Last year, I mentioned in our Shenmue 3 thread that Shenmue 3 didn't seem like a game I'd feel comfortable paying money for, but one I might enjoy. Our very own Pierrot offered to buy me a copy, and he did and sent a copy to my mom's place in America. I picked it up when I visited the States back in December, and have been waiting for the inspiration to strike since then. Last week, it finally felt like the right time to play through Shenmue 3, and four days and 25-ish hours (I think) of playtime later, I've finished it on my PS4 Slim. While I'm certainly far from a converted fan, I do wanna open this review by clarifying that while I have never played Shenmue 1 or 2 to any significant extent, I never really hated my time with this game, and I enjoyed my time with it well enough that it wasn't ever a slog to get through it. As one last warning, I do get into some light spoiler talk here about certain characters who appear as well as things to do with the pacing.

Shenmue 3 picks up right where Shenmue 2 left off with Ryo and Shenhua entering the cave with the big mirrors and the prophecy in it. Shenmue 3 follows Ryo's story in his quest for revenge another couple of steps through Bailu Village and the port city of Niaowu. While Shenmue does have combat in it, it is far more an adventure game that happens to have combat rather than more of an brawler-RPG like Yakuza is. That being the case, I weigh the story in the game pretty heavily as an aspect of recommending it, and it doesn't hold up very well there.

Shenmue 3, being a larger part in a story (that is allegedly still not even close to being finished) only encompass a small section of Ryo's overall quest for revenge. However, rather than feeling like a self-contained episode that is narratively satisfying in and of itself, Shenmue 3 feels more like a section cut out of a larger story with little care given to pacing or payoff. While I do understand that Shenmue is a series far more about the journey than the destination, compared to most other games, this still leaves Shenmue 3 feeling like an unsatisfying and shallow adventure.

Characters have interesting aspects to them, and some very interesting themes (like a father's relationship to their child, how a single-minded quest for revenge can affect a person's worldview and behavior, the dangers of cycles of violence) are present and interesting, they're never meaningfully commented on or evolved. Most characters in the street you talk to (especially in Bailu Village) are boring and dull, and the best most characters ever get are "entertainingly weird". Even that "entertainingly weird" nature can still leave many characters (some very tertiary, some very well established) falling into some harmful and outdated stereotypes. As a result, it's somewhat of a blessing in disguise that characters like Chai have such small roles in the narrative.

The most entertaining characters (for me, Ren and Mr. Hsu) are largely so interesting in no small part because of how good their voice acting is. I played the first few hours of the game with the English voice track on, and then switched it to Japanese for the rest of my playthrough. It is no secret that Shenmue 3 has an embarrassingly poor localization for a game released in 2019. Nonsensical conversations and flat, unemotional delivery are as iconic as Ryo in his forklift. This can be slightly remedied by turning the voice lines to the Japanese voice track, but you're still left with the awkward and poorly done subtitles of the English voice track. The almost non-existent marketing aside, the awful localization is the #1 thing I chalk the commercial under-performance of this game up to. To the uninitiated, Shenmue 3 looks more like a bad joke than a genuine attempt at a sincere story. And even then, the Japanese voice track isn't terribly good either. Most characters still have fairly flat delivery and uninteresting dialogue with only a few exceptions. At most, the Japanese VA provides a story that at least makes better grammatical sense for players who can understand Japanese.

Regardless, even the best VA in the world would have a hard time making up for the too often poorly written dialogue and missteps in setup and payoff in the story's general construction. The fact that the climaxes of both sections of the game revolve around earning a ton of money to get a nearly identical move needed to progress the story makes for a very underwhelming end to the arc in Niaowu. Not to mention that those giant piles of money you need offer nothing but massive roadblocks to the pacing even if (like me) you were enjoying the smaller mysteries outside of the larger revenge plot. I'm really glad that I went into the game knowing that I'd need 2000 and then 5000 yuan, because if I didn't those would've been some awfully demoralizing progress stoppages.

On the topic of money, lets move on from the story and onto the main gameplay loop. Shenmue 3 is still as Shenmue as ever in most regards there. Ryo needs information, and people have information. A lot of the game is going around asking the same question to everyone you meet, trying to get an idea of where to go. This is the bread and butter of Shenmue, and it's hard to fault the game for it given that it's such a staple of the game. It's an adventure game, not an action RPG, so most of the game is talking to people. That said, a lot of the people you talk to are really boring and have little interesting to say (especially in Bailu Village), so this can get a bit dull after a while. Thankfully, you can press square to hurry through dialogue a bit if you're fine just reading the subtitles.

Everything outside of the talking comes back to making money though. In a change from prior Shenmue games, Ryo has a health bar that's also his stamina meter, and you need to eat food to keep it higher so you can run instead of walk (although walking is fast enough that I found myself doing it a lot of the game anyhow), and you'll also wanna have it at least a little high so you can survive a fight should you get into one. To keep that stamina up, you'll need to buy food, and that costs money.

In another change from prior Shenmue games, you don't just get better at fighting in a Virtua Fighter-style. Ryo has attack and HP stats that will go up as he masters different martial arts moves and does simple endurance mini-games respectively. Being at high health means these things level up faster, and (as we'll get to later) the combat isn't technical enough for you to simply win most story fights with technique rather than stats. As a result, there is a lot of actual grinding these mini-games and martial arts moves (just repeating them over and over during sparing) to get past a fight you simply aren't strong enough to beat. However, you can't get new martial arts moves to master just out of thin air: you need skill books. You get skill books by trading items (especially capsule toys) for them at pawn shops or outright buying them at martial arts stores, and that'll cost a lot of money as well. All this adds up to a gameplay loop that means that if you're not talking to people to solve the mystery, you're grinding out cash to get your stats up so you can win a fight to progress the story (or buy the super item you need to progress the story, as mentioned previously).

This wouldn't all be so bad if the combat were actually good, but it is not good at all. The biggest change from the prior Shenmue games is that you no longer have that Virtua Fighter-lite style of fighting. In an attempt to open up the game to more players, Yu Suzuki has opted to change the combat to no longer use directional inputs at all, and all moves are now on the four face buttons of circle, triangle, X, and square. By inputting sequences of 2-5 buttons, you'll pull off a special move. While I believe it is possible to execute a move you don't have the skill book for, you can't level up that move outside of sparing, so you do need those skill books to increase your attack power if you wanna survive the later fights in the game.

Where this really becomes a problem is how the button combo presses are just a sequence of buttons, and because there are only four buttons, the game doesn't know if you're only inputting two buttons, or if you simply haven't finished a four-button move set. This makes it almost impossible to react to opponents moves through anything outside of using the control stick to dodge, because there is a massive lag between your inputs and Ryo's attacks as he "waits" to see if you're done inputting a move or not. This makes the combat very frustrating and unrewarding to try and get good at, although it does mean that the combat itself being more about stats than technique is a small but welcome mercy.

The ways you earn money in the first place can be quite entertaining though. I mostly earned my fortune going around and collecting herbs that I'd then sell, but I also did a button pressing mini-game to earn money chopping wood quite often. Aside from that, you can gamble on all sorts of games of chance to earn money, as well as perform the iconic forklifting job once you get to Niaowu (which I'll admit I never had the patience to try). Earning money through gambling is fairly annoying, as you can't gamble directly for cash. You first need to buy tokens, then gamble (in quite small amounts) for more tokens, and you then exchange those tokens for prizes which you can THEN sell at a pawn shop for actual money. Given that you could apparently just gamble for money in Shenmue 2, this is mechanically a really annoying step back, and I was super excited when I realized that I basically never needed to gamble and could just collect herbs to get past those money-based progress barriers.

The final part of the gameplay that I think annoyed me more than anything were the quick time events. I know this is Shenmue and QTEs are a fairly iconic part of it, but they're not fun in 2019 and they frankly never were (and I'm really glad that the industry as a whole is moving away from them). If you fail a QTE, the cutscene immediately replays and you get another chance to hit the exact same button. The only actual penalty for missing a QTE is the time you lose watching the cutscene again, some of these cutscenes are really long (one near the end of the game is easily over a minute long and has only two button presses in it). I would've much rather they had no QTEs at all, or at least done what a lot of games have done recently and given you the option to turn them off. Shenmue is a very slow series to begin with, but the QTEs more than anything feel outright disrespectful of the player's time.

The last thing we'll talk about is the presentation. For reference, I played this on a PS4 Slim, so this is the base PS4 experience of the game. One of the best things the game has going for it is that it's quite pretty if you stand still and look around, particularly at the environments. Some of the NPCs look a bit uncanny valley in just how stylized they are compared to a lot of the main characters like Ryo and Shenhua, and they can also look pretty creepy when they open their mouths to talk, but it's far from a deal breaker and the game overall holds up visually just fine. The game also has some quite nice music, especially during the final battle and the chicken catching game. It's not without its odd performance issues though.

If you run around an area, NPCs take quite a few seconds to load in, although they still exist, meaning Ryo will just be bumping into air until the NPC loads in and you can interact with them. There are also many areas in Naiowu where you are forced to walk through an area to let the area ahead of you load, and this can get annoying given how often you need to run from one end of the city to the other. There are also a lot of (admittedly quite fast) loading times within cutscenes, and some of them are just these weird fades to black that happen constantly in longer cutscenes. They make for very jarring dialogue exchanges where you keep thinking the scene has ended, but in fact it's just a fade to black that could've been a quick cut, and that's a problem that the whole game is plagued with from the word 'go'.

Verdict: Not Recommended. Though I did not hate my time with Shenmue 3, and actually quite enjoyed most of it, it is not a game that I could actually recommend in good faith to anyone who doesn't already like it. The main reason I enjoyed Shenmue 3 was just down to it being an open world game, and having the same "number go up" dopamine hits of progression that any open world game has. Everything Shenmue 3 does ranges from mediocre at best to outright bad. Shenmue 3 didn't have to feel like a poor man's Yakuza, but the production decisions made along the way make it feel like precisely that. Shenmue as a series has very different goals narratively and mechanically from Yakuza, so steps could've been taken to lean into the mundanity and slow pace to bring Shenmue into the 8th generation of gaming, but that is not what YsNet did. Shenmue 3 is a game that turns its nose up at the decade and a half of innovation in the open world genre since Shenmue 2's release and the start of Shenmue 3's development. It not only refuses to imagine that Shenmue could be anything more than what it always was, but when it does try to change it's actively taking steps backwards. Shenmue 3 had the potential to be an interesting niche entry to an ever expanding genre, and is instead a nostalgia piece that simply can't imagine a world beyond itself.

Phew, that's a tough one to review. I liked a lot about the game, the graphics, mood and general vibes were very good and very Shemue. The way you slowly build up the relationship with Shenua and how she changes her behavior towards Ryo was very sweet. I also liked the city of Niaowu, a beautiful place with some nice quests.

However, the game has glaring weaknesses. The stamina system is a real pain. Who thought it was a good idea to use up stamina for every action (even just running), which is then no longer available in battles, in a game that actually invites you to explore? What a stupid idea! The fighting itself was also not as well implemented as in the predecessors, the Virtua Fighter license was unfortunately not available here.

Story-wise, almost nothing of relevance happens in this part. It's a mystery to me that they didn't take the opportunity to advance the story after such a long time. The ending is also totally sudden and Landi's appearance seems totally random and out of place, much like the Kickstarter fighters in the last section of the game. Overall, I had fun with the game, but came away from the experience somewhat disappointed.