Shenmue III
PlayStation 4
Previous Shenmue reviews:
Nostalgia Factor:
My love for the Shenmue series has never been a secret. The first game in the series was unlike anything I had ever seen before, and its sequel took everything that was great about the first game and ramped it up to a whole new level. I consider these titles to be two of the greatest video games ever created. Truly, they are brilliant. I even included my reviews for these games up above for reference if you wanted to check them out.
While we’re on the subject of those reviews, let’s revisit my Shenmue II review, specifically, the last few sentences of that review. Here is my exact quote:
“This game sets the bar ridiculously high for the upcoming Shenmue III. It has been nearly an 18 year wait. I sure hope it’s worth it.”
*sigh*
It wasn’t worth it. To say that this game was a disappointment would be a major understatement.
Let’s just move on to the review and I’ll explain what is so disappointing about it.
Story:
This game picks up immediately where Shenmue II leaves off. Shenhua’s father Yuan has gone missing, so Ryo and Shenhua head to nearby Bailu Village to look for clues. Turns out that a bunch of thugs has recently raided Bailu Village, looking for stonemasons. A lot of stuff happens, but long story short: Ryo defeats the thugs in battle and they reveal to him that Shenhua’s father has been taken to the nearby city of Niaowu. This comprises the first half of the game.
In the second half of the game, Ryo and Shenhua travel to Niaowu to continue their search for Yuan. Niaowu is a large, bustling city whereas Bailu Village is more peaceful and tranquil. Ryo again follows a trail of clues that leads him to a group of thugs called the Red Snakes. These Snakes are holed up in a nearby castle where they are keeping Yuan. Ryo teams up with Ren, who believes that the Dragon and Phoenix mirrors will lead him to a massive treasure, and two other fighters he meets over the course of his Niaowu journey. They storm the castle, beat up a bunch of bad guys, and recover Yuan. Unfortunately, however, Lan Di is there and he kicks everyone’s ass. The castle burns down, Ryo and company escape with their lives, and Lan Di gets away once again.
Yuan offers answers to all of Ryo’s questions, but the game ends on yet another cliffhanger. The last thing you see is Ryo and his friends scaling the Great Wall of China before the game ends.
What, we waited 18 years for THIS???? No answers, no great mysteries revealed, the game ending on yet another cliffhanger. Why are the mirrors so important? What is Lan Di after? Is it just treasure, or is there more to this story? Who are Shenhua’s real parents? Why are they going to the Great Wall of China? What part does Ryo have to play in all of this?
Nothing. The game gives us virtually nothing as far as answers go. After faithfully waiting around for 18 years in-between installments, you would think the game would have thrown us at least some kind of bone. But no.
*sigh*
The chances are incredibly slim that there will ever be a Shenmue IV. It's not like I expected them to wrap up the series in one game when it was originally projected to have five or maybe even six more installments to come. But after the 18-year long wait I think we all expected something more groundbreaking to happen in this installment. Instead, the whole game is basically one big quest to rescue Shenhua’s father, and no real answers are ever given to us as to the larger scope of things going on. Just a few small clues here and there.
Since we don’t know if the series will ever continue, here is my personal theory. The Phoenix and Dragon mirrors represent a real phoenix and a real dragon, which have been imprisoned in some kind of mystical prison for thousands of years. The mirrors keep these creatures in their prison (which may or may not be located deep within the Great Wall of China). Every few hundred years, these mirrors have to be reinforced or rebuilt completely, which would explain why they were “created” a hundred years or so ago. Lan Di wants the mirrors so he can try and control these creatures for his own personal benefit. Ryo’s father wanted to keep the mirrors hidden away so that these dangerous creatures would be locked away for all eternity. Ryo’s destiny is to release the creatures and guide them to the Shenmue tree, which will return them to the spirit realm from where they originally came.
Or something. I don’t know. I am sure I am way off base. But I refuse to believe all this fuss is over something as horribly clichéd as treasure. Hopefully we get the chance to find out someday.
Gameplay:
The first thing you’ll notice when you start playing Shenmue III is that its basic gameplay hasn’t changed much from that of its predecessors. Ryo handles the same. His movements are the same. The way you interact with things and talk to people is the same. On the surface, very little has changed.
It is only when you really start digging in that you notice the differences. I’m just going to get my biggest gripe out of the way immediately: the stamina meter. The damn stamina meter.
I don’t know who thought this was a good idea. I mean, I get it. The goal of Shenmue has always been to deliver a living, breathing world to the players of the game. It makes sense that they’d want to have to Ryo stop and eat every once in a while. But they took it way too far in this game.
Let me elaborate. In Shenmue III, Ryo’s stamina bar is ALWAYs dropping, even if you are standing still and not doing anything. If you make him run, the stamina bar absolutely plummets. Once your stamina bar empties out, you are forced to walk until three bars of your meter have recharged. Start running again, that meter empties out in about two seconds.
In this game, you are going to be running back and forth quite a bit. Ryo moves way too damn slow when he is walking, so completely ignoring your stamina meter is not an option. The only way to recharge this meter is to eat. But eating costs money. You have to buy food from vendors and then eat the food. Sounds par for the course when it comes to video games, but your average food item restores only about 30 units of stamina, and Ryo’s bar is over a thousand units. So you’d have to eat something like 40 to 50 apples to fill your stamina bar. That’s a lot of apples. More importantly: that’s a lot of money.
To earn money in this game you have to take on mundane jobs like chopping wood, collecting herbs, and fishing. If these jobs paid well, I’d be more okay with this system. But they don’t. To get through this game, I’d say I had to chop wood at least 100 times, and that is not an exaggeration. Where did that money go? To food. Just so I could make my character run, something that you could do for free in Shenmue I and II.
WHY??????
That’s not the end of it either. Ryo’s health bar and his stamina bar are one in the same. So if you have to run halfway across the game’s map and you get attacked, you are going to be going into battle with a depleted health meter. The game’s combat is challenging enough as it is. I don’t know why the game makers felt the need to handicap people like this. The good news is that if you die, you can restart from right before the battle. So you can load up on the 40 apples you need to eat to refill your health before going in to finish the fight, or whatever. But still, this is very very obnoxious.
You know what else is obnoxious? The combat. I had no issues with the fighting in Shenmue I and II. In this game, however, it is super challenging. If you go into battle and you aren’t leveled up enough, you are going to get your ass kicked to next Tuesday. How do you level up to make Ryo stronger? More grinding. Yaaaaaaayyyyy! Just what I wanted to do in a video game, work out at a gym. So not only do you have to grind for money to keep your health and stamina meters filled, you have to grind to be able to win fights too. How fun.
Not.
When you aren’t chopping wood, eating, exercising, or fighting, you will find that this game at its heart is fairly similar to its predecessors. You walk around, you explore, you talk to people, you follow clues from one area of the game to the next. This is where I had my most fun with this game. But even this is flawed too.
The backtracking. My god, the backtracking. It’s like they are trolling the player on purpose. Talk to someone near your hotel and they tell you to talk to someone on the opposite end of the map. That person tells you to talk to someone at the docks, which is right by your hotel. That person tells you to talk to someone on the opposite end of the map, right by the other person you had previously talked to. That person sends you back to the other side of the map. It is maddening, and there is no way this wasn’t done on purpose. Maybe I wouldn’t have had such an issue with this if it wasn’t for, AGAIN, that goddamn stamina meter.
Very quickly this game began to feel like an absolute chore to play. I know you have to backtrack and work jobs and earn money in the other Shenmue games, but this game takes it to a whole new extreme. And not a good extreme either.
All this complaining and I haven’t even gotten to the QTEs (Quick Time Events) yet. These are annoying too. Normally I don’t have an issue with these in games because I am pretty quick on the trigger, but they are AWFUL in this game. Even me, the master of QTEs, routinely failed these. They just simply don’t give you enough time to respond. If you read my review of Shenmue II, you’ll remember how I hated the QTEs when you have to walk over the wooden planks late in that game. Every QTE is like that in this game. It’s maddening. Luckily when you fail you start over right from where you left off, and the button prompts don’t change, so you can memorize them. But still. Annoying AF!
Graphics:
Graphics are a mixed bag here. On one hand, the landscapes in this game are freaking beautiful. The colors are eye popping, the scenery looks amazing. I’ve never been to China, and probably never will, but this game gives me a pretty good idea of what it would be like to live in some of its rural areas. The attention paid to detail when it comes to indoor environments is also incredible. Considering the small budget this game had to work with, I can’t help but be impressed by how much work went into making Shenmue III so authentic to the area it is set in
The bad: the character models. Ryo, Shenhua, and some of the main characters look fine. Other characters look like grotesque, freakish creations pulled straight from the set of the 1990 Dick Tracy movie. NPCs in this series have always looked a little freakish, but this game, again, takes this to a whole new level.
All in all, though, I would give this game’s graphics a thumbs-up. The landscapes and its attention to detail are enough to override any other flaws it may have.
Sound:
Voice acting is just as bad as ever. I didn’t harp on it in my previous Shenmue reviews, so I am not going to do that here either. Poor voice acting is a staple of the series, and honestly I am glad the tradition has been upheld.
Music is, for the most part, fine. Aside from the “Shenmue theme”, nothing really stood out to me as far as anything I would put on a video game playlist. Bailu Village’s theme sounds eerily like Pure Imagination from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In fact, the first time I heard it I nearly lost my shit, like REALLY? But it’s different. Kind of.
Meh.
Overall:
It seems like all I have done is bicker and complain this entire review. I should just shut up and be grateful I even have a Shenmue III to play, right? Right???
I mean, kind of. It is somewhat of a miracle this game was even made to begin with. Even though I wasn’t a huge fan of the game, I am still grateful I got to play it. But the fact still remains that I didn’t really like the game. All I can do now is cross my fingers and hope that Shenmue IV is made, and that if it is made, it is better than this game.
In a way I kind of feel bad even giving this game a bad score. But what can I do? I didn’t enjoy playing it. It has too many flaws, it’s too slow, and it feels like an absolute chore to play. Rarely, if ever, while playing this game did I ever have “fun” playing it. The stamina meter, the grinding, the difficult fights, the backtracking, the running out of money…. oh yeah I thought of something else to complain about!
In two separate parts during this game, you need to buy something with a large amount of money in order to proceed. We’re talking 2,000 yuan that you need to have in your inventory on two separate occasions. Chopping wood gets you somewhere from 60 to 70 yuan a pop. That’s a lot of grinding if you’re trying to save up that kind of money. You can fish, but that’s not much more efficient than wood chopping. You can gamble, but you don’t earn money when you gamble. You earn tokens that you can cash in for rare items, which you can then sell for money. This also is not a horribly efficient way to earn money. You can drive a forklift in the second half of the game, but AGAIN this doesn’t give you a whole lot of money. I found myself earning the most by collecting and selling herbs. Some herb collections can net you 350 plus yuan a pop, but you have to be scavenging and keeping your eyes open all game long in order to be able to do this. Again = inefficient.
You get the point. At least I hope you do. Shenmue III is a flawed game full of nearly unforgivable flaws. Slow, boring, grindy, completely unfun to play. It’s only redeeming factor is the fact that it is Shenmue. While watching me play this game, my wife told me that it was the most boring video game she has ever seen me play, and honestly I can’t argue with her.
I truly, desperately wanted to like this game. But I don't. Sorry.
Overall:
D
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