Thoughts on the phone calls?

I really enjoyed the phone calls and going through each response to hear what the dialogue would be, it was great to hear new things for those characters we haven't heard from in such a long time, in terms of the gameplay timeline and real life. I think my favourite calls were the fact that Guizhang still didn't know that Lishao Tao was a woman, talking to Joy about Ren, and Ryo trying to console Fuku-san after his break up with Akemi.
 
I really enjoyed the phone calls and going through each response to hear what the dialogue would be, it was great to hear new things for those characters we haven't heard from in such a long time, in terms of the gameplay timeline and real life. I think my favourite calls were the fact that Guizhang still didn't know that Lishao Tao was a woman, talking to Joy about Ren, and Ryo trying to console Fuku-san after his break up with Akemi.
Fuku-san’s was my favorite overall. Always loved that guy, he’s comic relief done just right
 
For anyone saying there were fantastic or great, are you playing in Japanese? I can't fathom how anyone listening to the English versions would find any satisfaction in them.
 
For anyone saying there were fantastic or great, are you playing in Japanese? I can't fathom how anyone listening to the English versions would find any satisfaction in them.

Yes, I played in Japanese.

I'm based in Europe so after playing the first game in English I turned to Japanese for Shenmue II and never looked back since then.

The (lack of) quality of the English dub is hurting the game in so many ways, and the hopes for the series to have mainstream appeal are so little, that I hope a possible Shenmue IV axes it and is Japanese only (or no dub at all even).
 
I loved the calls.

While they failed at being the ultimate fanservice nostalgia bait they were supposed to be due to the lack of most of the original english voice actors, they gave me the most human, heartfelt and character-driven dialogues the game had to offer.
 
The game was a massive disappointment to me but I agree the phone calls were "fantastic".

I limited myself to two calls by night so I was never bored and each home return was the root of some excitement.

They even introduced little sentence variations if you phone the same character again although the illusion doesn't sound perfect every time. Background music was on point as well.

One of the best moments of Shenmue III if not my favorite, and probably one of the smartest fan services of all time. (Played in Japanese).

The Calls of Love.
 
The ridiculous english dubbing is just a joke and a waste of money since the first entry. Having it back to the third game was a bad move to please a couple of nostalgic people. A really stupid idea.
 
I liked the conversations with Gui Zhang. The conversations about Joy and the Yellowheads, in particular, were nice. I played the game with Japanese voices because I knew that most of the cast for the English dub were culled but I saw some videos and I thought Tom's replacement actor was good. Unrelated to the calls but Chai's dub voice was surprisingly decent as well.
 
The ridiculous english dubbing is just a joke and a waste of money since the first entry. Having it back to the third game was a bad move to please a couple of nostalgic people. A really stupid idea.
It's not just nostalgia. They know that a certain amount of potential buyers don't want to play in Japanese. I've seen others who don't mind that but still prefer English when they're streaming. Easier for viewers and they can listen while checking the chat. Some didn't want to stream Yakuza because of that and the amount of text dialogue.

So they likely estimated that a dub could lead to extra sales. A rough calculation :
Having done sound work, even a modest budget album start to finish quickly costs a few thousand. Extensive voice work can take about as long. That's engineer and studio time. Add actor wages. $200-400/day is common. Big names over $2000/day. Games with just a few characters, several takes allowed, can pay over $10 000 for voice work. Shenmue 3 was mostly 1 line=1 take so my rough estimate (not knowing exact script size, wages,...) was that under $100 000 might be possible?

But I think that it was @tomboz who estimated that this could be up to $500 000? Assume that a copy costs $60, publisher gets $30 (can differ) : 500000/30 = 16667 copies to recoup that cost. If it's $100 000 you need about 3300 copies. Since the game often costs $30, double the needed sales. They keep more though from Epic which makes things easier. These numbers seem pretty justifiable for a company?
 
Last edited:
Back
Top