Ended up watching half the Like a Dragon: Yakuza live action amazon series earlier due to being roped into a group watching of it, and my god it's bad. Much worse than any of us expected.
Most of us knew about the story of the series going in and understood the general plot, and one of us didn't know really anything but the surface level, but nobody could understand a single thing that was going on in the show. Characters swap between multiple different personalities at the drop of a hat, time jumps back and forth once every 5 minutes, and many plot threads will be created that mean absolutely nothing but lead to confusion. Previous knowledge didn't help since everyone is nowhere near their game versions (Kiryu acts most of the time like the exact opposite of his character). Going in as its own thing also doesn't help, since characters are muddy at best and every single scene was treated with the exact same level of importance. I could not recap a single strand of the plot because the random one off characters in a small corner of Kamurocho are given just as much, if not more screen time than Kiryu or any of the actual yakuza.
There was one good thing though, the first 2 episodes have some absurd scenes that are genuinely hilarious, though likely not the intention. Episode 1 ends with a car being thrown out of the second story of a parking garage by another car, with it almost being cartoon-like in execution. Episode 2 has a scene where a weak ass pistol took a massive chunk out of a random guy and launched him far enough you'd think he took a shotgun blast to the chest, followed by the most unceremonious explosion imaginable.
From what we've seen so far, don't watch this shit, it's not worth it. It doesn't appeal to Yakuza fans, let alone anyone else. The creators were proud of having not played any of the games, and it shows. Several hours of my life I'm not getting back. :cirno_angry: