I feel like fans saying that controversy and haters are what damaged the series are dooming us to have history repeat itself once again..
We're not giving Yu Suzuki criticism or pushing him to evolve, we're pushing the blame off onto something else.
There are real issues with Shenmue 3 that need to be hammered hard and repeatedly.
The characters, aside from Shenhua, are as flat as cardboard. The story is bare minimal and terribly written as well as il-paced. Nonsensical priorities that favor wasting the budget on mini-games, shops and an absurdly over-bloated Niaowu instead of combat/innovative new features/story.
At this rate, if Yu Suzuki by the grace of any God gets the budget needed for Shenmue 4.. we're either gonna be back here again with an unsatisfying story and a cliffhanger ending OR having an actual ending to the series that failed all of the promises setup by its predecessors.
In either case... I'm hanging my hat on the anime saving this series.
Not quite sure I agree with all of this.
Let's just consider the factors that they had to deal with in making Shenmue 3:
- Non-Static Budget until 2017
- Much limited budget in comparison to the originals. Also factor in that Kickstarter Fees and rewards account for around 25% of the raised funds so that final total drops quite significantly.
- No original source code to reference (70% of the whole dev time was spent getting the game systems going)
- Re-building a fighting system
- Considerably less staff (3 writers in comparison to 18 from the originals)
- Expectations.
- Essentially being told to push out what they had, resulting in a different ending to the one they wanted.
Now I don't disagree that the story in Shenmue 3 is minimal at all. From what I gather it follows the original outlines from the scripts from way back. They basically didn't have the time/resource to do more with what they had which is a massive shame but symptomatic of what they were working with.
When the vast majority of the dev time goes into building the game other things will end up being impacted and here one of those was the story. However I will be more critical if they have the same story issues with Shenmue 4 now that we have the systems in place and they don't have to spend such a large chunk of time on the systems. I think that would be final nail in the coffin for the games IMO. They shoudl really go to town on the story for Shenmue 4 if they get the opportunity.
Also, as fans, we have had the burden of 15 years of expectations and in some aspects Shenmue 3 was never going to live up to those and we all had some form of rose tinted glasses in that respect.
The critics range from fair to downright horrendous and I don't think we should ever ignore those/shift blame. What I wish people would do is have more of an understanding of what the team worked with to what we ended up getting, which was a decent game overall with some definite flaws, which should be scrutinised but with a sense of context.
I've said this for 2 years, my biggest discussion point out of all of this was the scope of the project. That's the biggest criticism I have but also the biggest compliment. Double edged sword for sure but can you imagine YS only giving us one area for the Kickstarter in 2015.... I don't think we'd have generated as much hype around what could have happened. Yes some were let down and clearly the project was hugely ambitious (probably not realistic either) but I applaud them for having the balls to go for it.
I've watched a few streams of new Shenmue fans playing Shenmue 1-3 and they've seem to had more enjoyment out of it the 3rd game than some of us. Now of course this is personal preference but these newer fans haven't been coloured by the 18 year wait and I sense that while they're also aware of the faults they've been more forgiving of them.
Did Shenmue 3 harm the franchise? No it didn't. Shenmue 3, warts and all, revived Shenmue, got us the HD re-releases (even if they are patchy), got us a bunch of new merch and got us this Anime. Shenmue 3 showed that the series has legs and continues to do so. It's now where those legs take us.