Were you happier with no Shenmue III? Or do you prefer living in a post-Shenmue III world?

Shenmue 3 wasn't made with the ideal budget. Yu Suzuki was out of the game for a bit.
Publishers coming in late in development.
The game we got was probably not what we would have got had the Dreamcast been successful and we got an immediate continuation. But that's down to circumstances.
As much as some of you guys hate it, we actually have a Shenmue 3.
I really, really enjoyed my time with it. Some parts were nostalgic, others just filled me with joy. Is it perfect? No. But I still had a blast and it perfectly captured that Shenmue charm. It was good enough just being able to get back into that atmosphere I've missed for so long.
Playing the ending through a few more times, it's actually growing on me. Especially that show down with Lan Di and the future of the Chiyoumen after Niao Sun's antics.
So many questions left to get answers to... I honestly can't wait for Shenmue 4.
 
Thomasina said:
Hope you're not talking about me because I had no expectations of an enormous open world. I just wanted what was there to make sense.
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It's total bollocks. All i've heard is excuses why people don't like it. They've never played 1 or 2, they were expecting a Skyrim size world, its episodic, the budget was low.

There's no excuse for the cash grinding missions. They murder the pace.
 
Furinkazan said:
It's total bollocks. All i've heard is excuses why people don't like it. They've never played 1 or 2, they were expecting a Skyrim size world, its episodic, the budget was low.

There's no excuse for the cash grinding missions. They murder the pace.
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Maybe it's me being slow today but I'm not sure what your first point is getting at.

Anyway calm down, theres been plenty who enjoyed the game despite its flaws

Shenmue 2 also had a cash grind.
 
I was pointing out common arguments as to why some don't like S3, and expecting a massive world is one of them. Which is just ridiculous. There's more atmosphere in Dobuita than there is in most AAA games TODAY.

Plenty of people love The Last Jedi as well.

And S2's cash gathering took approx 5 minutes (if you didn't already have thousands on you and i don't know why you wouldn't).
 
Honestly the constant complaints I hear about Shenmue 3's 'Paywalls' makes zero sense to me. There's so many ways to earn money in this game, when I hit the 5,000 purchase point, I strolled into the herb shop (the one with the bangin' choon by the top of new paradise) and walked out with 4,500. Woke up the next day did a forklift shift then went fishing. Job done. I wasn't even expecting such a hefty purchase first time around, so on my new game plus I had around 11,000 at that point from collecting herbs in Bailu alone.

It's just part of Shenmue to me. You need money for plane tickets, meeting people, entering fights etc in the first two games, just like how you need money for unexpected purchases in real life. I wonder if certain types of player (like the ones who play Resident Evil and horde the power weapons and before they know it the credits roll and they still haven't used them- like me!) just approach this stuff with a different mindset.
 
Furinkazan said:
It's total bollocks. All i've heard is excuses why people don't like it. They've never played 1 or 2, they were expecting a Skyrim size world, its episodic, the budget was low.

There's no excuse for the cash grinding missions. They murder the pace.
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Whether people like it or not the Shenmue series always had a focus on realism and grinding for cash has been in it since the beginning.
In my point of view it makes sense for Ryo to have to work to earn money to pay for lodging and food.
I didn't mind having to earn the money to buy the wine for Master Sun in Bailu; in fact I found it amazing because it reminded of those old chinese kung fu movies. It is typical in these movies for the master to have the student work for him because it reveals that the student is worthy and has a strong will. One popular example is that of Mister Miyagi that makes Daniel work for him around his house.
If recall correctly Master Sun even comments with Ryo in this regard after teaching him the Body Check.
On the other side I didn't like the quest where we had to earn money to buy the book to learn the reverse body check.
First of all it is repeating the same type of quest wich reveals a lack of originality. Second they could have easily come up with something different and interesting.
 
Yeah that's the only thing I thought was a bit shit, the reverse body check. Should have been another of Akira's trademarks moves which would not only help with the VF connection but be a major thrill for Akira fans too.

Something like this would've been awesome.

akira-vf-combo.gif
 
Sergeynest said:
Whether people like it or not the Shenmue series always had a focus on realism and grinding for cash has been in it since the beginning.
In my point of view it makes sense for Ryo to have to work to earn money to pay for lodging and food.
I didn't mind having to earn the money to buy the wine for Master Sun in Bailu; in fact I found it amazing because it reminded of those old chinese kung fu movies. It is typical in these movies for the master to have the student work for him because it reveals that the student is worthy and has a strong will. One popular example is that of Mister Miyagi that makes Daniel work for him around his house.
If recall correctly Master Sun even comments with Ryo in this regard after teaching him the Body Check.
On the other side I didn't like the quest where we had to earn money to buy the book to learn the reverse body check.
First of all it is repeating the same type of quest wich reveals a lack of originality. Second they could have easily come up with something different and interesting.
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Yeah, i love when that happens in old kung fu movies. Master refuses to train student so student does work for him. Shame that isn't actually what happens in S3. Using your analogy, it'd be like if Daniel-san convinced Miyagi to teach him by giving him an expensive bottle of whisky, or just outright paying him off.

This happened in 2, but instead of simply paying Xiuying we helped out around Man Mo Temple, and learned kung fu in the process.

I can forgive the first time it happened, but not the second. It was a cheap move solely designed to stretch the game out. The definition of filler.
 
If Bailu was not so much about fan service and if someone or a reviewer would say "I wish there was arcade/classic mini games in the village", I think nobody would agree. I even think that most of us at Dojo would make fun of this person for such idea, while treasuring the sens of immersion of Shenmue 3 they canonly got - isolated village for Bailu, S2 vibes for Niaowu. So I think the "what if" argument is flexible in both ways.

If Suzuki was free to do the game he wanted, I believe he wouldn't make the fan service in Bailu neither. Tsukuyomimagi99 explained very well what could have been done right without ruining the immersion and fun with the bit of imagination that helped to make S1 & S2 great games.

I don't think Yu run out of ideas for Bailu but was rather afraid of offering a game that has no evident "Shenmue" feel.

Imagine if YSnet rightfully saved the fan service for Niaowu but eventually had to cut the whole location, which could have been very possible considering the unfinished state and the underdevelopment of her most important character Niao Sun. (Btw we've never seen the "Kowloon vertical gameplay" Yu was mentionning for Choubu early in the development).

We would have inherited of a certainly great game but something would be lacking. Pretty like what was happened to Splinter Cell Blacklist, hated by the fans but cherished by the new players because the qualities were too different of the ones that made the previous games originally interesting (precision of the controls, slow-paced gameplay focused on darkness, sense of humor, etc.).

And Splinter Cell is only one of the many examples in video game history about the difficult equation of making innovation while keeping original interest. Yu absolutely wanted to avoid the terrific situation of fans not playing what they expansively paid. Ryan Payton knew it as well.

So yeah, I do believe it was mostly a lose-lose situation. I don't think YSnet needed more money, 20 million is huge, but if they got all of them from the very beginning, I'm convinced it would have changed everything. The technical issues they got early with UE4 probably led them to precipitate things and completely re-imagine Bailu to fulfill their planning in the worst-case situation.
 
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Yokosuka said:
I don't think YSnet needed more money, 20 million is huge
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Yes, $20 mill is a lot. But more money would have meant more developers and possibly more development time.
I believe increased funds would certainly have made a difference.
 
Those funds get eaten quite quickly when you consider marketing costs plus they had to pay kickstarter fees and reward production costs from the initial outlay. That's on top of running the studio, mo-cap, 2 dubs, translation work (as bad as it was), general development, submission to Sony for digital release, production of the discs etc.
 
When you look at Bloodstained which raised 5.5 million dollars and the end product is a 2D side scroller (not a diss it's a great game) compared to the 6.8 million Shenmue made which is a 3D fully voiced open world game with a brand new combat and economy system and two dubs...I think it's a miracle what they pulled off with the budget I really do. Then the publisher release of Bloodstained launched at $40 so it's a smarter, easier sell to latecomers than the full price $60 Shenmue 3 launched at. Do i think Shenmue 3 was worth $60? absolutely, but the bloke on the street probably thought differently.
 
Down by Law said:
When you look at Bloodstained which raised 5.5 million dollars and the end product is a 2D side scroller (not a diss it's a great game) compared to the 6.8 million Shenmue made which is a 3D fully voiced open world game with a brand new combat and economy system and two dubs...I think it's a miracle what they pulled off with the budget I really do. Then the publisher release of Bloodstained launched at $40 so it's a smarter, easier sell to latecomers than the full price $60 Shenmue 3 launched at. Do i think Shenmue 3 was worth $60? absolutely, but the bloke on the street probably thought differently.
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Come on, S3 isn't 'open world'.
 
Furinkazan said:
Yeah, i love when that happens in old kung fu movies. Master refuses to train student so student does work for him. Shame that isn't actually what happens in S3. Using your analogy, it'd be like if Daniel-san convinced Miyagi to teach him by giving him an expensive bottle of whisky, or just outright paying him off.

This happened in 2, but instead of simply paying Xiuying we helped out around Man Mo Temple, and learned kung fu in the process.

I can forgive the first time it happened, but not the second. It was a cheap move solely designed to stretch the game out. The definition of filler.
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I respect your opinion and understand it to certain extent; but personally I don't consider it filler. I don't consider that Ryo is paying him off with the wine. The demand came from Master Sun, it wasn't Ryo that offered him the wine or tried to give him the cash to buy it. In my point of view it was a test to see to what extent Ryo really wanted to learn the move, the same happens with the chickens so in so that he even purposly tries to annoy Ryo by macking him do it every day and then sending him home like someone does with is dog. Its a test of will and patience like what happened with Xuying in Shenmue 2 with him having to carry the books.
For Master Sun its a win win situation, he teaches Ryo not just a martial arts move but also teaches him the right mindset and at the same time wins a big jug of wine because he is the Drunken Master.
Has for stretching the game out it depends because we can easlly earn the 2000 by just walking around picking up herbs. That aint so bad at all, at least for me.
 
Developers are always lacking of money in any situation, it doesn't prevent them from making tons of good games with comparable complexity although it's true than few games can say they're more complex to design than Shenmue.

I think condition rather power penalized them. Crowdfunding is not really a Japanese thing, historically and culturally to begin with.

It's also very rare that a Japanese developer adopts the West way of designing. Japanese tend to put all their efforts in the endgame, West developers prefer to rather put the magic in the first levels. Before 2019, Final Fantasy XV was the only Japanese game I can remember using such method and it had the same Frankenstein feel of S3. The kickstarter format likely led Yu to re-think his paradigm and put him in an uncomfortable situation.

If they got a definitive budget sooner, I believe the game design would have been way more balanced and so the whole game better accepted. Trying to make your game scalable according the funds you may get in the future is incredibly tricky, even more when your project is not a competitive game, and I think Yu didn't manage to deal with this exercise as you don't feel a satisfying unity when you beat the game - and he must himself feel highly frustrated of that.
 
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Y'know.... in a way I think Shenmue 3 had the same problem as the Sega Saturn.. additional resources wasted by lack of pre-planning.

The Saturn was supposed to be a simple 2D powerhouse, but at the last minute needed to handle these newfangled 3D graphics so it got slapped with a second CPU which made the system a frankenstein mess.

Similarly, Shenmue 3 was supposed to be a small indie budget charming little game, but at the last minute got a huge influx of cash, to they just slapped all the plot points of Niaowu and pasted them into Bailu as well to fill out the game.
 
I don't like the additions to Bailu ut I get why they were done. Imagine the S3 demo coming out and you didn't have any combat, mini games etc. to see how those tings would work later in the game.

on the other hand I do feel like it lacks confidence in away to embrace where the story was going for the Bailu chapter and explore that fully. Especially since Niaowu would still be in the game with all of the jobs and mini games. I think it would have made for a nice contrast actually.
 
Furinkazan said:
Come on, S3 isn't 'open world'.
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Blame wikipedia lol

Shenmue III, developed by Suzuki's company Ys Net, was released in 2019 for PlayStation 4 and Windows. The Shenmue games consist of open-world 3D environments interspersed with brawler battles and quick time events.
 
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