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Like a Dragon: Yakuza season 1 review - an emotional, skull-cracking saga with no time for messing around

After the success of Fallout, Prime Video offers another screen adaptation of one of gaming’s biggest beasts. But has it captured the franchise's essence?

| Image credit: Amazon Prime Video The new six-part screen adaptation - produced in Japan with the blessing of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio head Masayoshi Yokoyama - builds out that story into two distinct timelines while lightly remixing some of the plot elements and characters. We get the two-fisted origin story of Kiryu's back tattoo, the violent deal-making that led to the construction of Kamurocho landmark the Millenium Tower - given some extra gravity-defying bulbousness in this version - and a close-to-home medical crisis that runs through the later episodes like a hissing fuse. | Image credit: Amazon Prime Video One blink-and-you-might-miss it example that really sold me on this version: as the younger Kiryu was building his formidable reputation in an underground fight club so shabby you could practically smell the blood, an elevated panning camera shot caught a grand piano situated not far from the soggy mats that constituted the ring.

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