Amazon Prime’s Like a Dragon adaptation Like a Dragon: Yakuza will premier on 24th October, 2024.
Previously, we’d been told the series would debut on 25th October.
To mark the change, Amazon also dropped a tantalising, if brief, peek at what’s to come in a new teaser trailer:
Sega’s Yakuza game series released in 2005. Amazon says in the video description that it was “positioned as an entertaining game for adults, which found massive fanfare amongst its target audience”.
The series will span two time periods – 1995 and 2005 – and follow “the life, childhood friends, and repercussions of the decisions of Kazuma Kiryu, a fearsome and peerless Yakuza warrior with a strong sense of justice, duty, and humanity”.
“The series depicts the lives of fierce yet passionate gangsters and people living in a huge entertainment district, Kamurochō, a fictional district modeled after the violent Shinjuku ward’s Kabukichō, that acts as the backdrop of the gameplay,” the description adds.
“Like a Dragon: Yakuza showcases modern Japan and the dramatic stories of these intense characters, such as the legendary Kazuma Kiryu, that games in the past have not been able to explore. Coming October 24 to Prime.”
Japanese actor and model Ryoma Takeuchi (who cameoed in Detective Pikachu, among other roles) will take on the lead role of Kazuma Kiryu, while Masaharu Take (The Naked Director) will direct.
The TV series is yet another indication of the success of the series, which has sold 21.3m units in total. The most recent game, this year’s Infinite Wealth, sold 1m units in its first week and was the series’ biggest Steam launch ever.
As Ed reported for us at the time, Sega “flat out rejected” the first proposal for the game, presuming it wouldn’t attract mass audiences. Yet the TV series is likely to do just that, especially following the success of Amazon’s Fallout series, which was watched by 65 million people in its first 16 days of release and has already been renewed for a second season.