![]() ![]() Pros: The open world environments are filled with detail and surprises. In Short: A literal dream come true for fans and while most others will struggle to understand the appeal it’s impossible not to admire Yu Suzuki’s vision and tenacity in not only making the game but making it his way. Officially the money is meant to be spent on more martial arts training, or other story sensitive purposes, but you can also choose to just waste it on a gashapon machine or a game of Lucky Strike (there are some fake arcade games but, due to Sega’s lack of involvement, no proper ones). The games have always been essentially life simulators and most of your time is spent simply earning money doing menial jobs. The real appeal of Shenmue is found in everything you do in-between. Ryo still doesn’t have anything close to a personality and the few people that do tend to be cackling, one-dimensional bad guys.īut while the game gives the impression that it’s all about the storytelling, since that’s the thrust of the gameplay, it’s really not. The dialogue is so dull it’s almost comical, which is true for many of the other elements of the game, but what can’t be so easily forgiven is how little character development there is for anyone. Despite at least 50% of the gameplay involving nothing more than walking around talking to people the dialogue lacks any sort of energy and is not helped by a voice cast you’d swear were probably Kickstarter backers looking to be immortalised in their dream game (in actual fact some of the actors, including the one for Ryo, are the same as the original games). In terms of dialogue the problem isn’t the quality of the translation but the deathless banality of what’s being said, which we suspect is very accurate to the original Japanese. Either that or there were half a dozen different people making the character models and they were all given completely different briefs. Some of the weirdest characters – that look like something out of the Dick Tracy movie from the 90s – are relatively important so we can only assume it’s on purpose. Although Ryo’s constant need to eat if he exerts himself for more than a moment is irritating and unnecessary, as he piles raw ingredients into his maw like he’s shovelling coal. ![]() Ryo controls more or less like a modern third person character, with proper camera controls, but there are still little touches, like him shuffling up to doors so that he’s exactly opposite them before opening them, which invoke the memory of the originals without negatively impacting the gameplay. Which is odd really, given how obsessed it is with the minutiae of training and the philosophy of martial arts, only to end up making the execution entirely trivial and limiting the number of real fights to a mere handful. It now bears almost no resemblance to Virtua Fighter though and when the on-screen controls tell you to just press any button you get an inkling for what the game expects from its players. Shenmue is always difficult to describe to anyone that hasn’t played it, as the game purposefully has no focus and even its most gamey element – the 3D combat – is extremely simple and surprisingly easy. Which is not a surprise if you’ve been paying attention to what Suzuki’s been saying lately but it does seem very brave, if not foolhardy, to once again avoid any sort of closure. We obviously can’t get into spoilers but, since Suzuki is already talking about making Shenmue 4, we should say that the plot moves forward surprisingly little from the last game and certainly offers no kind of resolution.
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