Earning money in Shenmue II is one of my least favorite parts of the series. The only reliable way to earn cash is to carry crates with Delin/Congo and that's about as fun as gouging my eyes out with a rusty butter knife. Other than that, you can get a part time job at a Lucky Hit stand, which is probably even worse. You just stand around for what feels like forever and you maybe make $25-$50 if you're lucky but usually end up with nothing.
Totally agreed, this is probably the worst part of S2 and I was extremely disheartened to see S3 make it a pillar of the franchise. What I will say in defense of this in S2 is that Ryo is stripped of his money as part of the story, and a brilliant way to differentiate being a stranger in a strange land from the relative safety of his hometown, so there is a reason for him to need money. In S3, he's in a tiny village in the mountains; he should be training and learning about the Shenmue tree, Phantom River Stone, and the poem, not trying to make enough money to buy $2000 wine (which is the same amount that the ticket to HK cost and that was considered prohibitively expensive). Never mind when he needs to do it again for $5000.
There's gambling obviously, but that's not reliable either without save scumming. I don't like save scumming, and needing to save scum to avoid having a bad time is just poor game design.
Agreed. But it's way faster than any option in S3, including save scumming, because S3 fundamentally changed how gambling works by lowering the stakes and adding the weird token-item-money loophole. In about 15 minutes of save scumming big or small, I had enough money to fulfill the needs of the story and buy every move in the game (with about $3k left over).
Chopping wood and picking herbs was surprisingly addictive. I also liked driving the forklift and catching ducks.
Agreed, these were fun. I didn't like picking herbs because of the stamina system and the annoying need to go into first person. What isn't fun is having to repeat these tasks for hours. Ditto the martial arts training.
And considering that Shenmue II is the game that forces you to air out books every morning until you advance to a certain point in the story, it's pretty hypocritical to complain that Shenmue III is a game based around martial arts that makes you train your martial arts skills.
Except that in S2 you are training under Xiuying (who we know is a major recurring character) and it's part of the story. She's trying to teach Ryo patience and he is rewarded with several moves and an important book that holds key information. On top of learning moves from several other masters. In S3 you literally meet the master who taught Ryo's father and nothing happens, he just tells you to go to another location. All of the martial arts training is side content related to grinding with the exception of the two body check moves.
It's also ironic that you think Shenmue I is a bad game when, by your own admission, it doesn't have any of the forced mini games that Shenmue II or III do.
That's not why I consider Shenmue 1 a bad game. When playing S2, I never felt like my time was being wasted or that what I was doing was going to lead nowhere and if I did, the game quickly remedied it by introducing memorable characters or moving the story forward.
Shenmue III also has a New Game+, so you really only have to level up your Kung Fu during one single playthrough if you don't want to keep doing it every time you replay the game.
While I'm thankful for the New Game+ option, I can't see myself replaying S3 until S4 comes out. Not many moments I care to revisit.
Aside from stamina, all other elements are present within all three games and so they are not unique to S3. They make up the bulk of the game as much as they did in 1 & 2, as it is possible to beat 3 without grinding with Ryo still even being able to level up within the story battles. So I don't really see how this is so fundamentally different in S3 than the previous games.
I played on the normal difficulty and found the fighting (even the first story fights) insurmountable without improving stamina and strength and I suspect this is by design. Also, S1 and 2 do not feature level grinding of any kind. You can level up moves to change their animations but this is not tied to Ryo's overall ability to win fights. You start every fight with full health and can win using the moves you have at the beginning. The economy in S1 and 2 isn't broken because it's barely there. You can buy all the moves in both games for less than the cost of the reverse body check.
It has the wait feature. Essentially every NPC points you in the right direction. You can skip most dialogue. The DC version had Japanese voice acting. The fighting is better integrated into the overall game. And it tells a better story with better characters.
Having almost every action sequence in the game rely on QTEs or some other variation does not improve neither the game experience or pacing. Worse, command QTEs at every moment actually diminish immersion as it breaks the action sequence fluidity to a halt.
Agreed, it leans pretty heavily on QTEs but this is something I forgive due to its age. It was a pioneer on this front and other games that followed suit (like RE4) are still good despite them. Plus S3's QTEs are the fucking worst, they're super unforgiving and several of them require one button press for Ryo to dispatch what should be high-level enemies. S3 is not an old game, what's the excuse here?
And if players are so keen on timeskip as improvement, the development team might as well used that in Guilin where the game is basically automated from that point on with nothing to do beside having players choose random dialogues that lead literally to nowhere gamewise, unlike in S3 (if you don't what I'm talking about, play it again with careful eyes).
S3 treading ground that S2 covered pretty well is not a point in its favor. Shenhua is on the cover of both games, recites a poem foretelling their destiny, and Ryo dreams about her once he finds the Phoenix Mirror; in that context being able to talk to her about pretty much anything is a very interesting idea especially after the slam bang action assault that was the Yellowhead building. Imo Shenmue is at its best when the gameplay serves the needs of the story so for it to allow that kind of downtime for the sake of properly building to that cliffhanger ending is not something I'm ever going to hold against it. And you can skip most of their dialogue on the nature walk. S3 has Shenhua grow slightly warmer toward Ryo if you talk to her every night but it gets entirely dropped in Niaowu because S3 completely forgot how setup and payoff work.
Anyway even if S2 is really the crown jewel of the series in the eyes of most fans and you bashing the other games, it won't make anyone else hate the series any less than what they do today, so I don't see your point. It's a niche game with a small cult following, so it's bound to be hated like so many of its kind.
The point, as this thread asks, is why Shenmue gets so much hate, and it's because S1 and S3 are bad games in ways that S2 is not. S2 has much more mainstream appeal (it's faster paced, the story is more interesting, Ren, etc.). Obviously it's still weird and quirky but it doesn't open itself up to being outright mocked the way S1 and 3 do but S1 and S3 are MUCH higher profile. I was hoping for the HD rerelease to remedy this but alas, most reviewers seem to only have reviewed the first game.
