An interview with the cast and producers of Amazon Prime Video’s Like A Dragon: Yakuza from San Diego Comic-Con 2024.
After a string of refreshingly great video game-to-TV adaptations — namely HBO’s The Last of Us and Prime Video’s Fallout — the bar set for Sega and Amazon’s upcoming series based on the Like A Dragon (née Yakuza) games is high. The producers and stars of this October’s Like A Dragon: Yakuza believe their show will meet that high bar, in part because it’s locally grown and has global appeal as a story about family.
The producer of the video games is on board, too. Like A Dragon game series producer and head of Ryu Ga Gotoku studio Masayoshi Yokoyama gave his blessing to the TV show’s script, and serves as executive producer on Like A Dragon: Yakuza. He told Polygon in an interview over Zoom that he had “in-depth conversations with the director and cast” to discuss the series’ mythology and “the rules they needed to follow.”
“I was ready to turn down or really tear apart the script,” Yokoyama said through a translator, “but it turned out it was really, really impressive what I read through. So beyond that point, I was very light touch after that, and let the film crew take full control of the production.”
Like A Dragon: Yakuza, a six-episode live-action crime drama series, is based on the events of the first game in the franchise — and not the similarly named Yakuza: Like A Dragon.
Yokoyama said that the linear storytelling format of Like A Dragon: Yakuza will give viewers a point of view of the story that the games cannot, since they’re not seeing the narrative by playing from Kiryu’s perspective.
“When you adapt it into a [TV] story, you can stick with Kiryu and then [Akira] Nishikiyama, and then Yumi [Sawamura]. You can jump through POVs and tell things from a more rounded, bird’s eye point of view, which was quite liberating. I think that’s one of the strengths of the adaptation that’s different from the game,” he said.
One area where the Prime Video series might outdo the games, Yokoyama said, is its representation of the fictional nightlife district of Kamurocho in Tokyo.
