Did Shenmue 3 hurt the series?

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I'm sorry but I think it did hurt the series, yes. Not a deadly wound, hopefully, but a wound nonetheless.

I agree that the game, with the budget it had, could never live up to 18 years of hype and myth. And, with the premise it was conceived as a direct continuation of the story and the formula, it was also really unlikely that it was going to expand the audience by a lot and end up selling 5 or 10 million copies.

But it could have been a fully satisfying game, if it had delivered on a significant amount of story, and had more polish in some key areas that don't depend really much on budget, but on talent, like writing, QTE or UI design. I think that would have led to a situation where most of the current criticism would still exist (by general haters, clickbaity sites, and storefront wars), but the core values of the series would remain untouched, maybe strengthened a little.
 
jcjimher said:
I'm sorry but I think it did hurt the series, yes. Not a deadly wound, hopefully, but a wound nonetheless.

I agree that the game, with the budget it had, could never live up to 18 years of hype and myth. And, with the premise it was conceived as a direct continuation of the story and the formula, it was also really unlikely that it was going to expand the audience by a lot and end up selling 5 or 10 million copies.

But it could have been a fully satisfying game, if it had delivered on a significant amount of story, and had more polish in some key areas that don't depend really much on budget, but on talent, like writing, QTE or UI design. I think that would have led to a situation where most of the current criticism would still exist (by general haters, clickbaity sites, and storefront wars), but the core values of the series would remain untouched, maybe strengthened a little.
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III was a ´reborn child´. You can't run before you learn how to walk.
 
ShenSun said:
I didnt like 1 or 3 tbh. They're not horrible, but i dont care if i ever play them again. I probably wont to be fair. 3 especially
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to be fair, those games weren’t met with the same level of polarizing responses like Shenmue 3
 
Yeah, I wouldn't call them bad. I really enjoyed 3 actually (well, when I firsr played it. I haven't played it since to see how it holds up). The first game has aged, but it was the first entry in the series.
 
If i recall correctly the average metacritic score for those games are in the 70s.
Tbh i dont give a damn about metacritic, but the score anit far from shenmue 3.

Personally i enjoyed shenmue 3 way more than those two entries, but to each their own.
 
How can you possibly hurt a series that was dead and buried for 15 years? This is essentially the same "were we better without Shenmue III?" question and the answer is easily no as far as I'm concerned.

*I couldn't finish Yakuza 3. I liked the concept but found the execution underwhelming.
 
orient said:
How can you possibly hurt a series that was dead and buried for 15 years? This is essentially the same "were we better without Shenmue III?" question and the answer is easily no as far as I'm concerned.
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Exactly - after reading this thread I thought I was missing something. We either get Shenmue III as it existed and have a glimmer of hope for the series to continue, or we get nothing and the series is 100% dead.
 
Yeah it hurt the series.

It took advantage of a great opportunity. It reaped the fuits of the great seeds planted by the first two games, long ago.

That energy is no longer there...So, Yu Suzuki and the team have made the wrong choices in my opinion. They should have included a lot more story, and cut other things that were costly. Now, the difficulty of making a new one, is even harder than it was prior to Shenmue III's development..
 
DanyTargaryen said:
Now, the difficulty of making a new one, is even harder than it was prior to Shenmue III's development..
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So it's harder than Yu losing all influence at SEGA then leaving. His former employer wanting nothing to do with the series and Yu having no control over Shenmue for over a decade? Yu having no team, no interest, no platform, no nothing?

We had a better chance of future titles when the series was completely dead and no one had heard of it for years?

Makes sense.
 
orient said:
How can you possibly hurt a series that was dead and buried for 15 years?
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Because we may have simply traded the last installment in the series from S2 (a masterpiece) to S3 (a not-masterpiece).

orient said:
This is essentially the same "were we better without Shenmue III?"
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I guess it's basically "do you think S3 could have been better?" There are those who think that, under the circumstances, this is the best game that we could have realistically hoped for (or close to it).
 
Revan said:
Caves get me going too 😘
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Please don't mention anything remotely maw-like! I have guests!


ShenSun said:
If i recall correctly the average metacritic score for those games are in the 70s.
Tbh i dont give a damn about metacritic, but the score anit far from shenmue 3.
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Fun-fact: The Yakuza series didn't break 80 on metacritic until Yakuza 5. In fairness, nothing other than Dead Souls has below a 75. (I agree that it's a terrible metric, regardless.)


orient said:
*I couldn't finish Yakuza 3. I liked the concept but found the execution underwhelming.
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Once Kiryu said he was leaving Okinawa, I guess I was done, subconsciously, because I just have no motivation to go back to it. I think it's that I find the story to be too at odds with a lot of the gameplay.
 
iknifaugood said:
Because we may have simply traded the last installment in the series from S2 (a masterpiece) to S3 (a not-masterpiece).
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I enjoyed S3 enough for it to feel worth it. It made me feel something I hadn't felt in a game since Shenmue II -- that trademark Shenmue atmosphere. The music, the exploration, the environments, the NPCs going about their business. None of that went to waste on me. It wasn't perfect but I still enjoyed it more than a lot of games I play nowadays.

While I love Shenmue II, I certainly don't hold it on as high a pedestal as you do, and if Shenmue III came out exactly the same in 2003, the reception amongst fans would've been far more positive, I'd wager. Nostalgia, plus the 18 year wait, did S3 no favours.

Rydeen said:
Once Kiryu said he was leaving Okinawa, I guess I was done, subconsciously, because I just have no motivation to go back to it. I think it's that I find the story to be too at odds with a lot of the gameplay.
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Yeah, I just felt that the "main" land development/political campaign plotline was pretty darn boring.
 
orient said:
Yeah, I just felt that the "main" land development/political campaign plotline was pretty darn boring.
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I was actually somewhat interested in aspects of that, just because Okinawa has been at odds with US military bases on their island for 40+ years, but there's a bunch of literature that is way better at capturing this struggle anyway. It was the comical level of convenience when Kiryu goes looking for his elected officials that kind of got me.
 
BruceWayne911 said:
Shenmue 3 is the worse game in the series but it didn't hurt the series. We went 15 years with nothing.
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Yeah maybe in its whole its the ´worst´. But the way I see it is that each Shenmue game has its own strengths and weaknesses. 💪 There were many things I liked about III that the first two didn't have.

Now they know what worked and what didn't.
If they need more money to make IV I do think they will find a way. I think they may have enough to make IV right now, but not to live up to the higher standards of a PS5 game. I think they can turn this around with IV and they know this. They just have to be sure that they have as much assets and support as possible to make a complete Shenmue game.

I think they can do it. But we'll see!
 
We as a community are now spoilt im afraid. Was the game as good as 1&2, no way but think about 5 years ago before the Kickstarter, we missed the series and would have taken anything. The game is genuinely not that bad and actually received lots of good reviews (as well as bad) by the critics

I am afraid we as a community just had 18 years of excitement and finished product could never live up to that (although it didn't help itself with lack of story progression)

I think we live in a better world for having Shenmue 3 and look forward to Shenmue 4
 
blixt said:
Now they know what worked and what didn't.
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Whilst I agree with the majority of this post, I do have to question whether Shenmue 3 needed to be released for the developers to know that fans wouldn’t enjoy having to repeatedly grind for money or a stamina system that effectively discourages exploration of the game’s world.

I think that’s one of the things that makes Shenmue 3 so disappointing (to me, at least). Budget obviously played a part in dictating what they could and couldn’t do in terms of game design; but two of the game’s biggest wounds had nothing to do with the budget and were entirely self inflicted.

The need for grinding and the ill-conceived stamina system arguably made the experience of playing the game worse and yet it would have been both easier and cheaper for them to have simply not included them.
 
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