I saw that too, and Virtua Quest was called the real Shenmue, and Yakuza is called better than Shenmue 3 all over the net. Every time I see it, it makes my blood boil. And all because of lack of cash Shenmue 3 had to make better faces and facial animations. I really so hated that thing, I never finished Yakuza 1, and I've played so many bad games to the end. Some better, some worse. That one though, I know I'm talking myself here. I plain hate it, sorry.
I was interested in at least trying Yakuza 0. Now that Shenmue 3 finally happened. I don't see myself doing it this year, but I might next year. I hope I won't hate it as much. Sleeping dogs looks even more just action, and nothing else. I'd not enjoy it these days. It might even be good. There are too many good adventure/RPG games out now to bother for me. I grew out of plain fighters/shooters. They bore me.Virtua Quest was called the real Shenmue??
When did this ever happen? I never heard of that
Yakuza being called better than Shenmue in general has been said for years so you dont really need to even specify Shenmue 3. Many Yakuza fans feel Yakuza is the 'proper replacement for Shenmue' and all that noise, even though they are different games despite Yakuza obviously taking some forms of inspiration from it. Yakuza's DNA is beat em up (hence all the random battles, etc). Shenmue's is more point and click adventure (hence all the detective solving/talking to NPCs, investigating for clues etc)
Both series have their strengths and weaknesses. I dont like saying 'this is better than that'. It doesnt feel right to me. If Yakuza is the arms, then Shenmue is the legs. Why would you cut off your own legs?
In any case, you can't really make a judgement call on the Yakuza series by only playing Yakuza 1. That isn't even remotely fair. Yakuza 1 had a bad dub (good actors, just horribly directed with a botched script), fixed camera angles, and many other shortcuts.
The game was remade into Yakuza Kiwami which is much better. Same with Yakuza 2 (Yakuza Kiwami 2)
When the series moved to HD with Yakuza Kenzan!, a historical what if period piece spinoff, is when the series got an overhaul of sorts; free camera, completely 3D rendered environments etc. Thiis was repeated in Yakuza 3, then on and so forth through to Yakuza 6. The story focused primarily on Kiryu, the series protagonist, who in Yakuza 1, started off as a 35 year old ex convict, and his adopted daughter Haruka, who started off around 8 or 9 years old in Yakuza 1, and by Yakuza 6, she was 20 years old and Kiryu was 48. Each Yakuza game took place in the actual year and month the game came out in Japan (aside from Yakuza Zero, which is a prequel set in 1988 when Kiryu was 20 years old). No other video game series did something like this so its pretty special in that regard. You got to see the character development of these two main characters and how they grew over the years from 2005 to 2016.
Now Yakuza 7 is coming out, which stars a new protagonist, and the gameplay has gone to turn based, so that right there is a huge change.
I never thought it made sense to pit Yakuza and Shenmue against each other. Same with Sleeping Dogs. To me, if you're a fan of one, you should be a fan of all three. They are all special in their own way. Some people just like to be fanboys I guess.
i would definitely love to see RGG studio work on something other than RGG. I have a feeling the new Monkey Ball reissue is testing the waters for a new Monkey Ball at least.
Couple things: Shenmue's Kickstarter was "only" made up of around 70,000 backers, it made most of its money from those backers being extremely generous. Actual sales of the game appear to be pretty low (the only hard number I could find was 18k in Japan but it hasn't exactly been lighting up the charts) so 500k units may not be so realistic. I was shocked that the Kickstarter money, Epic money, and whatever was provided by the publishing partners, wasn't used to secure at least one more sequel. A second Kickstarter is unlikely to be anywhere near as successful.
True, these games don't usually have huge sales numbers but Shenmue certainly has the potential for mass appeal (lots of action, intriguing story, fun characters) that it constantly leans away from. It could be more "normal" (like a Bethesda RPG) or more "quirky" (like a Persona game), but it occupies this weird no man's land in between. It could also go the David Cagian set-piece driven, stripped down gameplay, pseudo-movie route but then it would need state of the art visuals and Shenmue is too big a story for that.
Agreed 100%. Though I find it interesting what Shenmue fans consider to be "in character" for Ryo or "on brand" for the series in general.
R.I.P. LucasArts
Kojima is really good at capitalizing on his pretentiousness; people love an "auteur", which Suzuki definitely tried to be in the 90's.
Shenmue has always been held to an absurdly high standard compared to its contemporaries. Whenever I hear people complain about the fighting systems in the first 2 games I'm like, the PS2 GTA games routinely got perfect scores and have some of the worst shooting mechanics ever. People love to hate Shenmue (the Funhaus let's play is particularly brutal) and the memes have made it worse.
Shenmue begins with the obnoxious "produced and directed by Yu Suzuki" (as if he's some household name), most of his interviews at the time where he talks about creating a new genre, the whole cringy "FREE" acronym thing, the fact that Shenmue was this extravagant project of unmatched scale. That kind of thing. I think that's at least part of the reason people love to hate it, they point at it and go THIS was the most expensive game ever made at the time.
Sorry, I meant specifically with regards to Shenmue. I know Suzuki never displayed that kind of attitude toward anything else. I just referenced the 90's because from basically '94-on he was working on Shenmue. This likely wasn't even his fault (he doesn't really seem to love the spotlight), near the early 2000s, when games started to cost and make a lot of money, there was this trend towards turning game designers into rock stars. Thankfully it passed.
Making games became exponentially more expensive in 3D, but what really elevates these costs is the marketing budget. FF7 cost $45M to make but had a marketing budget of $100M (hence those ridiculous ads).
Yea it was definitely an attempt to sell the game. Even at the time I knew that there was no way $70M was just the cost for developing Shenmue 1. $70M was the total cost for developing Shenmue 1 and 2 across 2 systems over 6 years, which is a lot more in line with reality. Not sure why spending so much money on a game is considered a good thing (wasn't Destiny's budget like $500M or something stupid like that?), but it's definitely used as a cudgel to beat Shenmue with now.
There are a lot of factors that go into this decision. 3D has more mass appeal than 2D, just like 2D sprites have more mass appeal than pixel art. Just the way it goes (broadly speaking). It's definitely easier to make something like, say, Skullgirls in 2D (crazy animation, lots of warping monster parts etc.). But for a game like Street Fighter? Where most of the characters are human and you want to sell a bunch of costumes as DLC? 3D is a no brainer; it would take forever to animate different costumes in 2D. On the whole though, across all genres, 3D is more expensive because it requires more people across more disciplines.
