Like A Dragon: Yakuza Casts House Of Ninjas Star As Its Tragic Villain

A live-action TV series based on Sega’s Yakuza and Like a Dragon video games will begin airing on October 25, and at San Diego Comic-Con, more casting details for the show were revealed. Japanese actor and model Ryoma Takeuchi’s casting as Kazuma Kiryu, the legendary Dragon of Dojima, was first revealed in June, and he’ll be joined by Kento Kaku as Akira Nishikiyama.

In the Like a Dragon game series, Nishikiyama grew up with Kazuma in an orphanage and was one of his greatest allies before the events of the first Yakuza game. A complicated character, Nishikiyama murders the patriarch of the Dojima family, Sohei Dojima, to prevent him from sexually assaulting his close friend Yumi Sawamura in Yakuza. Kazuma would willingly take the blame for Dojima’s murder and serve a 10-year jail sentence in his place, and upon his release, found that his sworn brother had radically changed in the last decade, putting the two on a collision course.

Kaku made his acting debut in 2007, and since then, has built up several credits in TV and film projects. His latest lead role is in House of Ninjas on Netflix, a series about a family of ninjas who used to work for the government and are descended from Hattori Hanzo, a legendary shinobi.

The Like a Dragon: Yakuza Prime Video series will span two time periods–1995 and 2005–and will follow not only Kazuma Kiryu but also his childhood friends and the repercussions of his decisions. Like the games, the show is aiming to balance intense action scenes with drama, and will be set in the fictional Kamurocho district, which has been the main stomping ground of the series since it began in the early 2000s.

“Like a Dragon: Yakuza showcases modern Japan and the dramatic stories of these intense characters, such as the legendary Kazuma Kiryu, that games in the past have not been able to explore,” the official plot synopsis for the series reads.