Shenmue Iii Gameplay
It’s a good 20 years since the games industry used buzzwords like ‘F.R.E.E.’, which is an acronym for ‘Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment’. I know, it sounds like nonsense, but that was Yu Suzuki’s late ’90s vision for Shenmue. Not content with RPGs where the character would continue its running animation if you held a direction against a wall, he wanted the real deal; for the character to stop, to turn the handle on the door in full 3D, and to walk inside, without pausing to load. And once inside, the ensuing conversation would be fully voiced, and all the drawers would open on all the sideboards, letting you examine the contents inside. Fully reactive entertainment for your eyes, indeed. Well, even though gaming has moved on since Shenmue’s 2000 debut, you still can’t say all the above is true of RPGs, even in 2019. But hear this: it is true of Shenmue 3.Somehow, in no small part thanks to the massive funding the game received on Kickstarter, Shenmue 3 is both massive and richly populated, oozing detail everywhere you look across its two large areas, namely the beautiful Bailu Village and the city-esque district of Niaowu.
And it really doesn’t let on that this is the case for a great many hours. The opening scenes in Bailu village look nice, certainly, and the dialogue has that clunky Shenmue charm, but it isn’t until about 15 hours in that you realise just how ambitious this design is.
Quite how it all would have worked on Dreamcast is hard to say, but it certainly does work on PS4. (Image credit: Sega)Release date: November 19, 2019Platform(s): PS4 and PCDeveloper: Ys Net / NeiloPublisher: Deep SilverNow, let’s get this out of the way early on: despite running decently well, Shenmue 3 displays all the idiosyncrasies of the now rather aged Unreal Engine 4. Textures load in after a second or two, water reflections actually ‘reflect’ any 3D object above it on the screen space, shadows and details visibly pop in in the distance, and materials look just a little more ‘matte’ compared to real life.
Shenmue III Sparring and Training Gameplay for PC: We head on over to the dojo in Shenmue 3 to begin training and to do so we get to spar against different opponents including Red Tiger.
Even so, there are many moments of obvious beauty, with gorgeous lighting and phenomenal detail, and all despite the impressive scale. You can run across the city in one go and then examine individual fruit skewers on a market stall, all without a loading screen.
Given that the game holds up to such scrutiny, the few technical hiccups are entirely forgivable. Somehow Shenmue still impresses even though it’s not really up to the highest modern standards. Maybe it’s because it still feels like a Dreamcast game, even emulating some haze filters typical of first-party Sega titles back in the day, making you feel impressed that Shenmue could look this good. What out for that ouch(Image credit: Ys Net)From a game design point of view, it’s simultaneously facepalm-inducing and a masterclass. It’s often dull, occasionally frustrating and sometimes even maddening. The phenomenon known as the ‘Quick Time Event’ that the original pioneered has thankfully passed through gaming’s digestive system in the past decade, but is back here, though thankfully it’s used sparingly.
Even so, the prompts simply don’t give you enough time to react. You’ll be shouting at the screen “I literally pressed that!” but you’ll still be replaying the sequence, memorising which button comes when rather than reacting to the action. It’s the only time the game really comes undone. Well, that and the animal moves bit. It was never a monkey.Mostly, however, the gameplay is just very mundane. Your daily life involves saying good morning to Shenhua, the girl from the end of Shenmue 2 who is your companion for this adventure, then heading out into a world that mostly couldn’t care less if you were in it or not.
You can fish, collect capsule toys, play in arcades - though sadly there are no Sega classics to play this time, which is a real shame - and gamble tokens on several basic minigames. But where the old Shenmue’s capsule toys meant nothing and money were hardly used, now everything has a purpose and is interlinked. Capsule toys come in sets, and sets can be sold at pawn shops or traded for skill books. These teach you martial arts moves, which must be practiced and mastered at a dojo. Levelling up your Kung Fu works better when your vitality is full, so you need to buy food. You earn money by chopping wood, catching ducks or fishing, but the gambling system uses a separate currency: tokens. Tokens win prizes, prizes can be sold for money, money buys you moves.
So basically all the mundane, apparently extraneous stuff is all channelled back into Ryo’s journey towards Kung Fu mastery. It’s never been so cohesive and it’s brilliantly done.Window dressing? Pah!(Image credit: Ys Net)Not least because capsule toys aren’t the only thing you can buy.
Every single shop sells everyday items you can use, collect in sets or trade on. Every shop has a shopkeeper with a distinct character, and every character will speak with a decent voice in reply to whatever question Ryo is asking at the time. The sheer volume of recorded dialogue is frankly unbelievable, and the quality of the voice acting is the best it’s been in the series. It was vital that Ryo’s voice actor, Corey Marshall, returned to make the game feel authentic, and he’s put in a stellar performance here.The rest of your time is spent doing some basic, rather laboured detective work, trying to find out who can help with the current problem, usually opening up a new area of the map to explore.
Aside from that, the mini-games are painfully basic and mostly involve tapping X. Even so, they do the job - and in terms of martial arts training, you could argue it teaches discipline and patience. For many gamers that just isn’t enough, but then the venn diagram of that kind of gamer and people who master a real martial art probably doesn’t have much crossover. That said, while the new skill move editor is great, allowing you to map five mastered moves to R2, toggled with L1/R1, the fighting itself still feels lightweight compared to Virtua Fighter. And since Shenmue started life as the Virtua Fighter RPG, that’s not quite good enough. I love Choubu Chan(Image credit: Ys Net)The gamiest element I’ve found is something I didn’t discover until I’d already been running around the second environment for a good 15 hours.
Choubo Chan is a small bird character and there’s a camouflaged Choubo to be found in literally every shop in the city - so camouflaged I only found one before I started looking. Acting as a very fun hidden object game, it makes you go in every shop and examine the wealth of 3D models in the game as you search for him. At last, it’s something genuinely fun and doesn’t involve just tapping X.Without this level of detail, Shenmue 3 just wouldn’t work at all. No other single element of the game is particularly fun. But it’s all wrapped up in this astonishingly rich world that consistently shows itself to be both beautifully balanced and consistently deeper than you expect. Details reveal themselves only when you stop and look, like the in-jokes on the books in the bookshop, or the way Ryo’s One-Inch Punch goes from sloppy Joe to looking exactly like Bruce Lee in tiny increments.(Image credit: Ys Net)Similarly, the way Shenhua will sit and talk to you about Japan and her childhood until it just gets too late to stay up any more is exactly the sort of thing that made the first game so great.
There’s a real sense of ‘coming home’, which is then taken away with the culture shock of leaving Shenhua’s house in Bailu village for the hotel room in Niaowu. But that just gives it something few other games can match; a game world you’re properly invested in.
And so when the few big story beats come in, they have much more impact. I even made Ryo phone his old housekeeper, Ine-san, back in Dobuita before a particularly dangerous part of the story, which brought an actual lump to my throat. But this richness is still sadly finite and it’s all finished in 35 hours if you push on through, with potential for easily double that. My advice is to take your time and embrace it all. A fourth game’s existence is still an uncertainty, after all.So many modern reworkings and sequels have ripped up cherished, established canon recently, but not Shenmue 3. This game works because it’s so genuine, honest and feels 100% authentic next to the originals.
You have to take into consideration that this game was literally made for its own fans and in that respect it’s a massive success. Despite its wholly predictable flaws, it’s a better Shenmue 3 than I ever dared imagine and feels like no other game except its own predecessors. Fans couldn't have asked for a more authentic sequel.Reviewed on PS4.
The brown, tiger-print jacket worn by Shenmue’s lead, Ryo Hazuki, has had plenty of time to become iconic. And become iconic it has, almost by default – after all, the rest of Ryo’s attire is of the white t-shirt and blue jeans variety. That jacket is literally the thing that gives him a visual identity. To put its importance into perspective, during, 22 people coughed up USD $3000 for a replica as approved by franchise creator Yu Suzuki. That jacket is Ryo Hazuki.It seems ironic, then, that actively removing it was a key moment of liberation for my own playthrough of Shenmue 3. I had spent many of my first hours in the game slavishly living by my own memories, much as the game itself seems a slave to where it left off in 2001. Removing that jacket was an eye-opener.
At some point in time, I had forgotten that I once complained that you couldn't change Ryo's outfit in the original Shenmue. Being able to actually do so took a knife to the hardened memories of what was, and opened up a cavity through which the what-could-have-been was able to glint through.
Shenmue 3 suddenly felt less shackled by the reality of its fore-bearers, more ready to achieve what they couldn’t. Those shackles, mind, come wrapped in the siren’s song of a cashmere sweater. Shenmue 3 picks up directly where Shenmue 2 left off, going so far as to recreate the ending sequence in what feels less like an attempt to welcome potential new players than it does a gesture towards the existing fandom, reminding them that this is something they have waited a very long time for.
It's like Yu Suzuki had been keeping Shenmue’s final design document under lock and key since 2001. The final documentation, it turns out, and nothing else. Not that anything else was needed to effectively sell through to 66,282 people, once the simple existence of Shenmue 3 was revealed during Sony’s. The story upon the game’s release is a little different.
With almost every post-Kickstarter copy purchased going to someone more in need of convincing, and the added to the mix, it might have behoved Shenmue 3 to put some effort into a flex during its opening moments, into finding a way to pique a new audience’s interest. And yet, in a move so brazen one almost has to applaud it, once it’s done with its short recap, Shenmue 3 opens with its two lead characters – Ryo and Shenhua – walking a bit, stopping to talk a bit, walking a bit more, stopping to talk again, walking again and well, it’s unevenly paced and wholly uninterested in doing anything other than picking up directly from the next page.
What is particularly astounding about Shenmue 3’s lack of compromise here is that Shenmue 4’s potential budget and scope, to say nothing of its very theoretical existence, is hugely dependent upon success at retail. It’s all well and fine to make the exact game that your most hardcore fans want, but it’s an awkward place to put yourself in if you’re a middle chapter in a franchise that was, at one point, the most expensive in gaming. Shenmue’s ambition, even today, isn’t something that can be pulled off on a shoestring budget. A step forward.To be clear, Shenmue 3 was my favourite game of 2019. It may not have been more, but it was still in most ways everything that I had reasonably been hoping for since I dropped too much of my own money on that Kickstarter. That said, it would be crazy to say that Yu Suzuki’s latest offering doesn’t have significant problems, even if they’re not as clearly related to simple datedness as has often been made out. Shenmue, while not really an open world game, still set down a potential path for the genre that would be.
This path was swiftly left to the weeds the moment Grand Theft Auto 3 became a runaway hit. Shenmue 3, then, irrespective of narrative continuation, dusts itself off and walks back to the road that it had tried to pave. Get past the awkward first day of gameplay, as well as some of the rust that may be the result of trying to do a lot with limited resources, and what is found within is a delightful alternative reality for what big-budget games could have come to be about. Shenmue 3, while lacking the visual sheen and polish of the likes of Spider-Man, Control or Gears 5, is nonetheless obsessed with detail. While most open worlds are littered with countless buildings and NPCs, Shenmue 3 has notably fewer, but they’re buildings that its individually-modelled and voiced NPCs actually live in. Shenmue’s is a world of order, not of chaos; it’s a world in which one actually knocks on a front door to see if anyone’s home, rather than just barging in; where sleep is a necessity of daily routine, not primarily a way to restore HP.
Contrary to most comparable game worlds, which ultimately exist for the whims of its players, Shenmue’s needs to actually function. This is literally the whole point.
It’s the kind of design choice that fated Shenmue to be a divisive game, and it’s of little surprise that it has caused people to bounce off of Shenmue 3. Even if Ryo were to be bestowed with a lock-pick and the always-rested superpower of your average videogame lead, it wouldn’t help much. Shenmue is fixated with martial arts to its very core, taking it to the point where discipline and training are just as important as – if not more important than – actual combat. On top of that, the primary verb of Shenmue’s gameplay isn’t shoot or punch or jump or drive, but rather talk.
It’s a game about gathering information from the world and, importantly, the people around you; people who do different things during the day and retreat to the respected privacy of their homes to relax and sleep at night. Shenmue has never been interested in putting convenience ahead of world-building, and doing so to bring itself up to modern-day quality-of-life design would be antithetical. “Shenmue 3 keeps the interaction through dialogue tradition very much alive, in some ways even building on it. Evenings during the game’s first half are largely dedicated to simply spending time with and getting to know Shenhua, a character who was the solo star of the original game’s intro sequence, but whom Ryo himself never actually encounters until right towards the end of Shenmue 2.
These conversations are wonderful, if occasionally stilted (as is the franchise’s unfortunate want) little pieces of character building that also perfectly highlight Shenmue’s fixation on all of the details in-between the story checkpoints.and one backIt’s here that the cracks in the surface turn out to not all contain glimmers of revitalised vision and ambition. These conversations with Shenhua are a nice touch, but they’ve very much built upon the bedrock Shenmue 2’s final hours.
When Shenmue first landed, the simple fact that you could talk to any and every NPC was (and is) a titlecase-worthy Big Deal. Sometimes people brushed Ryo off, asked him to bother someone else, but the scope was massive. Enter Shenmue 3 and the system is exactly the same. Right down to the very specific way in which the voice acting is terrible should you choose to assault yourself with the English voiceover. Despite the fussy inclusion of side quests, Ryo only ever asks the people around him about ways to make money or the main objective with nary a dialogue tree to be seen.
Play for long enough and you’ll begin to notice that there are multiple NPCs that Ryo can’t even initiate a conversation with at all. Maybe this is a failing of finances more than anything else.
Maybe doubling the budget would fix it. But the fact remains that the properly branching, reactive dialogue system that seemed so promising but also out-of-reach in the early 2000s didn’t seem even a hair closer in 2019.
And the incidental dialogue that is present is no better-written. To be fair, Shenmue 3 has introduced a handful of logical advancements. Ryo’s diary, primarily used to keep track of objectives, is now organised by tabs; character control is finally analogue (directionally, at least; Ryo can no longer jog); martial arts training options are more varied, the fight system itself has been overhauled and made more accessible, if perhaps less deep; collecting herbs is methodical in a way that makes sense; and in general there are more and better options for keeping Ryo in the green, such as clever, in-world ways to game street gambling. And food has, finally, been taken into consideration. Food and drink have had a strange relationship with Shenmue. Over a decade ago, Ryo could stop and take a fully-animated break at vending machines to enjoy a can of soda or coffee, but while he could walk into restaurants and talk to the owners, he could never eat in them.
Statistically, the kitten in the first game ate 100% more food than its lead character. Shenmue 3 finally absorbs eating – perhaps the most quintessential of daily activities – into its fixation with the mundane and manages to make an absolute mess of it. There were numerous ways in which it could have built upon the foundation of Shenmue’s fundamental identity, instead, eating in Shenmue 3 ties Ryo’s health to stamina in the most uninteresting, immersion-breaking way possible. “One must assume that, after stopping by a local vendor, Ryo has lined his pockets with pineapples, cola-flavoured sausages and (for some reason) bulbs of black garlic that are inhaled from within the menu screen.
As for actual cola, and other vending machine purchases, much like everything else, they’re entirely handled in the menu system, a hard break from the series’ commitment to tangible world interactions. And the numbers are insane: it takes 54 apples to restore Ryo from his baseline regeneration to his maximum potential health and energy. Elsewhere, rather than truly trying to build on its aged foundations, Shenmue 3 plays nostalgia like a get out of jail free card. At times this is on the nose – the prospect of something as simple as changing Ryo’s clothes loses its lustre once it becomes apparent that most of the wearable shirts are overpriced Shenmue merchandise. At other times, it takes the role of a subtle, knowing wink at fans about its technical shortcomings. Moving at speed through the world causes draw distance issues and NPCs that fade in to view, a trick that is something of a franchise staple. Then, of course, there’s the aforementioned English voice acting, perhaps the best example of Shenmue 3’s confused approach to its own identity.
It is, frankly, terrible, but clearly intentionally so. It’s a throwback to the first game, one done in spite of the fact that, surely, the Yu Suzuki of 1999 must have wanted the best performances he could get in his game. No fan in their right mind would have preferred this.
Elsewhere, QTEs (Quick Time Events) - short-bursts of cinematic action very much pioneered by the first Shenmue, manage to be, if anything, a step backwards from Shenmue 2, now containing absolutely unforgiving response times that ensure most players will be made truly aware of the total lack of even cosmetic branching paths. Kept short and sensible, these sequences could have been fun and fitting, especially as a way to explore the aspects of Shenmue that don't lean on languid pacing. Shenmue’s world has never been strictly realistic. It’s a martial arts wonderland, a fantastical spin on Asia in the 1980s. What it has been, however, is consistent with the routines of daily life, in keeping with its own internal logic and interpretations of the essentials of living within its areas, not just adventuring through them.
Shenmue 3’s biggest challenge was finding a way to expand on this in a meaningful way that would keep pace with modern videogame trends. It’s safe to say that, by and large, it has failed. A step to the sideShenmue has always had a fixation on the ‘stuff in between’. For the faithful, it’s the time between appointments that opens up its world, that allows the actual narrative moments to matter, that gives real weight to something like leaving one’s home, something that is often a trivial detail in many video games.
Perhaps this is just as well. Shenmue’s story should never be mistaken for a masterpiece – it’s a revenge tale that does a handy job of spinning a few plates, nothing more. It’s never needed to be more. Somehow, Shenmue 3 manages to tread water, moving slowly even by its own standard and then, when it finally gets to the kind of moment that could be given added weight by the slow path leading to it, has a crisis of commitment, throws in a twist so forced it could cause whiplash, and moves the story sideways.
Shenmue 1 and 2 were nothing if not self-assured. If there are tells of insecurity – the often too-meta fan service, in particular – breadcrumbed though the crust of Shenmue 3’s world and mechanics, then the final day of gameplay represents a full-blown meltdown. It’s just as well that much of the focus was on building the relationship between (two) characters, because without this growth the events in Shenmue 3 may prove entirely inconsequential to the events of Shenmue 4, should it manage to emerge. It’s hard to imagine that this is the narrative development that Yu Suzuki has had nearly two decades to chip away at and refine, but it’s equally hard to believe that this was where he decided to compromise on things.
“The greatest achievement of Shenmue 2’s writing had very little to do with key story moments, but rather with the way it moved Ryo around its setting, prodding players to explore different corners, with how it found ways to naturally expose them to a variety of characters. Shenmue 3 seems to lack the confidence to continue with this, and it comes at the cost not only of story pacing, but in limiting the way in which players explore the world and damn near ensuring that they don’t spend the time they’re clearly supposed to with key supporting characters. This stings all the more because Shenmue 3 asks a lot from its audience. It’s a game to walk through rather than run, to take in the sights of while noticing the subtle improvement in Ryo’s technique while sharing repetitive martial arts training time with him. It’s an adventure that plays out by the day, that embraces routines and creates a sense of community around Ryo and his plight. It’s a game packed full with distractions, both practical and frivolous and, importantly, because it’s a game about the stuff in-between the big swells, it’s a game wherein indulging these makes its setting feel more complete, rather than reminding you that it’s actually just built from polygons.
It’s actually fantastic at this. But it's also complacent, and the audience deserves to ask as much from it as it does from them. In being too scared to step out of its own shadow, Shenmue is now in danger of becoming a shadow of the dreamer it once was. And thus, the saga.
Continues?In being so coy about developing upon its own ideas, Shenmue 3 has, it is safe to say at this point, struggled to attract a new audience. By doing so, it has kneecapped its own potential vision, and by turn its chance to climb out of the hole that the franchise has languished in for so long. There may be a potential Shenmue game out there, in some alternate timeline, that is true to itself, to its fans, and that also took the world by surprise, but that game likely received greater resources than Shenmue 3 had. At this point, where’s the money going to come from? Assuming it gets to happen, Shenmue 4 will likely be produced with even less. Perhaps launching in the quiet of the first quarter might have helped.
Certainly, with Final Fantasy 7 pushed back, there’s a bit more room to breathe. At the very least, now that there is some time to indulge last year’s forgotten releases, and now that Shenmue 3 is selling at the kind of price it likely should have launched at, I can at least in good conscience recommend it to anyone who may be intrigued by its fixation on the day-to-day and the stubbornness of its design. I’d especially appreciate it if around a million of you fine people were to buy a copy. Because, my word, I'd like for Shenmue to be a game of ambition and desire again, self-assured rather than timid fan-appeasement, again filled with hunger enough to pave its own way forward.
And perhaps the only way to find out if that is still there is to throw an unreasonable amount of money its way. It is, in short, not the best place to be.
Or maybe I’ll just open up a new document and start writing fanfiction about what the hell I think Ryo Hazuki actually eats for lunch. Because it’s sure as all hell not raw cloves of black garlic.