If you ask someone like me who really loves the Yakuza/Like A Dragon games why they should play the Yakuza/Like A Dragon games, there’s a good chance that they’ll just end up basically holding you back at the beginning of the process. Rappel and says the following in your best husky Kiryu voice: ‘Hey, just play it’.
That’s because there’s a lot going on in the world of Big Kaz. Especially at advanced levels, because the narrative about the character and the world he runs around is set in 2024. Which series you should play and in what order you should eat those courses to get the best taste. A few years ago, I began my journey into LAD-dom with Yakuza Zero. All I knew was that this game wasn’t all that different from Sleeping Dogs, another seminal game about tattooed gangsters who use furniture and their fists to slap around. * These are the idiots I enjoyed up to that point in my life.
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I don’t quite remember what my true expectations were for the Yakuza game I recently became intimately familiar with, but I guess it was something like Like A Dragon: Yakuza TV. The series is, at least through the opening two episodes I’ve seen so far.
There are chain-smoking men in suits who like to fight, egos clashing in the pressure cooker of the underworld, and people falling bleeding out on the freight train of Kamurocho’s life. All of this is undoubtedly a key part of the Yakuza series, but it feels like the show is struggling to emphasize it enough, as fans will love the other side of this bizarre coin that Ryu Ga Gotoku has spent years rummaging through between his thumbs. Decide carefully when to turn it over, repolish it, or manipulate it in another way to make it shine brighter.
There’s some good humor, but mostly it’s for silly gags or weird, subtly sarcastic jokes. There are neon-filled, well-rendered versions of the series’ most iconic settings, but the format doesn’t mean you can interact with them, but rather you can touch them and become one as you wander from diner to mini-mart to store. arcade. There’s emotion, but there’s little time to breathe as we move from event to event to see how the original Yakuza’s story unfolds in the Prime Video version.
A decent crime drama is unfolding. The Dragon of Doima has some potentially interesting things going for it in the form of Kiryu being the unwavering presence he wants to be, rather than just the unique nickname he establishes for himself through his actions. As someone who has always been so into reading characters who examine their own relationship with determinism, I’d like to know where that applies in particular. There’s solid action, the frequent changes in time and location are handled much more skillfully than, say, the early series of Netflix’s Witcher shows, and as with other shows of this nature, everything is set up to make the costumes look slick and stylish from a purely visual perspective. .
Some characters look and act a little differently, and there are a few new additions, but generally I’m open to it for the most part, as long as the next four episodes provide adequate space for some development. Can I say that I have faith that it will happen? Or can we just say that the series will somehow be able to deliver the same kind of Like a Dragon experience that the game succeeded in, with thousands of hours of character development and storytelling? In reality, that’s not the case. But I would argue that Like A Dragon: Yakuza was likely going to be fighting a losing battle in that regard anyway, unless its showrunners chose to go the Fallout TV show route and come up with an entirely new story. The world of the series.
That said, I can’t promise you won’t react like this when the end credits roll unless you get some damn Kiryu and Majima karaoke.
