SHENMUE III
Something old, something new – but forget the blues
Promises are important. Back in 1999, after his father was murdered in front of him in his family dojo, Ryo Hazuki swore to avenge his parent. In 2015, it was a vow unfulfilled, the epic saga having stalled after the 2001 follow-up, but creator Yu Suzuki made a promise of his own in exchange for Kickstarter backers. The third game would be finished as originally intended. Now it’s released, we can confirm it’s a promise Suzuki has kept, and kept well.
So a fair warning: this game is not really intended for those who aren’t already on board with Shenmue as a series. It’s been developed in line with the original design sensibilities. Just as the story continues straight on all these years later from the very last scene in Shenmue II, so too does the game’s feel for the most part. Despite being made in Unreal Engine 4, Shenmue III slavishly emulates the feeling of those slowpaced, turn-of-the-millennium originals, right down to the sluggish animations. Both a Japanese and an English dub are available, with a surprising dedication to recreating the stilted feeling of the original English voiceover.
THE BAIS AND LUS
In many ways Shenmue III feels like a remaster of an early 2000s game that never existed. But what a remaster it would be. The game is visually stunning, and while the move away from realistic designs to some more stylised characters does at times look a little goofy, the environments and attention to detail are stunning. The careful renditions of 1980s China mean you’re constantly seeing glorious new vistas, whether they’re eye-popping meadows of flowers around sleepy Bailu Village, or the hustle and activity of the surprisingly dense port town of Niaowu.
It’s not just the graphics that have received an upgrade, however. As rigorous as the devs have been about staying true to the original games, attempts have been made to add new elements. There’s now a much more player-friendly ‘jump’ feature that allows you to advance time at specific plot points. Every NPC in Bailu and Niaowu operates on a real-time schedule for the day, so if you need to wait around you can click to fast-forward to the time and place you need to go.
Not that you’re going to get away with blasting through the story. It’s saddled with plenty of baggage – moreso than the originals ever were, to the point that it begins to feel like it’s padding the game rather than adding much of worth. A new health system means that simply running around town will drain Ryo’s health over time, unless he stuffs his face with fruit and veg to keep it up. Thankfully as you spar and
“FEELS LIKE A REMASTER OF AN EARLY 2000S GAME THAT NEVER EXISTED.”
train your Kung Fu, the toll running takes diminishes, but it remains a pain to deal with.
MONEY MAKER
At various points you run into fights you can’t win regardless of how strong you are. From there you’re eventually gated into paying a large sum of money in order to progress.
You can earn cash (slowly) by working part-time (forklift driving returns), picking and selling herbs, fishing, and some other methods. The grind isn’t so bad if you do a little each day and don’t try to rush. Picking apart the mystery, which mostly involves tracking down a single stonemason to find out more about the game’s mysterious mirror MacGuffins, is done by walking around, talking to people, and learning about the area as you make notes on your leads in a notebook.
Shenmue III is not fastpaced by any means, and that extends right down to the structure of the progression, even if at a couple of moments that does end up feeling annoyingly artificial. Because the game’s drawn out in this way, the runtime doesn’t really include enough character moments, leaving some payoffs at the end ringing hollow, and by the conclusion you’ll realise not a lot actually happened, and the story still has some way to go. But not a lot has ever really happened in Shenmue. It’s about soaking in the atmosphere, and slowly bouncing around the cogs of a machine that feels much larger than you are trying to make just a little bit of headway.