Director: Masaharu Take
Kamurocho's crowded arcades and karaoke bars hide a criminal underworld that reshapes one young man's entire future in this Japanese drama built around the long-running Yakuza video game saga.
What is Like a Dragon: Yakuza about?
The series follows Kazuma Kiryu from his early years running with a small-time gang through the betrayal that turns him into an outcast among Tokyo's organized crime families. Told across two overlapping timelines, the show traces how a handful of loyalties — to friends, to a found family, to a code few outsiders understand — collide with ambition, debt, and violence in the fictional Kamurocho district. Rather than glamorize its underworld, the series lingers on the everyday cost paid by the people caught inside it: broken friendships, prison years, and reputations that never fully heal.
Cast & crew
Ryoma Takeuchi anchors the show as the younger Kiryu, opposite Kento Kaku as the friend whose choices set the plot's betrayal in motion. Yuumi Kawai and Hinano Nakayama round out a cast built to carry the story's two timelines, with director Masaharu Take keeping the tone closer to street-level drama than action spectacle.
Context & significance
Like a Dragon: Yakuza adapts the long-running video game franchise for television, a rare crossover in a genre more often adapted the other way around. Its five-way genre mix of action, crime, drama, mystery, and thriller mirrors the games' own blend of brawling and soap-opera plotting, and the production draws on Japanese studios and cast to keep the setting grounded rather than exoticized for outside audiences.
Where & how to watch
Like a Dragon: Yakuza streams on K-Time with Farsi dubbing and Farsi subtitles, alongside the original Japanese audio. The page itself is free to browse; watching the episodes requires logging into a K-Time account, and the interface is built around a Farsi-first experience for Persian-speaking viewers.