Shenmue HD reviews and discussion

Englishhedgehog said:
Alrighty then. I'll finish off by saying that when Shenmue 3 comes out and at least 1 person inevitably gives it a low score, for the sake of making the Shenmue community look mature, please don't make it your first instinct to attack them or judge the legitimacy of their opinion based on their weight. I think that's a reasonable request to make.

Also, 7/10 is not trashing a game.
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Let me make a point. This wasn't over an opinion on a review it was the derailing of the topic and goading of another member that was the issue here. Simple as that.

Please discuss reviews freely and calmly.
 
I think there were more insults (personal ones at that) thrown my way, but I'll leave it there.

On another note, does anyone know what percentage of positive reviews Steam needs to hit for the overall reception to be "Overwhelmingly positive"? It's slowly climbing up and has just reached 91%.
 
I think most posters here expect Shenmue 3 to be controversial, and to get at least a bunch of low scores. Probably some of the angriest and harshest critics will be Dojo posters.
That said, when someone will make some childish, clickbait video or article named "SHITSKIN COAT DUDE AND HIS CONJOB PIECE OF TRASH GAME PLS COME HERE AND GET ANGRY" people will likely post it here and call the author an ass or whatever, since it would be really hard to consider that a serious, non-malicious, good faith-driven piece of criticism to be constructively discussed.
Anyway i just hope for people here to be smarter than that.
Also probably members reviews on every website out there will most likely be all written by Shenmue fans only anyway.
 
Englishhedgehog said:
On another note, does anyone know what percentage of positive reviews Steam needs to hit for the overall reception to be "Overwhelmingly positive"? It's slowly climbing up and has just reached 91%.
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I don't know exactly what ratio of positive to negative reviews there has to be to qualify but the option for "Overwhelming Positive" is unlocked at 500 reviews.

Verderame said:
I think most posters here expect Shenmue 3 to be controversial, and to get at least a bunch of low scores. Probably some of the angriest and harshest critics will be Dojo posters.
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Not on Steam at least, I imagine most of our copies will be from Kickstarter but controversially Steam don't count reviews from copies of a game acquired by CD key.

I have no doubt that some of us will buy multiple copies though.
 
Weirdly a selling point for this game is how easy the plat/trophy collecting is in it. I could see a few trophy collectors picking it up just for that, if promoted/known on sites like www.playstationtrophies.org
 
I am not playing the HD Collection until its competent, but I did buy a PS4 copy. We have been waiting too long for this to play it in its current state. Shame on Sega and d3t for allowing this and I can only hope they have the integrity to address this directly, apologize, do something to make up for it etc. I cant say this whole thing hasnt upset me and made me shake my head for multiple reasons but I just want these to be as good as they possibly can be.

Here are some things that have been confusing me:

They announced this in Mid April totally out of the blue and we began singing the praises, then a couple months later they drop a release date that is in mid August and every one is shocked at how soon its going to be coming out, mean while pre-orders run wild all over the world and hype starts to build and it felt good. Looking back on it I feel like from the unveiling to the announcement of the release date to the release was very very fast and happened quickly and this is whats leading into some of the things I am confused about. It was said earlier that they had been planning to do these re-releases since before Shenmue 3 was even announced which would be 2015, but then here recently it was said that these re-releases hadnt been worked on for very long. Logic would deduce the initial planning began in 2015 or before and sometime between then and now the work began, but we are talking about 3 years, maybe the licensing stuff took a bit to resolve? Still seems hard to imagine 3 years time though, but do we really know how long ports typically take for games from the same generation?

Next is the fact that if Sega had internally been planning these re-releases around 2015, then why did they give the rights to Yu Suzuki to make Shenmue 3 if they were going to revive the series themselves? Did these actions coincide or determine one another? At what point did Sega allow Yu to use the rights for Shenmue 3? Before or after they had already decided to re-release Shenmue I and II? Questions we will likely never get answers to, but I feel like this information could help determine what lead up to releasing these games in their current unacceptable state. Perhaps Sega and YSNet were in communication about organizing release dates for both releases, Deep Silver is in cahoots with them both so it would seem they would be aware of what the others plans would be.

I just wish we knew the game plan for what releasing everything was, I understand wanting to get this out before the holiday big guns which starts early this year I get that, but doesnt quality assurance take precedence? Apparently not. I also see how the date of August 21 was an absolutely perfect time for release because of the aforementioned things, but not when its this incomplete and untested. All that being said, could this not have waited until early 2019, Jan/Feb so it could be flawless? This whole notion of the new gaming industry standard of release now and fix later is really blowing that out of proportion with the issues this thing launched with no? So why? WHY? Financial reasons at Sega? The corporate implications? Doubt we will hear an answer if thats the real reason. Sega pulling a Sega? Their reputation definitely precedes them, but they had been doing so well with things the past year or so and I just cant help but think why with Shenmue do they have to fall back into their old ways.

I would just be highly enlightened if some official announcement was made addressing many of the things ultimately leading up to why this happened, and at this point a time table for patches and what they plan to do to right this ship because as of now it feels like we are pretty much in the dark and I really hope something to reassure us is done soon. I think we as the fans and community deserve and should demand some kind of explanation, this community has put in so much work for Shenmue over the years, none of this Shenmue 3 the HD Collections would have been possible with out the fan perseverance during the dark years. Sega, you had 1 job... 1 job! This community set all this up and gave it to you in a hand basket, we petitioned, tweeted, rallied, generated hype relentlessly every 3rd of the month for how long now? I am just saying we deserved better than this, the new fans playing these for the first time deserved better than this, and I hope they understand these issues are not representative of the original releases.

Had to get that off my chest, thats the majority of whats been on my mind in the past week or so. This community should be extremely proud and its unfortunate this was not recognized and rewarded in a better way than what we have received. But we have been a resilient community before and I have no doubt we will continue to be that way, and I hope this community can finally catch a break and decompress after all these years, I think thats what we deserve. Sorry for the long ass post.
 
I have some mixed feelings about the rereleased after spending 20+ hours on the pc version and I am willing to be patient and give D3t and Sega a chance.

Part of me is overjoyed that we finally have Shenmue on modern consoles as well as PC I am so happy about that.

The other critical side of me also sees some of the flaws. I am a bit frustrated with some of the excuses that were made pertaining to the bloom effect and being told originally it couldn't be disabled or that 16:9 was not kept in the cutscenes for artistic or technical reasons. We now know this is not true because the modding community has shown cutscenes can be played in 16:9 with little to no impact to the game.

It is certainly playable in Shenmue I but in Shenmue II it really hurts the scenes in my opinion.

I understand why Sega didn't want to spend more on the game and I am thankful they rereleased the game, there are definitely some things that really remove immersion such as the issues with the arcade games and controls. I haven't really seen any improvement to the controls. I have a ds4 controller on the way to hook into my PC.

I am optimistic and really hope Sega and D3t will be open minded to the modding community and consider the 16:9 cutscenes in an official patch or for the Japanese release.
 
What I don't get, is they said they didn't have access to higher quality audio files, but the Shenmue movie has all the cutscenes at significantly higher audio quality. Why couldn't they have injected them into the game.
 
pilman said:
I have some mixed feelings about the rereleased after spending 20+ hours on the pc version and I am willing to be patient and give D3t and Sega a chance.

Part of me is overjoyed that we finally have Shenmue on modern consoles as well as PC I am so happy about that.

The other critical side of me also sees some of the flaws. I am a bit frustrated with some of the excuses that were made pertaining to the bloom effect and being told originally it couldn't be disabled or that 16:9 was not kept in the cutscenes for artistic or technical reasons. We now know this is not true because the modding community has shown cutscenes can be played in 16:9 with little to no impact to the game.

It is certainly playable in Shenmue I but in Shenmue II it really hurts the scenes in my opinion.

I understand why Sega didn't want to spend more on the game and I am thankful they rereleased the game, there are definitely some things that really remove immersion such as the issues with the arcade games and controls. I haven't really seen any improvement to the controls. I have a ds4 controller on the way to hook into my PC.

I am optimistic and really hope Sega and D3t will be open minded to the modding community and consider the 16:9 cutscenes in an official patch or for the Japanese release.
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Well, Shenmue 2 removes black bars during QTEs, so that would be a challenging hurdle to overcome if they zoomed in.

Shenmue 1 though? I just don’t get it. Even the QTEs are 16:9 in the re-release, and those expose some of the technical flaws on the edges, including the frozen man in the Goro introduction. So why not just make it 16:9 all the way through?
 
I'm thinking D3T may be at fault here, as Sega (even their CEO) evidently had the best of intentions and their heart in the right place when they had the Sega Europe guys in Shenmue costume on-stage at Fes. They definitely wanted to please the fans and score a win after seeing Shenmue 3 light the world on fire, and perhaps finally acknowledged that fans of Sega are also super fans of Shenmue. I'm not saying D3T intentionally produced something less than perfect, but either through lack of resources or time, or just not being that capable of a studio that has resulted in Shenmue HD being in the state that it's in.

I don't know. I'm seeing mixed reports everywhere. Steam reviews are very positive (though this seems to be mainly fans supporting the original games, with not much play time of the actual re-releases), reviews are mostly average to good across the board and there's a lot of love and adoration in ResetERA's core threads. But then conversely you have one particular thread on ResetERA upset about the game's issues too, so it's mixed signals. The prognosis seems to be that they're competent ports, but do have widespread minor to major issues affecting everyone's enjoyment of the games - though most are able to complete them without anything super major or game-breaking. Either way we need a patch like yesterday, and I hope one is coming.

Sega did post recently (Facebook?) that multiple patches are planned, so I think they'll sort this out. Hopefully soon.
 
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I think both SEGA and d3t are at fault. SEGA should be keeping tabs on contractors work, what they release reflects back on SEGA since they gave it the go ahead. Also we don't know the time/budget or the diffuculty of doing the port to fully blame d3t, for all we know d3t could have told them it need more time or they run out of budget and SEGA still went ahead. Or d3t were in over their head with SEGA AM2/Ys Net coding. We can sadly only speculate. I think pushing it back to a near Christmas release or Novemeber like the JP version would have gave them more time to fix issues.

The games work but it holds many a issue and the more time you spend playing the more likely you are to notice them and the lack of polish. But fans want the series to do well so I can see why they are saying it isn't that bad, or vice versa saying this level of issues is too many. IMO it is the new player that are getting a sub-par experince and that isn't a good thing for Shenmue. Since chances like this for renewed interest don't come around often for old games series and they may think the games were buggy like this and that the critics were right all along.

It's nice to know they are working on things. But these will take time and by that time the new interest may have moved on to the bigger coming releases and the damage already done to put new fans off who gave Shenmue I&II a renewed look.
Like a fair few old fans I have ambivalent feelings on this re-releases even though I want Shenmue to do well into the future.
 
The studio are obviously capable; they got it 90% there -- SEGA clearly made the decision to rush it out a few months before it was ready to avoid being crushed by the likes of Spiderman and Red Dead. I seen sooo many comments when the game was announced along the lines of "it better come out before September or I won't buy it" and I think that's largely true for non-fans.

I also think SEGA are banking on a huge spike in sales next year before Shenmue III comes out.

UsoEwin said:
What I don't get, is they said they didn't have access to higher quality audio files, but the Shenmue movie has all the cutscenes at significantly higher audio quality. Why couldn't they have injected them into the game.
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The most obvious reason being Shenmue The Movie covers only a small portion of the full games' VO, so you would be left with the quality jumping back and forth, and it'd still be mostly bad.

Secondly, who's to say they still have the original cut of that movie lying around on a hard drive anymore? They would need the raw files. They can't just pop in the DVD and rip the VO.
 
Some people on Steam are pissed about the bugs but the vast majority of people are thankful the devs are being open, honest and patching it so quickly.

*Also, I somehow convinced my brother to buy it on Steam. He's always been impressed with what he's seen of the games but never played them properly, but he's loving it so far, apparently :D I even warned him about the bugs and he got a few borked cut scenes but it really didn't phase him. I think we forget how buggy a lot of games are these days lol
 
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Well, the Pc version is by far the best one, and with the last beta patch installed became pretty much playthrought-worthy, at least.
The Ps4 players should be the actually angry ones right now, to be honest.
 
Verderame said:
Well, the Pc version is by far the best one, and with the last beta patch installed became pretty much playthrought-worthy, at least.
The Ps4 players should be the actually angry ones right now, to be honest.
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Don't worry we are lol.

As long as they patch it next week I think people will be ok. If they don't I expect a rise in tension over the ps4 port
 
Was about time I left a review there myself. Of course praising it gloriously.

The results are really impressive, I have to say. This overwhelmingly positive with all the little issues it currently has? Can't even dream how high it would reach if all of theme are gone / weren't there to begin with!
 
I’d say my biggest gripe has been the audio quality. But I also understand Shenmue had an insane amount of audio recordings. Surely there should have been some way to fix it.

Glitches can be fixed, graphics can be modded but that audio will remain garbage.

I just wish I had a PC good enough to run it so I could get that texture mod.
 
ShenGCH said:
91% now. If the positive reviews stay on course, it'll hit 'Overwhelmingly Positive' soon (y)
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This is just awesome to see, hope that happens! Seems inevitable that it will, which is beyond fantastic.

.

And yeah perhaps some of the blame can be attributed to Sega also. They clearly didn't want to get stomped in to oblivion by the holiday onslaught of Spiderman and the heavy hitters. There's also the synergy with Shenmue 3 and the Gamescom announcement. Shenmue HD realistically probably needed another month or two? And then it would have got drowned by the end of year releases. I guess we also shouldn't be too harsh on D3T as they clearly loved working on this and were very dedicated and passionate - so yeah it's probably wrong to just presume the fault to solely be with them. This thread has been enlightening actually. I mean didn't that Facebook post from Sega say that D3T are still working on multiple patches, with a second patch coming soon that may alleviate all these issues? Odds are there'll even be more patches after that.

A good comparison would be We Happy Few. It had a lot of anticipation and hype behind it, Microsoft promoted it heavily at E3 and made waves when they bought the developer (meaning people thought Compulsion Games was this hot new thing) - and then the game came out and (at least initially) was a technical disaster, far beyond the state of Shenmue HD. It was simply unfinished. And was released at full price, and even had a Season Pass. And people were looking forward to it for years. Compulsion were then cagey about meaningfully fixing the game, releasing a quick hotfix but no substantial patch, and we're weeks now following its release. It's the worst example of "buy it now because we might fix it later" in recent memory. And I was genuinely excited for it, loved the concept, story potential and visuals. And yet I can't buy it because it's too broken.

The result? We Happy Few's official thread on ResetERA hit 4 pages. No one bought it because of the widely reported (and very severe) technical issues. Shenmue HD's official thread? 53 pages. Even eclipsing most Yakuza release threads.

Point being, when all is said and done, this is a mostly good port that is doing very well, so overall we should be quite happy with this, as this bodes extremely well for the future of Shenmue, particularly beyond 3.
 
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