 2005, it’s worth the watch!