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Shenmue III Review: Where Did The Time Go?
SHENMUE III HAS FINALLY ARRIVED, AND IT IS EXACTLY WHAT FANS OF THE SERIES HAVE BEEN ASKING FOR.
It's been twenty years since the original Shenmue was released on the Sega Dreamcast, and eighteen since its sequel appeared both there and on Microsoft's Xbox. This means all the children who were conceived during that first game's ridiculously long conversations are now old enough to vote and go off to war, and yet Shenmue III somehow doesn't appear to have aged a day.
The very fact Shenmue III exists at all is something of a small miracle, one clearly not granted by the same genie who gave players their wish of finally receiving Duke Nukem Forever. Shenmue was something of an iconic game when it was first released, not so much for its gameplay but for its budget. The original Shenmue game was touted as being the most expensive video game ever made, costing somewhere between $47-70 million, depending on reports, and yet only sold around 1.2 million copies. Although reviewers at the time praised the game's story and increased focus on realism, many players felt the abundance of stilted conversations and slow-burn gameplay made the game feel less like a series of drama-filled quests for revenge and more like simply walking from one place to another while being talked at.
The long-running plot of the Shenmue series sees main protagonist Ryo Hazuki, a Japanese martial artist, travelling to China in search of Lan Di, his father's killer. Along the way Ryo gets distracted by local problems affecting townspeople, side jobs he picks up for extra money, and his own martial arts training, but the over-arching goal always remains the same. In Shenmue III, Ryo is joined by Ling Shenhua, a woman who previously visited him in his dreams, and together they search for Lan Di as well as some thugs who kidnapped Shenhua's father, a stonemason, for reasons unknown.
Players unfamiliar with the Shenmue games may be thrown off at first by the stoic, detached way Ryo delivers his dialog. The attention to detail on display in recreating all the jerky, choppy conversations of the original games is a fully immersive feat, one which gives Shenmue III players the distinct impression they are experiencing some sort of lost Dreamcast title, and everything from the sheer variety of mini-games and side activities available to the beautiful landscapes they take place in show off both the game's budget and its dedication to remaining faithful to the core series concept. Shenmue, even in it's original form, was a beautiful game, and although the NPCs often appear more like mannequin dolls than actual people in conversations, when Ryo is walking normally (yet rigidly) through the city streets of 1980's China Shenmue III can become quite an easy world to get lost in.
Shenmue III is a game for a very specific fan base. The people who pumped massive amounts of money into Shenmue III's Kickstarter knew exactly what kind of title they wanted, and the franchise's director, Yu Suzuki, gave it to them. Even in the opening area of Shenmue III players can easily become overwhelmed with the amount of side content on offer, from mini-games like The Price Is Right's Plinko to bag tosses to optional martial arts sparring contests. Arcade games, log-splitting, training Ryo's different fighting stances on wooden dummies... there are countless ways for players to get distracted in Shenmue III, something which, in practice, feels quite like the way side activities in the Yakuza series work.
There are a number of small irritations which add up over the course of a play session in Shenmue III some players will want to be aware of before purchasing. Conversations in the game are long and, if it's the first time Ryo has heard them, unskippable. Interactable objects must first be looked at with one button press, then examined with a second, and sometimes taken with a third, and then another button must be pressed to back away. If the object is an herb on the ground, thankfully one of these button presses are removed from the process, but if the object is located inside a drawer or cabinet an extra press is needed in order to close the door/drawer/cupboard back the way it was. Ryo's a rummager, but he's polite about it, and players who found the lengthy loot animations of Red Dead Redemption 2 too long should probably steer far away from Shenmue III altogether.
Quests in Shenmue mostly revolve around walking around a certain section of town while talking to as many people as possible in order to dictate where Ryo is supposed to go walk around next. Players will often have to search for clues and then present those clues to the appropriate townsfolk in order to ascertain the next step of the search, often with more than one villager knowing the right way to go. Occasionally Ryo will have to do battle with thugs and other martial artists, but just as often he will have to wander around looking for missing chickens or children playing hide-and-seek. Once the sun goes down, Ryo and Shenhua always make sure to get a full night's rest, often stopping missions in their tracks until the next day rolls around.
Health and stamina are linked together into one meter in Shenmue III, meaning if the player spends the majority of their time holding down the run button they may often be too exhausted to have a proper fight should a combat encounter occur. Stamina/health can be regained by eating and drinking, so it's important to always have a well-stocked backpack full of cooked meals and spare onions for the day's journey. To buy food and items, such as new fighting skills and sake, Ryo needs money, and this is where those side job QTE mini-games like fishing and wood-cutting come in.
Shenmue III is not a quick game. It's not meant for players who are busy, for those who just have twenty minutes before work to squeeze in a quick session. Shenmue III wants your attention. Shenmue III is a saga, and it devotes equal time to training, eating, talking, fighting, fishing, and walking. Everything about the game feels somewhat purposeful in its randomness, however, even as the camera cuts away to a different angle for a third time to display a slightly askew view of Ryo during his unskippable door knocking animation. Sometimes dialog lines with random NPCs don't quite line up, and sometimes it feels like the game is decidedly stringing the player along for just one more fetch quest or one more unnecessary cutscene, one which simply repeats all of the information the player learned in the previous cutscene, in order to pad out the gameplay. Sometimes, it feels like that.
Some other times, Shenmue III is the immersive masterpiece it strives to be. For an eighteen-year-old sequel to a cult classic, the game somehow seems to feel exactly as it would have had it come out in 2003, with all of the flaws and risky gameplay choices intact. As a Kickstarter project, backed by players who knew exactly what they wanted, Shenmue III delivers in such a specifically correct way exactly what long-time fans of the series had been asking for that it's hard to know whether some more advancements made in the last 20 years, besides the elimination of loading screens around every corner, were considered but ultimately scrapped in the name of keeping the series pure. Many players may not enjoy this. However, for those select groups of people looking for the fabled Shenmue III, hoping it plays and acts exactly like the first two, such an answer doesn't matter, because this is exactly what they've been waiting for. Just don't expect a proper ending before the credits roll, as Suzuki himself has stated Ryo's story is far from over.
Shenmue III is out now on PC and PS4.
