Products You May Like
If there’s one series that can be relied upon to dole out 80-hour helpings of joy straight into my eager face at regularly scheduled intervals, it’s the RPG brawler stylings of Yakuza/Like A Dragon. One could, I believe, make a convincing argument for Yakuza 0 being – if not the best videogame ever made – then at least the most videogame. While this coming October’s Amazon series won’t be the first live action adaption of Yakuza, I am hopeful its episodic format will give its characters a bit more room to breathe. Or, according to Kiryu actor Ryoma Takeuchi in an interview with IGN, to find the love they’ve always longed for.
“Rather than me becoming Kiryu, I had to create Kiryu from scratch,” Takeuchi told IGN Japan. This is music to my ears, honestly. It’s always reassuring to hear an actor not treat previous depictions of a character with so much reverence it becomes stifling, even if the interview makes it sound like Takeuchi has clearly spent a lot of time researching the games for his own portrayal. “I have great respect for the feelings of the fans,” Takeuchi says. “But when I play a character, I have to express them in my own way, so I can’t pay attention to the preconceptions of others.
Takeuchi told IGN he sees Kiryu as a man who’s “starved for love,” saying ““I think we all unconsciously chase after what is missing in our lives, and we all want to be loved.” With this in mind, Takeuchi continues, “I thought about what Kiryu might be searching for in Kamurocho, as he strives to become the Dragon of Dojima. He wants a family, he wants love, and he doesn’t even realise how much this drives him.” And, yep, that’s Kiryu.
Elsewhere, Takeuchi talks about honing Kiryu’s different fighting styles before and after the character’s prison sentence. “When the story starts in 1995, Kiryu’s fighting style is still rough and not very effective, because he has not formally learned martial arts and he is just using his instincts,” he says. “I wanted to portray him growing as a fighter, as he gradually becomes able to beat his opponents. So his fighting style in each of the two eras is very different.”
Takeuchi is obviously a bit more fresh-faced than the Dragon Of Dojima we know. But as long as he can lift a bicycle over his head and belt out Judgement at karaoke, he’s fine by me. I had a chat with the localisers of Yakuza: Like A Dragon a while back about translating the jokes and other fun nuances of the series from Japanese to English, in which they detailed the subtleties of Kiryu and Ichiban being great mates who have each other’s backs.