What if Yakuza/Ryu Ga Gotoku was made on the Shenmue engine?

[RyoHazuki84]

So, lets go back to 2005/2006 when Yakuza was released in Japan and internationally. A good fraction of us assumed that Yakuza could’ve been Shenmue’s successor, when yes and no that came to be the case. However, lets turn the clock back and change the conditions. What if Yakuza was made using Shenmue’s original FREE engine instead? Could the PS2 hardware at the time handle it? No way it going to be released on X-Box considering Nagoshi wasn’t even sure if it was going to get an international release, and all X-Box consoles have been a collosal failure in Japan. Obviously, the course of history would be different. Would the series still be a success in Japan only to slowly build an international fan base? Would more Shenmue fans be on board with it? Could it have helped paved way for more Shenmue games a decade earlier? Of course we can never know, but I do feel it’s worth discussing.

Considering Nagoshi’s work with Shenmue, he could have used the engine to simulate Kabukicho in the same way that it did for Yokosuka and China. FREE allows more exploration and more interaction while in Yakuza, it has always been more restrictive in that respective game.

Maybe the engine at the time they were using was much cheaper and that the Virtua Fighter fighting engine certainly wouldn’t have worked, but I do think in some ways Yakuza could have benefited.

 

[darksniper]

I think had the Dreamcast stayed alive. Yakuza would've been running on the Shenmue engine and would've ran and looked better on the DC than the PS2.

 

[Shenmue]

Yakuza not being made in the technical, and maybe also design, mold of Shenmue II was deliberate. You can really see that Nagoshi understood what Shenmue stood for and why it didn't sell as much as people at SEGA hoped.

Yakuza is a complete 180 of Shenmue in many ways, in one you only have fights where the plot absolutely NEEDS to, in the other you have random fights with goons every minute or so, for example. This was done in order to maximize the appeal of the game to a wide audience while retaining some core ideas from Shenmue, and as a result it is a completely different beast. It seems to have worked in his favor considering it had 6 games and plenty of spinoffs, excluding the fact that Yakuza never sold well in the western world until Yakuza Zero.

Edit: Also I must add that the PS2 is a VRAM bandwidth / parallel processing monster and the "Shenmue couldn't run on PS2" is bullshit. On the early years of the console I could see a Shenmue II port having lower quality textures and missing effects here and there, but it would still be Shenmue II.

 

[BlueMue]

If they had used the Shenmue engine to make Yakuza instead of III with it, it would've been even more of a slap in the face...

 

[9dragons]

In that case we had some much better looking PS2 Yakuza games. The PS2 Yakuza games were really ugly compared to Shenmue 1 and 2 on the Dreamcast. From 3 onwards the Yakuza games got really nice from a graphics Point of view.

Also I doubt that Yakuza is the right medium to win Shenmue fans over. There might be some not very knowledgeable gaming jouranlists and some naiv fans that compare Yakuza to Shenmue but both games are very different. They have nothing to do with each other.

Yakuza is a great gaming Franchise no doubt about it, but it lacks to Points that make Shenmue Shenmue.

Shenmue is more like a old School Point and click Adventure of the 90s with some fighting, while Yakuza is a pure Action ga me with some light RPG Elements.

 

[darksniper]

I think where the Yakuza/Shenmue comparisons are valid is that I believe whatever tools Sega used to craft their character models are the same that were done in Shenmue. If Sega just released character models of the Yakuza characters and didn't place a name on them, many would assume it's a new Shenmue game.

 

[RyoHazuki84]

I’m pretty sure the FREE engine could have been tweaked to make it a more action oriented game, but of course it would mean taking out the Virtua Fighter engine for something fresh. I still like how Shenmue lets you explore almost everywhere and interact with almost everyone, and I would have liked that implemented into Yakuza as well.