For a while there it looked like all of the best streaming services on the market had figured out a new recipe for success - jumping aboard the videogame adaptation bandwagon. The huge critical reception garnered by the likes of Fallout and The Last of Us had many heralding a new era for big TV.
I'm not saying that's been disproved, by any stretch, but it's fair to say that the theory just took a bit of a dent after the arrival of Like A Dragon: Yakuza on Amazon Prime Video. The show hasn't exactly lit the world alight, despite being based on a pretty beloved gaming franchise.
The show is directly based on the Like A Dragon series, fairly recently renamed from its previous Yakuza titling, to avoid glorifying what is still a real criminal enterprise in Japan. It takes some of the most famous characters from that series and gives them a new spin, with a split timeline that shows their origins alongside their later struggles.
Disappointingly for Prime Video, though, it hasn't done too well at all. Critics weren't too impressed by the show, handing it a middling 67% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but audiences have gone in way harder. They've handed it a score of just 36% as it stands, which makes it a real turkey this Thanksgiving season.
Many of those negative verdicts have focussed on some of the changes that Prime Video's creative team made to characters that have become enormously familiar over the course of a long series of games. In some cases, these are surface-level (like a famously bald character having hair), but in others, they seem to tweak quite established character traits.
One unhappy viewer wrote: "Taking what was already working and making a decision to rewrite characters, their motives and relationships was completely unnecessary, totally ruined the show for me." That's fairly damning, although others have obviously felt more positive about the show as a whole.
That discrepancy between critics' reviews and the thoughts of the wider audience can actually sometimes be quite enticing, too. Some of the most interesting TV is divisive, after all, so if you're a Prime member this might be one to roll the dice on and sample to see how you feel.
