Shenmue III (2019)

I totaly didn't know what i'll play when i launched this game. Characters look like an old fighting game (Virtua fighter) and remember that old console but graphics are Unreal Engine better graphics. On first bridge, i said :

• "woaw ! that's beautifull !" Finaly the story captured my mind. I was in the game, i was a Kung Fu fighter that will save the princess's daddy ! Let's connect that Xbox gamepad and let's try fighting !
• "Oh it's easy ! I just need to spam all buttons !" If i'm not strong enough, i just need to train and come back later. So fighting is not the finality of this game. It's just a bonus gameplay to wake up you. So what is this game (with no spoil) ? This game is fun, chararcters are very funny, i like japanese humor in that game. The history of Japan country ? I don't know japan country but that game made me understand why money games are forbidden. But the game show that it's certainly impossible to totally forbidden because even if you win loots, you can sell it on pawn shop ! So it's an interesting system that certainly make a limit on risk. Sometimes i see those little surprise box, you pay for a random loot and collect all the things. When we are children we like it but every time it's a plastic toy with no value. So finally i bought bubble gum... In that game we understand that there is rare piece difficult to have and when you have all, you can sell it a very good price. Nobody explain me that when i was young.

Finaly i discovered the game Yakuza "like a Dragon" after that game and that is a best 5 star game, with the same spirit but more RPG turn by turn style, more GTA open world, more action game than this chill "versus fighting" old school game. But i saw that old Yakuza games was more "versus fighting" like Shenmue. So Shenmue is certainly the same family game. But this one is more and more chill and contemplative ! It's a nice virtual travel in the ancient world of Kung Fu. (And then, Indiana Jones have a gun xD)

Another thing incredible : i didn't find any bugs. It's near perfection, it's rare to have no bugs in a game. I didn't found anyone. That's UE power maybe ^^

If you don't get these games, then you probably never will. There is a unique charm and bewilderment to Shenmue. Yu Suzuki is almost as unapologetic in how he has pushed forward with bringing us an experience that feels inextricably connected with the first two way so perfectly that it's more of a miracle that he's kept it the same than the fact the game came out in the first place.

Shenmue 3 falls short in few areas, but it definitely has it's flaws. It's a game that deserved a bigger budget to give us an even more polished Shenmue game. I would have wished Shenhua Ling looked exactly the same as the first two games. And little things like no animation for drinking soda or the title screen not being the same plague my greedy little mind sometimes. But as a Shenmue fan, I got an experience that is above and beyond what I could have hoped for. With a series that is as niche as this, Shenmue 3 is a miracle of a game.

Playtime: 15 minutes trying to figure out the controls, 5 minutes trying to figure out if it's a joke.

Actual conversations from this game:

1:

"I'm looking for mr. Yuan."

'No, i haven't.'

2:

"Do you know mr. Yuan?"

'I haven't seen him since he went into that house over there'

Also, the controls sure are something else. Menus use J/K to deny/confirm. The main menu is under U. Menus also use Ctrl and Shift to change between pages. J is used to skip dialogue.

Saving a game means pressing U, then K to pick a slot, then K to confirm (even an empty slot) then K again to acknowledge the game has been saved.

Did i mention the game has incredibly long unskippable cutscenes? And that it looks like a remaster of a PS2 game? And that i wasn't allowed to look at candy machines because i was supposed to follow someone?

So yeah, i agree with Commander Stephanie Sterling. Is this a joke? Someone gave this 5 stars, that has to be some sort of joke, right? Help me out here.

1/10

This is one of the toughest games I've had to score, coming nearly 20 years after Shenmue II, I was expecting a big upgrade but instead it was the opposite. Voice acting was cringe, movement and combat ridiculously stiff and the repetitiveness of the same objectives throughout my 25-30 hour playtime, and yet, It retains that original Shenmue feel I loved back in the day. Oh and Lan Di lives to see another day.

I won't attempt to review this game in an objective way… for that, I recommend Julie Muncy's article in Wired. But as a longtime fan, I really loved this long-awaited sequel.

Sure, there's probably an alternate reality where Yu Suzuki sacrificed different elements (the game's size, the inconsequential details of the world, etc.) to elevate other aspects more noticeably. But would it have still felt like Shenmue? Probably not: So few games do.

But this did. So for me, it was worth the wait. ❤