Like A Dragon: Yakuza better be sillier than its first trailer

Prime Video’s gritty adaptation looks like any other yakuza show, but not "Like A Dragon"

By Matt Schimkowitz | September 30, 2024 | 6:47pm

TV News Yakuza

Like A Dragon: Yakuza better be sillier than its first trailer

Earlier today, Prime Video released the first full trailer for Like A Dragon: Yakuza, the much-hyped adaptation of the bestselling Sega game. The gritty trailer heightens the steely menace of HBO’s Tokyo Vice for a slightly more colorful gangster series, with operatic violence and characters tightly stylized to resemble more grounded versions of their video game counterparts. (They’ve reduced the size and stiffness of the collars). For those purposes, the trailer is perfectly serviceable. Want to watch a show about the vast networks of organized criminal activity ravaging the Kamurochō underground? Like A Dragon: Yakuza could be it.

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But the trailer for the video game version, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, reveals a much more colorful, unpredictable, and sillier world. The tone is light enough to make Yakuza feel like a departure from the norm, with different play modes and a karaoke coda that promises a game unbothered by convention. The series trailer is not as ambitious. Where are the press conferences? Where are Ichiban Confections? (Or Ichiban, for that matter?) Where are the puppy filters? Where is the silliness in Prime’s version?

Maybe that’s what happens when the titles get flipped. After all, the show is called Like A Dragon: Yakuza, not Yakuza: Like A Dragon, following the video game’s soft rebrand. Or maybe you do need 18 years of video games to make the recent goofy stuff sing.

Still, the show seems more interested in delving into other games in the Yakuza series than its namesake, making the “Like A Dragon” moniker nothing more than a hood ornament. The game’s main character, Ichiban, doesn’t even appear on the cast list. Instead, the series focuses on the series-long protagonist, Kiryu (Ryoma Takeuchi), the main character in every Yakuza game but Like A Dragon. The series unfolds across two timelines, 1995 and 2005. In 1995, Kiryu takes the fall for an arcade heist gone wrong. When he leaves prison a decade later, he starts working with the cops to help fight the yakuza forces threatening his friends. Again, it all sounds like a Yakuza show. But when a show is called Like A Dragon, we’d hope it would be interested in adapting all of it, even the silly parts.

We’ll see for ourselves on October 24, when the first three episodes premiere on Prime Video. The final three stream the following Thursday, October 31.