My Shenmue 3 impressions (5 hours in)

Just heard a couple of the phone card telephone calls. Couldn't help but crack a beaming smile 😁
 
Was able to put a handful of in-game days in Niaowu today. I wanted to share some additional thoughts and observations;

- Niaowu is huge! The whole city is sprawling with dense areas of stalls and shops, huge staircases leading to temples and the docks running by the Li river

- This game feeds into my worse impulses as far as herb collecting goes. Every time I enter a green area I scour every inch of it for herbs. It also serves a gameplay benefit as collection of herbs fetch good money

- Hunting for Chobu Chans at every store is my new addiction. It’s such a small but brilliant addition, a lot of them don’t take that much work to find but some of their locations I’ve seen to date are rather ingenious

- Forklifting is fun and definitely more challenging in it’s return with varying cargo to deliver

- New wooden dummy training
rooster walk
is another simple but addictive mini game

- The curfew of
9pm remains enforced here too. At first I was puzzled why this remains but you get curtailed debrief conversations in lobby of hotel and on balcony at the end of the day

- I can see why Suzuki has said the hotel proprietor is his favourite character. she’s full of personality and I observed what I believe is random
cutscene of her dancing behind hotel. Ryo’s expression is priceless

- The QTE
window on hard seems pretty unforgiving. I can admit to failing multiple QTE’s pretty much routinely on my first attempt.
Anyone else experience this?

- There’s plenty of nods and references to the original game. A few examples I can think of,
Shenmue artwork of ‘5 americans’ in your hotel room, pictures of Don Nui and Zhang at art gallery, or the fact Delin’s brother runs forklift job.
So far I think most of the fan service has been tasteful

- Made a handful of phone calls to
Nozomi, Inesan, Fuku and Guizhang. I mean most of us speculated with Ren as your default side kick his return was unlikely, in the call any pretext of him catching up with you seems to be dropped. Safe to say we won’t see him any more?

- Anyone else surprised how
anticlimatic Ren’s first appearance is. I mean it’s Ren through and through but at this early juncture, without knowing where the story goes he seems to be wandering around aimlessly. I hope this makes better sense as I progress story

- Found the Save Shenmue building and a lot of other backer elements. I actually will post more detailed thoughts on this later

Guys Niaowu is huge and looking across the river to all the buildings and structures in the distant gives you sense of scale. I’ve been loving a lot of what I’ve seen and done and I’m progressing the story as slowly as I can trying to partake in all the activities available. I can’t wait until others start playing and I’m confident you will be enjoying the game as much as I am.
 
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celsowm said:
So, Does Shenhua has some kind of
super power after all?
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Nothing confirmed yet outside of her belief she can
talk to animals. There is a interrogation scene near end of Bailu chapter that hints at some sort of power. What that is remains to be confirmed in my playthrough to date
 
quicktimefailure said:
I haven't found the option yet but since it looks like there's an option to change characters in terms of dressing up I think it's possible to get outfits for her. Still haven't found any for Shenhua tho.
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The outfits for Shenhua are DLC only, so we wont know until that part of the season pass is ready to be released.
 
Those of you who've made it to the section after Bailu, is there a playable boat sequence on the way to the next area?

You can mark the answer as a spoiler if you like so those who dont want to know cant see your answer.
 
Brandon Howard said:
Those of you who've made it to the section after Bailu, is there a playable boat sequence on the way to the next area?
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I will mark it spoilers just in case.

Traveling between Bailu to Niaowu is a cutscene. Unfortunately boat ride isn’t playable but the boat is completely modeled and you can explore it once you dock
 
I'm wondering guys about those who had good advancement into the game, does it seems long ? Maybe even longer than 2 ? And whitout spoiling, is the story amazing ? :)
 
Goro Harasaki said:
Some characters have great models, others do not. Theres a lack of cohesion.
It might be because a subcontractant company was hired to create a part of these NPC. The females and old folks look very good, very Shenmuish and Chinese, whereas many of the male characters look very lame and not even Chinese, rather Nepalese or Indians (This company is actually based in India)...
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The Indian company Lakshya digital is actually a professional company that worked on several AAA titles like the Uncharted series, Bloodborne, Kingdom Hearts III etc so it's most likely it's the other way around, some of the bad models with those exaggerated faces are mostly in house like that big brute guy and the underling who kicked Ryo's ass, Yu Suzuki did say his team consisted of artists who were either good at realistic or cartoony artstyles hence the inconsistency in the models, the only one character we know for sure that was worked on by Lakshya digital was the shrine priestess and she looks great, honestly the way you say the "male characters look lame as u think they look like more Nepalese or Indians" (which i disagree) comes off a bit racist, probably wasn't your intention but your wording was bad so it comes off that way.
 
I absolutely love the chat with Shenhua at the end of the day, the atmosphere is great and it gives insight about Ryo’s and Shenhua’s past which we have waited for 18 years.

Oh and about the supenatural vs grounded on reality debate
she tells Ryo that when she was a kid animals were literally talking to her, so the supernatural element is definitely present in this game
.

For last I would say so far i’m not exactly a fan of the tokens>prizes>pawn shop>money economy, I save scammed 30k tokens with the dice game (odds seem to be in favour of the player) and I barely made 1000 dollars out of it.

Edit: nvm for the last part, that was because I had bought 2 t-shirts costing lot of tokens. Reloading and getting other stuff netted me about 2900 dollars.
 
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I have to say in terms of currency I’ve survived in part because of herb collection selling and any move scrolls outside first two at Tao Store I’ve gotten by pawn shop exchange. Even while working in mornings on hard difficulty I would be lucky to have anywhere between 1-3 thousand dollars maximum, which would only get you one of the more expensive move scrolls.

I haven’t found a reliable game to bet on to score lots of tokens, perhaps Rose Garden is the answer.

I’m done for today. Couple of quick thoughts while they are fresh in my mind.

- I love how in Niaowu depending on which area of the map you are they have it’s own unique 7pm night cutscene. I was disappointed in Bailu it only showed same cutscene of village square even though you could be in a completely different area

- It is fun bumping into
Shenhua and Ren
in the city. I could swear the later actually nods and salutes you when you walk by him. Need to see again to confirm

- I actually realize you can fail side quests, I goofed side quest where
you aren’t meant to by 4 items cheaply for girl. I actually compared prices on every item but clearly didn’t get the cheapest resulting in failure of task.
In addition if you go back to character and press square button before you complete tasks, game assumes you’ve given up on quest and leads to failure. D’oh

- I’ve had two large chase QTE
chase sequences
. Slightly disappointing one error instantly leads to failure state, especially as prior games let you make multiple errors but still recover. Now depending on length of sequence it won’t necessarily restart the whole sequence and it will restart part way through.

Phew enough Shenmue 3 for today.
 
code l name said:
After a well directed opening cinematic, the games opening handful of minutes are pretty uneven. Those that have seen the latest previews probably know what I'm referring to but the game tries to get a lot of exposition out of the way in a relatively cumbersome manner. I just know there was a better way to block and edit conversations together, making them feel much more seamless. Perhaps a product of lack of budget but it certainly feels a lot less refined and cinematic than it's two predecessors.
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I saw that in a preview. It's so strange that they decided to leave it like that since it obviously feels weird. This fading in and out and loading doesn't really leave a good first impression either. Could this loading be ironed out with a patch? Adding some loading while they're talking for example. I mean, Yu clearly knew how to do this before.

- First thing everyone should do before starting game is going into page 2 of the settings and under Zoom option turning it to 'off'. This will remove picture frame when going into First Person mode
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It is good that they added that.
 
jsh020 said:
How often does it devolve into that terrible aesthetic, cause that preview which showed those weird black transitions was disheartening.
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As you advance through the game, it doesn't happen as often. And you end up getting used to it.

It's a little bothersome in the beginning, because you're hit with it right away. But it's not a huge issue.

By the way, hi everybody!
 
ys. said:
I saw that in a preview. It's so strange that they decided to leave it like that since it obviously feels weird. This fading in and out and loading doesn't really leave a good first impression either. Could this loading be ironed out with a patch? Adding some loading while they're talking for example. I mean, Yu clearly knew how to do this before.
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It’s certainly stylistically a very odd choice. I don’t understand why they couldn’t handle it like the walking sections in Guilin, heck most modern developers such as Naughty Dog basically take that template and build on that for exposition scenes when walking.

It also happens during the ‘debrief’ scenes in evening with Shenhua. This is slightly more acceptable because different dialogue will load depending on where you are in the story, also different elements will trigger depending on how often you speak to her and she isn’t always in same room. Still is creates this odd disconnect at times.

indask8 said:
Is it just me or the Qte are much faster than on the previous two games, I fail very often and I'm on Story mode (easy mode) on PS4.
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Oh good so it just isn’t me. I’m playing on hard and wondered if the difficulty setting had any effect on QTE window. I discussed earlier I’m disappointed with immediate fail state the QTE’s have but I have failed a lot as well.
 
code l name said:
Oh good so it just isn’t me. I’m playing on hard and wondered if the difficulty setting had any effect on QTE window. I discussed earlier I’m disappointed with immediate fail state the QTE’s have but I have failed a lot as well.
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So far I've missed 100% of the Qte I had to do on the first try. I guess it's something they'll fix soon enough.

Other than that the new "Freeze Qte" are fine (Sparring etc...)

Mel1605 said:
I've just reached the part where you need 2,000.

Any ideas how to get it quickly. I don't fancy chopping that much wood all at once.
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Fishing brings a lot of money (150+) otherwise gambling is good too (if you're good at button mashing, try the turtles), buy some capsule toys, full sets sells for 300, but the rarests pieces of the sets are... well... very rare.
 
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