The great conversion of video game properties to TV video has left many an interesting project in it's wake, arguably none more so than those that try to take something entirely stringent on it's interactive elements and create essentially new media with it. Borderlands is a first person shooter that briefly deluded itself into thinking it was a comedy franchise- but with more entries being tiresome exercises in humourlessness- that label is becoming harder to ratify with each passing day. Thus the movie really had hardly anything to work off at all- does that justify how boring the final product was? No. But I guess I can understand why Eli Roth got the project and went- yeah, I've got nothing to work with might as well half ass literally everything. People already don't respect the gaming space- giving out licences to Borderlands wasn't going to change that.
But what about 'Like a Dragon'? Well, that is honestly a franchise that has been very cinematic in it's long years, covering many of the tropes of romanticised crime fiction and imbuing a high octane bipolar attitude that can have you contemplating the erasure of the forgotten class by a supposedly confrontationally justice-centred society to a straight slug-match with a shark. Sometime ago this franchise might have made a decent movie, but by now it's transcended that medium entirely and has become as much about the video game exclusive diatribes into distracting minigames as it has been about the serious drama that rocks the narrative. To say that the new Like a Dragon series has me slightly on edge about what they propose to do to my favourite property is a bit of an understatement.
Of course there was a movie based on Like a Dragon years ago by a studio who seemed wholly invested in capturing the insanity of being a video game movie. With nonsensical shifts in pace, taking healing item breaks and presenting Majima as a megalomaniacal mass murderer- which was a very easy conceptual mistake to make before Yakuza 0 reframed him so masterfully. What we have today doesn't really feel all that interested in celebrating the medium as the franchise itself, which is fine on paper- but I wonder how much of the Like a Dragon property is infused with it's identity as a game- and consequentially- how much we can really get out of an adaptation that wantonly shirks those ties.
Now, we have ourselves a full trailer giving us what to expect with the full launch later this month and I'm not going to pretend that I'm fully impressed with everything I saw. On a production level the show appears to be decently budgeted- and solid enough with the gun-toting violence that I think we won't suffer 'violence withdrawals' as some feared. But does it feel like Yakuza? Not yet. There's a drab blue/green-wash tint over the footage that seems to share more in common with a melodramatic crime story than the colourful, seedy world of the franchise- wherein every square inch of land is secretly hiding some kind of lush underground wonderland of illegal activity. Kamaroucho alone should be home to a prostitution/fighting metropolis underneath the homeless-run park- do you get that impression from glimpsing this world?
And maybe that's the point they're going for right now. Like a Dragon is renowned for their intentionally bizarre balance between the ridiculous and the series that springs back and forth so suddenly the whiplash alone keeps your blood pumping. Maybe what this show wants to do is capture the essence of the realistic drama so acutely that when Majima goes careening into a soaphouse with a truck it blares out as even more insane and over the top- but I guess we'll not know until it's in front of us because that is not the experience they're selling right now. At the very least the show has explosions, so there's that.
What I'm most worried about at this moment is obviously the changes that are inevitable in any project like this. We know this is more than just an adaptation it's a reimagining- which means we won't be getting a one-to-one with all the characters and stories that we know- I don't even know if we'll be getting Kazama or Sunflower Orphanage. It kind of looks like Kiryu grew up watching street fighters and decided to become a Dragon based on that alone- and unless the trailer is hiding her completely it seems we're not getting Haruka- which is insane to me consideringly she is literally the single most important person in Kiryu's life- throughout nearly the entire franchise! Everything he chooses to do in his entire life is framed around Haruka- if she really is excluded this time around... whew- god knows what that means for our boy.
Then again I do love this world, love it's style, love it's characters, so many giving us an alternative look at the story of the ten billion yen would be exactly what we need to breath a new life into this done and dusted story. Whilst Kiryu is busy handing off his legacy to Ichiban, real-life Kiryu is stalking an entirely different path leading in a different direction. Heck, who even knows if this Kiryu is going to be a virtue-touting hero or a down-dirty Yakuza rocking his way through the underworld with something to prove? He certainly does seem a lot younger than we would expect Kiryu to be at this point in his career. It's just very unclear right now.
All of this is to say that I'm not exactly burning with anticipation for what I'm seeing right now, despite having been pretty open to the idea of an adaptation for this franchise dating back a while now. But I don't rightly know what a perfect adaptation of this series would look like, so I'm keeping an open mind that I can be proven wrong. This is what I like to call 'healthy skepticism' so that I don't build up hopes too high just in case this turns out to be another mid dud like Netflix's Avatar. At the very least- I think this will be a good show. Will it be a good 'Yakuza' show? Wait and see.
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