Shenmue 3 review for PlayStation 4

20 years ago, back in the days where Nintendo and Sega were the big console household names, with Playstation just emerging I had among other consoles of that time a Sega Dreamcast, which turned out to be Sega’s last attempt at securing its spot in the console market, before turning to publish games instead. It wasn’t the best console, but it had some unique qualities such as connecting to the internet via dial-up over the phone line, which was at that time the only internet access I did have at home. While some earlier Sega games had been great the likes of Ecco the Dolphin and Sonic the Hedgehog just didn’t work for me in 3D. There are only a handful of games I remember from the Dreamcast era, but of those Shenmue was one of the greats.

For its time Shenmue was kind of in its own league, there were no other games like it in the West back then. The story of a boy from Japan out to avenge his father’s murder, while working as a forklift driver and collecting capsule toys, Ryo wandered the streets of his town with brand advertisement galore. Several years later came its sequel, then with the death of Sega consoles, there was nothing… until Kickstarter came along and the dream of the developers to bring the third installment to light 20 years later was finally realized.

What’s it like
Shenmue 3 carries on directly where Shenmue 2 left off, which if its been 20 years since you played the second game can be a little confusing. There is however a recap video you can watch first from the main menu or you can play the remastered versions of the first two games. You start off in the Chinese country village of Bailu, Ryo is still seeking clues to solve the mystery of the Phoenix mirror, sought after by his father’s killer. Your friend Shenhua, the stonemason’s daughter, is helping you as her father has now gone missing while staying in her house you talk to the residents of the quiet town trying to find out where he has gone.

There is a distinct feeling that the residents don’t like outsiders. ‘We don’t take kindly to strangers in these parts’ I thought to myself as I talked to some of them. Though to be honest the voice acting is poor, sounding very scripted and the translations are laughable, with responses often not making any sense to what was said beforehand. Ryo comes across as moody and sarcastic with a lot of his dialogue and even though I believe there is supposed to be a beautiful romance blossoming between him and Shenhua, instead I got the impression they didn’t like each other and were just tolerating each other based on their conversations due to the poor acting/translations used.

The graphics are ok, sure they don’t look as good as some games we see today, but the developers had to keep with the original look of the game or it would just be kind of weird if all the characters looked much more realistic and nothing like the first games in my opinion. I did notice some occasional screen tearing though when I was running and this should have been avoidable in this day and age.

Ryo can take a break from sleuthing and just enjoy what the world has to offer too, there are more mini-games than I knew what to do with, in the form of arcade games, gambling games, capsule collecting, fishing and then the jobs of chopping wood and later forklift driving once the story progressing and you reach the colorful port town of Niaowu. Each location also has a martial arts hall where you can hone and improve your skills in your free time. There are various ways you can make money if you want to and plenty of shops to spend it in, especially in Niaowu, which is full of shops, most don’t really have anything useful but Shenmue is different in that nearly every building does have something in you can interact with, unlike a lot of open-world games that have massive towns to explore but most are just closed shells of buildings that you can’t enter. Although while this felt different in a good way initially, I did start to feel a lot of it was pointless and just slowed down my progress when having to question people.

There is some fighting in the game, you do a lot of training to be ready for these fights, more training and sparing that actual fighting in truth. This isn’t like Yakuza where you are being attacked on every corner, so quite often I had to grind to train up my levels to be able to beat a boss, rather than naturally progressing by fighting and leveling up. You need to acquire skill books to learn new moves too or there is little point sparing at the dojo if you have mastered all the skills you have books for. Fighting requires using combos of the 4 shape buttons, but you can also cycle through the ones you have mastered using R1 and then trigger them with the simple press of R2 which is a nice touch if your fingers are not that nimble. Quick reflexes are essential when sparing to get the combos done quickly and also there are quick-time events during the game that require super speed to hit the right button before you fail. Maybe I’m getting old but I found it impossible to hit the right button on time and ended up just memorizing and pre-empting them. This, however, didn’t work when you had to catch ten chickens during a set time for a training mission and the buttons would be random. I was playing on normal difficulty, surely, I should have had a little time to react, just a second maybe would have been nice.

All we got is time
The real-time element is back for Shenmue 3, while it’s not real-time as we know it, there is a day and night cycle that Ryo goes through, he wakes up at 7 am each day and then at 9 pm it’s back home for bed. If there is someone you need to talk to that won’t be around till later you can skip to that time if you chose rather than having to wait around till it gets to that time like in the original Shenmue. While its kind of a nice touch and makes you think about your day a little, it’s generally a burden and slows down the progression. At one point I needed to find a Kungfu master to teach me a new move so I could beat a boss. He would teach it to me till I had earned enough money to buy him some 50-year-old alcohol, this took several in-game days of fishing to achieve, then in between each step of the training or if I got to him too late, he told me to come back tomorrow, really dragging out the whole quest, by the time I got back to fighting the boss I had forgotten where he was as it had been so many days of traveling to the other location instead to learn the move.

The fishing while a fairly easy task was slowed down by me having to travel to the tackle shop every day to rent a rod, as you couldn’t just buy one to have in your inventory but had to rent one every time. Then once you had the rod you had to choose just one location to fish, if you stopped fishing before Ryo decided he had caught enough, then your rod was returned. I managed to catch on average about 14 fish per turn so on some days I had to rent two rods when I was earning money and of course, since time was not our friend, the guy wouldn’t rent them out after around 3 pm, so after my second turn, I was off to bed to start a new day. During the quest mentioned above, I would quite often finish my training at 3 pm and get told that was enough for the day and come back tomorrow, so I often sent Ryo to bed at 3 pm so I could continue the training. Sure, I could have spent a few hours playing the mini-games, but I just wanted to get on with learning the move so I could beat the boss and progress the story!

Trophies
Shenmue’s 3’s trophies involve a lot of time-consuming collection trophies such as collecting all the herbs in both locations. This can be aided by maps that you can pick up at some of the shops that show you where the herbs are, you can then sell sets of herbs as another means of earning money. Then there is the fish in all spots of both locations trophies and catch 1000 fish, as mentioned earlier on average I could about 14 a turn so you can do the maths there. Own 10,000 yuan (money), own 500,000 tokens (gambling), bought 1000 items at the store and collect all the capsule toy sets. Also, you need to get all the high scores in the mini-games, which would probably require a fair amount of time and skill. Most of the other trophies are fairly easy and will be earned by completing the story, but you will have a bit of a grind for the rest which will probably end up with some fairly repetitive tasks.

So, was it worth the wait?
While I had fond memories of the original games 20 years ago, I wasn’t waiting with bated breath for the 3rd installment, they were fun at the time, but time moves on and these days there are much better games of a similar style such as Sleeping Dogs and the awesome Yakuza series. However, it was nice to take the trip down memory lane and revising Shenmue again, it was still fun in a more relaxed slow-paced way compared to Yakuza. For fans that have been waiting a long time for the 3rd installment with the story left untold for all those years I hope they are satisfied and maybe we will see a 4th game someday, hopefully not in another 20 years’ time. While the timed day and night cycle is interesting, I really hope if they do bring out another game, they drop this feature as it just ruins the flow of the game, I know it’s a Shenmue thing, but if a thing is broke fix it or scrap it, please?

*This Review Code was so generously provided by the publisher for review*

Developer: YS Net, Yu Suzuki, Neilo, YSNET inc. Publisher: Deep Silver, Shibuya Productions, Koch Media
Release date: November 19, 2019
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows
Platform Reviewed on: PlayStation 4 PRO

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