Likewise the cash drain of feeding your stamina/health bar, which leads to odd moments of wolfing down garlic bulbs because they’re the most cost effective foodstuff. The inclusion of two brutally pricey quests practically forces the latter, slamming the brakes on the story to become a menial job simulator. This is a world where investigation happily pauses for week-long fishing trips or part-time wood chopping.
Creator Yu Suzuki is more interested in the rhythm of everyday life than the thrum of a Hollywood thriller. Shenmue III is technically a quest for revenge, as Ryo Hazuki is still looking for the man who killed his father in Shenmue 1. Throughout Shenmue III there’s a gulf between the handsomely modelled central cast and everyone else, who appear to have escaped a budget Dragon Quest. Especially scary as the lady who runs the hotel seems to have no connection between her teeth and face.
The later port town of Niaowu loses some of that magic with its non-interactive shoppers, restricted routes and daily demand for hotel fees. Every NPC is a named character, most play some part in Ryo’s tale, and lodging with your fellow sleuth Shenhua gives you a comfortable base to explore it all. With its small community it’s much closer in tone to the original Shenmue’s Yokosuka. Much goodwill could be earned with a dialogue skip option for this endless small talk.Īnd the style definitely works better in the first half of the game, set in the rural Bailu Village. The fact that every NPC has to have a voiced response to young martial artist Ryo’s every question suggests why few designers have repeated it, though, and Ryo’s own generic replies - “I see!” - soon begin to grate. There are hints of it in recent Ubisoft adventures, where quest markers can be swapped for naturalistic directions, but it still feels more lived in here. It’s striking how few games have attempted similar. Dependence is gradually swapped for expertise - where the best wine is sold, which elder is the least senile - and the excitement of holding your own in a foreign land helps disguise the relative mundanity of the tasks at hand. Simply registering which house belongs to who, or where residents can be found at different times of the, day forges a bond.
This sounds terrible, yes, but there’s something hypnotic in the way the to-and-fro sucks you into the world. Certainly Google Maps would cut playtime in half much of that time is spent asking for directions. Most of Shenmue's design hinges on existing in the pre-internet age it’s a detective story that could probably be solved with two Google searches, stretched into a 30 hour trek round the houses. When you aren’t feeding shoe leather to local hoodlums, you’re wearing it down in the streets and countryside you explore as you endlessly pester NPCs for gossip. Does the ageing design hold up and can it make converts 20 years on? Here's wot I think. That's 6.3 million dollars worth of permission to not change a thing, and so it has largely turned out. Of course, it’s time travel that doesn’t fret about the butterfly effect - you spend most of your trip kicking in groins in a way that will surely curtail a few family lineages.īut this sequel is time travel of a second kind, too: a design throwback to 1999, when Shenmue was the cutting edge of blockbuster game development then the most expensive game of all time, and one that remained so cherished that it raised 6.3 million dollars in a Kickstarter campaign. In the case of Shenmue III, China in the spring of 1987. The opportunity to visit a very specific moment in history. Because that’s what Shenmue is: time travel. On one line, the current date and time above it, the date and time this particular save will whisk you back to. Nothing better captures the magic of Shenmue III than its save files.
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