I'm not sure how much I liked Shenmue III but I sure hope it doesn't take twenty years for us to get Shenmue IV. There've been a lot of complaints and commentary about Shenmue III that you can read anywhere, so I'll try not to beleaguer too many of the commonly heard critiques and criticisms. It's Yu Suzuki as highly distillated as possible and what his Shenmue games are considered great at, are as good as ever in Shenmue 3. And what they're worst as is as bad as ever in Shenmue 3, too.

Ryo is back, with accompanying Shenhua, to again hunt for his father's murderer, Lan Di. The game begins exactly where we left our heroes at the end of Shenmue 2. In Bailu Village, Shenhua's home, searching for her father and Lan Di. They work to uncover the secrets of the Phoenix Mirror and discover that Lan Di's Chi You Men have beaten them to the punch in finding Yuan. In Bailu Village, Ryo learns a variety of new skills and meets countless new people in this charming small village tucked away in the Chinese mountains. Eventually, a convoluted tale of feudal sordidness extends its way into the 1980s and secret Shaolin mysticism guides us to the bustling Chinese port of Niaowu.

With Shenua in tow to find her missing father, the pair arrive in Niaowu and start their search anew. Forklifts, chopped wood and pachinko games later they finally discover a gang hideout which sits as a local subsidiary of the Chi You Men. A couple of lavish kung fu fight scenes later and the moment Ryo has been after for 20 years (or maybe closer to 12 weeks) is before us. A showdown with Lan Di. Ryo winds up being no match for Lan Di but he's saved both by some clever antics by Ren and by an unlikely ally of circumstance in the usurping new leader of the Chi You Men who burns down a castle; saving Ryo from the same fate as his father at the hand of Lan Di.

Shenmue 3 is a funny little thing. All Shenmue games are, truly. It's Shenmue 2 with a fantastic new coat of paint. Despite the heaps of money raised by Suzuki's Kickstarter, Shenmue 3 is about a AA quality game. It's very pretty but many of the animations come off almost EuroJank odd. The character models looks hilariously bad when talking but do seem to otherwise look quite nice. The environments are all very well detailed and bright and inviting, in conventional Shenmue style. The voice acting is every bit as terrible as its ever been, which at this point is more part of the Shenmue experience and charm than it is a legitimate problem.

What you get is largely just an extension of Shenmue II. And, honestly, I'm good with that. Why wouldn't I be? Shenmue II is a crowning achievement in gaming even by 2022 standard. No doubt about it. So following closely in its footsteps is a great decision. The problem is that Shenmue 3 doesn't do enough to stand out from its immediate precursor and instead of improving on it much, it actually gets worse.

The narrative story of Shenmue has never been its strong suit. Shenmue I had just enough of a threadbare JJ Abrams style mystery box to keep it engaging. The mystery was there to be solved and you had to work for even miniscule story elements. Which was great because the world was lively and rife for exploration and every NPC in the game was ready to provide you color and charisma that made a 1999 release feel impossibly engaging. Shenmue II took the same formula and blew it up like a zeppelin. An immense city in Hong Kong and a flavor rich Kowloon with big characters at every turn gave Shenmue II all of the Shenmue I charm while it burst at the seams with environments and content.

So what does Shenmue III do in the evolution? Well, really not all that much. Bailu Village is quite small. The individual characters take a long time to warm up to you and while it feels natural they'd be weary of outsiders in such a remote mountain hamlet, it doesn't make for the most engaging gameplay. There's lots of backtracking through a village that frankly isn't big enough to warrant it. There are odd set design choices that feel like even Suzuki was grating at the edges of what a small village like Bailu Village should be realistically able to accommodate. Weird waterfall neighborhood with just two houses and a tucked away martial arts master in a forgotten corner of the area. Wait, make that two martial arts masters tucked away in two different forgotten corners of the same 20-person village.

The NPCs are truly as lively and as engaging as ever but unlike Dobuita in Shenmue I, Bailu Village has no timebased mysteries or NPC engagement necessary to figure out the puzzles. NPCs are more static than typical and really a couple conversations guide you right to the next step. No mysteries exist to be solved or uncovered, not in the way Shenmue I forced you to engage with the Dobuita Street community. In fact, Shenmue III seems desperate to shovel you through by ending days at 6 or 7pm if it so decides that you've advanced the main story enough. You never feel like you really got to know the Bailu Village citizens like you did the people of Yokosuka. No one other than Shenua herself leaves much of a mark.

So it's not hard to say goodbye when you board the ship to sail to Niaowu. And unfortunately the same thing occurs there. You even wind up meeting your best frenemy of Shenmue II, Ren, in Niaowu and somehow the game manages to suck out all the meaning in that moment. Ren seems weirdly callous even for himself the entire early portion of the game. And actively decides not to tell you anything about how Ren actually found you or what the hell he's doing there as a way to provide some humor and mystique to Ren's character. But it doesn't land, at all. Ren is always a guy who is out for himself but at the end of the day deep down cares for his friends. We saw it with Joy and Wong and of course with Ryo. But where Shenmue I & II thrived with deep engaging interpersonal character relationships, Shenmue III spends very little time with anyone other than Ryo and Shenhua.

Which, to its credit, is quite well done still. Ryo and Shenhua care deeply for each other and seem delightfully compatible with one another. They're both driven, family-loving fighters. They're also both dumb as shit. And it's great. Ryo is 17 and Shenhua is 16 and the two of them are perfect for a teen romance with one another as they matriculate through the story going from one martial arts movie trope to the next. Ryo's absolutely horrific writing and even worse voice acting is well compensated by Shenhua who is a far more well written character. But short of this, most other interactions in Shenmue III are short and shallow. Lots of characters could've been better developed but just simply aren't.

Because here's the other thing. The Shenmue games are such a powerful novelty because fundamentally the story is not very good and neither is the gameplay. It just isn't. And that's from someone who absolutely loves Shenmue II. But the gameplay has always been shoddy too. Poor, confusing and bloated combat, janky character movement, a weird obsession with the repetitive performance of terrible mundane tasks. But the Shenmue games have such rich, engaging, lively and charming environments that you enjoy being in them. In a similar way that Animal Crossing has relatively uninspired gameplay but a tremendous atmosphere, Shenmue as a series thrives from its set dressing and relationships. Yet, Shenmue III fails to replicate this.

And it doesn't improve elsewhere. Shenmue III's combat is the worst of the series. It's significantly harder but not more engaging that it had been previously. You still need to open every drawer and wait for long animations while looking for tokens in the old lady's hut in Bailu. You still have to routinely perform mundane jobs for shockingly low pay. There are also new hurdles to leap like a hunger system that requires you to eat a bizarre amount of food every day or you lose all of your health. Food you also have to buy which means you have to spend more time working silly jobs or gambling. Which may not be so bad if the atmosphere around you was as enjoyable as Shenmue I or II.

The cardinal sin of Shenmue III is how grindy it is. How very, very grindy it is. You have to spend an impressive amount of time developing your kung fu in order to level up enough to make fights not a complete pain in the ass. You need to spend a ton of time making money at two different points in the game to advance the quest. Even gambling isn't very quick. You even spend more time than that doing jobs or gambling because of how often you need to buy heaps of food. There's just always something going on that seems to take you away from just 'playing' the game. And some twisted part of me quite enjoys Suzuki's desire to put you through the mundane paces of life in these epics, Shenmue III is the least fun iteration of that design philosophy.

But still. There's just something about the Shenmue series. There's just something about our terribly written and horribly voice-aced Ryo that's still so fucking charming. And I don't know what it is. It's not nostalgia. Because he was shittily voiced and written in 1999, too. I need to know more. I need to know what happened to Zhao Sunming. I need to know exactly what the Chi You Men are. Who the fuck Chai is. Why Lan Di thinks my father killed his father. I need to know what powers the mirrors still possess that make them worth this trouble. I need to know what bizarre powers of psychological torture Shenhua seems to possess. I need to know why we're climbing the Great Wall of China. The story has given me so little and the overarching story was moved hardly at all by the entirety of Shenmue III but still I'm hooked.

When Shenmue III is good, it really still is a Yu Suzuki special. It is still the classic Shenmue experience. And I want Suzuki to get one more crack at this so we can wrap up the Shenmue experience. So we can put a bow on the story. So we can hear that delightful theme music one last time as the final credits roll and the story of Ryo Hazuki, Lan Di and Shenhua Ling can be completed. I'm excited to play more pachiko and cut more wood. Forklift more boxes. One last time. Hopefully, I'll get the opportunity.

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.

Shenmue 3 is mostly a disappointment, a shell of the former heydays of the two earlier games. There is a certain old-world charm to it all, and the game’s largely static world is fun to explore and take in. However, there are a few moments where the game’s pacing blocks story progression with tedious money-collecting and lackluster design choices. The story also barely moves forward an inch, resulting in what feels like an elongated chapter one of Shenmue 3 rather than a true sequel that fans have been anticipating for 20 years.

Full Review: https://neoncloudff.wordpress.com/2020/02/28/now-playing-february-2020-edition/

Shenmue III spans two slow chapters past Ryu's journey through Guilin, with sights and characters to behold constricted by a more modest budget and story direction.

The Bailu chapter hits it fine and plays it slow on the mysteries from the series while adding on a couple more, the chemistry between Ryu and Shenhua is fun and there is a lot of different dialogues to dig up even through several playthroughs, meanwhile Niawou is a majour pitstop doing very little to progress the story, even leaving shenhua almost completely for dust.

Sadly towards the end of the game, the budget final strings starts to show, as there's so much padding through forced backtracking and longwinded requisites right before the finale that almost sinks the ship and when at last the cutscenes while wonderfully displayed appears, go by so fast before the sudden - the story goes on- shamelessly dances on the screen cue credits.

There was intended to be one more area in the game for the climax which apparently was cut, and sadly it does leave a stain on the game,
hopefully if the 4th game ever comes out Shenmue III might get more recognised for being the middle bridge that it is, into whatever Yu Suzuki has in store for his next chapters..

For what it is now, Shenmue III is for its better half a faithful adaption of the prior entries formulaic gameplay despite being more narrow with its line of progression.

Both Bailu and Niawou are beautifully crafted locales with lots to see and a few decent minigames.
The places you visit are filled to the brim with details, throwbacks and fun nudges to all the backers which is definitely the strongest aspect of Shenmue III.
Throughout Shenmue III there are namedrops, models, quotes and pictures to be found of backers that gives the game a very unique touch of care for its community.

It is in benefit for its slow nature a very relaxing game to play with excellent ambience and a great soundtrack mostly remixing or recomposed tracks of songs from prior entries while the few new ones are absolutely earmelting. Helping out locales with sidequests, going fishing, picking up herbs all over the place, searching for hidden choobus or other side activities are all comfort addictions good for weary old bones.

Shenmue III does retain the same spirit as its predecessors, following the core formula faithfully to a tee (outside of the combat), and while budget constraints definitely rears its ugly head, there's still good moments of care and detail within the game with fun and heartwarming discoveries to be made. Just don't expect much more than a stretched out resort trip.

The game is a Shenmue game, but it's a filler episode where despite people really really really wanting the plot to advance, it does not advance. I have no idea why it was thought to be a good idea. Even if you had 7 or 8 Shenmues planned out, this is a crowdfunded game. You better abridge your shit and get Ryo to kick Lan Di's ass and get back the Phoenix Mirror because strong reality that even if this succeeded, there wasn't gonna be a Shenmue IV. And thanks to this flop, there's absolutely not gonna be a Shenmue IV!

You can really tell that Yu Suzuki had not so much as looked at a game in the almost 20 years between Shenmue 2 and 3. Everything moves slow, is clunky, and is almost designed to waste the player's time. I absolutely will not be playing this incredible tedium any longer because I honestly have more respect for myself than that.

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.

GOTY 2019 - NUMBER FOUR
Video version

I went into this year’s GOTY coverage thinking it would be pretty easy. There’s no 3DS games, no mobile games, no Switch games that don’t support the system’s built-in video capture. So many of these games are so meaningful to me, personally, that it’s been really difficult to know how to cover them. With that in mind, let’s spend a couple minutes on Shenmue-fucking-Three.

It’s barely worth identifying each entry in the series as a separate game. They’re just parts of one story. Its mechanics, tone, presentation and quirks are just the same as they were twenty years ago, and I really wouldn’t have it any other way.

Shenmue tends to be thought of as a more archaic Yakuza, but that really overlooks what’s so special about the series. They’re gentle, simple games. Sweeping scope, but the player’s approach is in any moment always small and modest. There was a subsection of its audience who played it solely because it was a massive technical achievement for the Dreamcast, but I don’t believe those were the ones who stuck with it. The persistent fans were the ones who fell in love with the quirks and eccentricities of its cast, the intricate detail of its recreation of south-east Asia in the eighties, and its approach to dutifully acting out the minute tasks of Ryo Hazuki’s life. Shenmue is about the small things, and Ys Net have never forgotten that.

Shenmue has always felt nostalgic. They’re games about a very specific point in history. Before the internet and mobile phones. A time where the young still stayed in their parents’ small towns, and could help operate their little businesses. Playing a new entry in the series, nearly two decades after where it last left off, adds to that feeling of nostalgia intensely. Not just getting sucked into that setting again, but being challenged to work with Dreamcast-era gameplay loops and structure. This is Pokémon Red, Donkey Kong 64, Tomb Raider III stuff. Things you’d never freely think you’d ever feel nostalgic for, but being brought back into that way of thinking can be a powerful reminder of what life was 20 years ago.

I don’t want to make it sound like Shenmue III is a backwards-facing game though. This is definitely the next part of the story, and it feels really good to finally be able to push it forward. The first two games were largely about the struggle to travel to Guilin – the Chinese village that was such a crucial part of Iwao Hazuki’s life and the mystery of the Phoenix and Dragon Mirrors. In this entry, we finally arrive there and start to understand what was going on.

Some of my favourite parts of the game were the conversations between Ryo and Shenhua, as they discuss their lives, and begin to relate to each other more deeply. They’re stiff, wooden conversations, but I wouldn’t appreciate them if they weren’t. It feels like we’re still travelling with those old Dreamcast characters, and only now getting to know who they really are. It’s another meaningful, intimate, step on the journey.

Nope. I barely had enough patience for Shenmue and Shenmue II's meandering bullshit, I am tapping out here.

I played about three or four hours of this, maybe less. Might've just felt like I put that amount of time in, it's hard to tell when you're stuck in the Shenmue time-dilation chamber. Not that you need to play much to get a sense of what this game is going for. Shenmue III is incredibly faithful to the previous two entries, and so authentically captures the feeling of those games that you could tell me it's a cleaned-up build of an unreleased 2003 game and I might just buy it. Ryo still controls like a car, you still spend an inordinate amount of time running around asking people for information, and characters still talk in a way that feels like they're engaging in two disparate conversations at once.

"Hi there. Do you know where Shenhua is?"

"Ah, don't tell me that!"

"I am looking for Shenhua, have you seen her lately?"

"I go to bed at 7pm."

"Ok. Thank you."

That may not be line-for-line, but it should give you an idea of what I mean. Yu Suzuki's writing hasn't aged a day, and whoever the voice director is clearly still has The Touch, too. None of the actors sound like they were ever in the same room as one another, even Johnny Young Bosch is giving a performance that feels plucked from the original game. Toe to tip, this is a Shenmue!

That's not to say there haven't been any changes to the formula, however. The Virtua Fighter-style combat is much stiffer this time around, and there exists a sort of disassociation between input and action that really makes it feel crummy. Juggling a ton of enemies at once with Shenmue's lousy camera was never fun, and actually lining yourself up with a target was clumsy, but I actually felt like I embodied Ryo more than I do here.

Ryo also suffers from stamina drain now, and if he doesn't eat eight god damn pears every five minutes he'll whittle away to bone. This is the mechanic that threw me off Shenmue III, and I can't imagine anyone actually likes it. I haven't run across anyone posting apologia for it in the wild, and I'm not going to seek out stamina defenders if they even exist at all. Running around, fighting, and breathing chews away at Ryo's health at a pace I've never encountered in a video game before, the man is straight up hemorrhaging energy. I get it, Shenmue is a series that seeks to emulate the mundanity of life, so naturally Ryo needs to have himself a little snack every now and then, but if someone out there is pulling whole cloves of garlic from their pocket and eating them with half the same voracity as Ryo, I'm gonna assume they have a medical condition.

Early in the game, you have to beat up a carny to get intel, but the dude can chip off nearly a quarter of your health with every blow. Ryo practically destroyed the Kowloon Walled City with his bare hands in the last game, so this dude is just jacked, he's a genetic freak and he's not normal. Every time I lost to him, I had to restore my health before trying again, which meant going back to the store to buy more food that barely heals a pip of energy. Only now Ryo is so low on health I can't run, so I get to take an excruciating stroll up the hill, back and forth, hoping to God I don't run out of money and get forced into a shitty wood chopping minigame so I can earn a few bucks. I'm not Goku, I shouldn't be undergoing intense physical and spiritual training disguised as errands so I can defeat Shenmue's version of Cell, who is some fuckass running an illegal Lucky Hit booth.

A few hours of this and I realized I had to make a choice. I could stick with Shenmue III for another 20 hours or whatever, or accept that the likelihood of the game improving mechanically or actually going anywhere meaningful narratively is slim and that I could spend that time doing something else. Like playing Final Fantasy II. I've slogged my way through two Shenmue games, what do I have to prove at this point? I spent three dollars on this, the price of a delicious hot dog from Tom's, is it really so bad to be out that much money?

I can't imagine Yu Suzuki is ever going to make another one of these, I don't see there being a resolution to Shenmue in my lifetime, and while I do appreciate that he was so uncompromising on his vision that he didn't truncate the story, the fact that all roads out of Bailu Village lead to a dead end is a compelling reason to drop Shenmue III. Helps too that it's just a bad game.

Backed the game as a support to Suzuki-san who made Shenmue I & II that are my all time fav games.

I actually think now that Shenmue III should have never came out it this state, and let us dream about the Shenmue III we were imagining for more than 10y.

So many weird gameplay decision, until this day I am still confused.

The combat system is absolutely horrendous and it doesnt make any sense. As a vs fighting competitor, I was shocked beyond recovery. Especially as the virtua fighter gameplay was perfect. Why change for this ... thing?

Another example is the game forcing your character to ALWAYS go to sleep from in game 8pm, wtf is that??
I laughed my ass off when I realized it was a thing, and then clench my teeth knowing I can never enjoy the night setup of the game for ridiculous reason.
And dont let me start with the pacing of the game .. Anyways the list goes on and on.

There is some great ideas (kung fu "realistic" training, mini tournament ranking system in dojo, calling old friends etc ..) and time to time, I could feel the real Shenmue vibes that were so precious to me. Visual and music were good as well.

But honestly the game is so full of flaws that it feels more like ... a fan project.

My biggest deception of the decade, if not of my gamer's life. Cant help be feel sad about it.