The crime drama genre is quite crowded across all media, from novels to the big screen, from games to television series. And this is especially true for stories that focus on the world of the Yakuza, as members of organized crime syndicates are known in Japan.

Amazon’s upcoming series Like a Dragon: Yakuza, based on the popular video game series, is therefore the latest in a long line of such stories set in the Japanese underworld. So the question is, what makes this series stand out in such a crowded subgenre?