Buy Shenmue III

Shenmue was one of the most ambitious games ever made. Having an absolutely absurd budget for the time, it attempted to create a living, breathing world on the Dreamcast and tell a deep, multi-game story. Unfortunately, it wasn't a financial success, and neither was its sequel, Shenmue II. Despite being among the most memorable games on the Dreamcast, the games were seemingly forgotten — until Shenmue III appeared on Kickstarter. Rapidly becoming the biggest Kickstarter success in gaming, the Shenmue III campaign showed that fans enjoyed it, even if the franchise hadn't been successful.

Of course, Shenmue III picks up where Shenmue II left off. Ryo Hazuki is a teenaged martial artist who lives in Japan. He returns home to find Lan Di murdering his dad, so Ryo sets out to get revenge and amass the biggest collection of capsule toys in existence. The third game basically picks up from there. Ryo has spent the last two games trying to track down Lan Di and discover the secret of the Dragon and Phoenix mirrors. Alongside his new partner, Shenhua, Ryo once again sets out for revenge and capsule toys.

Before I go any further, I need to clarify that Shenmue III feels, looks and sounds more like an HD remaster of a Dreamcast title than one made in 2019. This may be what fans were expecting, but it makes the game inaccessible if you aren't nostalgic for a very specific period of Dreamcast game design or you have a high tolerance for awkward and janky games.

Now I love ambitious, awkward and janky games, and parts of Shenmue III were satisfying, but it never reached a special level for me, aside from its pedigree and lineage. It feels like a Shenmue game, which is both a positive and a negative, since much of what made the franchise special has become commonplace in the intervening 18 years . Even the mundane daily life elements felt more engaging to me in cult classic Deadly Premonition than in Shenmue III. It is exactly what it promised to be: a Dreamcast game released in 2019.

This is going to be the biggest barrier to anyone enjoying the game. You need to expect and want Shenmue III and nothing more ambitious or modern than that, and you must be willing to work with what it's giving you. If you're unsure, I strongly recommend trying out the HD remasters of Shenmue 1 and 2 first. Not only will it give you an idea of what you're in for, but the story is also borderline incomprehensible without knowing the first two. If you enjoyed them, then Shenmue III is a game for you. If you didn't, you'll probably be boggled by the hype.

This is probably the biggest point of disappointment of the game. The original Shenmue was ambitious in that it tried to advance gaming to do something that hadn't really been done before. It was probably too ambitious (and too expensive) for its own good, but it tried. Shenmue III is almost the antithesis of this. It's a dated game that trades on nostalgia more than it does creativity, and it doesn't try to be anything but the third title in the series. This is good if you're hoping for a continuation of the multi-decade cliffhanger, but it's disappointing if you were hoping to see something bolder.

This also brings up the game's other big issue. Shenmue II ended on a cliffhanger, and for a long time, it seemed destined to never be resolved. Shenmue III is not the ending of a trilogy. In many ways, it feels like a detour on the road to an inevitable Shenmue IV. This is fine for those who want more time with the ever-awkward Ryo, but considering that Shenmue III relied on a Kickstarter campaign, it feels crappy to end a multi-decade cliffhanger with another cliffhanger that may never be resolved. Hopefully, Shenmue III is successful enough that fans will be able to see the end of Ryo's adventure, but at the moment, I worry that we've traded one "To Be Continued" for another.

With all of that out of the way, Shenmue III has its charms. In theory, it's akin to Yakuza, where you play as a kung-fu hero wandering around small sections of towns doing side-quests, playing minigames, and collecting trinkets. In actuality, the bulk of your time is spent walking, talking and training. It's actually a very slow-paced game. You'll spend a day doing little but talking to people, training your martial arts, and experiencing the towns you can explore.

This might sound dull, and it's easy to imagine people feeling that way. I certainly did while I button-mashed through what felt like reams of awkward and poorly acted dialogue as I tried to find the correct person to talk to. There's something fun about the calm cadence of the game, though. You can wander around and enjoy the exploration. If you love "breathing" towns, there are dozens of games that do the same thing and better. However, I can't deny Shenmue III's charm. The game doesn't try to reinvent the wheel or modernize, and the part of me that loved the awkward, jerky days of the Dreamcast had a fun time. If you don't have that nostalgia, though, it's a tougher sell.

The combat system is functional. It has some simple combos, blocking, dodging and so on. You can learn new combos and moves that add higher-damage options to your arsenal. Combat isn't the draw of the game, despite how much time you spend building up for it. There are some great fights, and the final fight of the game is pretty excellent, but Ryo feels just as comfortable fighting as he is doing chores and increasing his collection of capsule machine trinkets. Fortunately, fighting is a relatively small part of the game and not front and center at all times, like a Yakuza title.

The rest of your time with Shenmue III is spent doing a combination of fetch quests, minigames, and speaking to random folks to find the information you need to progress. You also have to find ways to earn money because Ryo, unlike most video game heroes, has to pay rent and feed himself. A good portion of your time is spent trying to make money to get items to continue the plot. On the one hand, it's a nice touch of immersion. On the other hand, playing a game is one of the ways I like to escape from working to keep myself alive.

There are a lot of small annoyances. It's never clear if pressing the pause button will stop the dialogue, skip the entire event, or do nothing at all. The user interface never felt natural, as I kept expecting it to work like modern games and not like a Dreamcast game. It's often obtuse in areas where it doesn't need to be, and there are times when it felt like ideas were shoved in because the developers could, not because the ideas were interesting or fun.

It's hard to be positive about Shenmue III because on paper, it does a whole lot of things wrong. It breaks many rules of modern game design. It has tons of annoying little nags that feel like they have no place in a modern game. It feels dated. Despite all of that, I had some fondness for it. It plays like a lost game from my childhood in a way that many pretenders can never quite succeed at. That's going to be the biggest selling point for a lot of people: the chance to revisit a lost franchise as if it had never gone away.

Shenmue III looks like a reasonably nice-looking budget game. Some of the environments are fantastic, but the character models are pretty bare-bones. The cut scene direction is a total mess, with constant cuts to black screens, characters' faces barely emoting, and people staring off into space when theoretically talking to one another. This is another instance of Dreamcast nostalgia battling with modern sensibilities, and in this case, I feel like the nostalgia loses. Shenmue III doesn't need better graphics to tell its story well, but it does need better direction. Similarly, the voice actors feel like they walked right out of 2001, with stilted voice direction and sometimes incomprehensible lines of dialogue.

Shenmue III is a game for the fans … and only for the fans. It feels like what would have happened if the Shenmue series had continued on the Dreamcast. This is delightful if you were hoping for a continuation of the franchise, but unfortunately, the appeal stops there for most casual players. If you're a fan of playing old, quirky games, you'll find something to like here, but if you can't tell Shenmue from Shamu, you probably won't understand the hype. It's nice to revisit a long-dead franchise, but if Shenmue IV gets made, one can only hope that it's slightly more ambitious.

Score: 6.5/10