On the other hand, this is also exactly what Suzuki wanted because, again, his game is theatrical and the staged, props-minimal combat of Shenmue 3 fits with that theme.Įvery corner of the world in Shenmue 3 is gorgeous. It’s just not the engaging combat system we expect in a world that now has the hyper-refined, counter-heavy and visceral likes of Assassin’s Creed, or the playful creativity with violence of the Yakuza series. There’s a rich combo system in there and the heritage of Shenmue, originally being an attempt to turn Virtua Fighter into an adventure game, remains. You’ll go from being beaten to a pulp by an opponent to spending an (in-game) day training to level up, and then wading through the fight without needing to think. The combat system – the main time that you’ll be asked to play Shenmue, is laboured, and quite arbitrary in difficulty. Nothing about Shenmue 3 really plays that well, either. Shenmue’s reflective and emotive narrative can’t afford to let you lose your train of thought. It’s too busy representing the energy and wealth of activities available when living life in a big city. The Yakuza series doesn’t rely on rhythm. Those side distractions are a very temporary distractions indeed, but again that works to the game’s theatrical strength in ensuring that the narrative pushes along at the right rhythm. Where Yakuza took great joy in piling on the side stories and minigames, in Shenmue you get a couple of simplified gambling games, a couple of minigames to build up protagonist Ryo’s fighting level and earn some money, and a couple of QTE-like games that you find in “arcades” that are, you have to remember, set in regional China in the ’80s. There’s the need to be at certain locations at certain times, and a relative dearth of things to do outside of following the narrative breadcrumbs. The vintage Shenmue experience is preserved in all its entirety. Indeed, aside from the established Shenmue fans, it’s difficult to picture much of an audience for Shenmue 3, which renders the “catch-up” video option in the main menu for people who hadn’t played the first two rather moot. Anyone coming in expecting something akin to a Yakuza title (which is perhaps not unreasonable, given that the heritage of Shenmue led to Yakuza’s creation) will quickly find that Shenmue 3 is an open rejection of Yakuza’s steps forward for the “genre”, and that may well be off-putting. The deliberate pacing slows the action right down, and that is part of a ploy by Suzuki and his team to encourage you to settle into the world, but will come across as unsettling for people used to more kinetic energy in video games. In challenging the normal way that game narratives are told, Shenmue 3 immediately establishes itself as an outlier that a lot of players will struggle to get along with. Suzuki’s script is filled with repetition, conversations are the dominant way through which the narrative is pushed forward, and even the fight scenes take place in staged arenas, just as though you were watching Hamlet and Laertes have at one another. Furthermore the narrative rhythms work just like you’d expect from theatre. Though it’s a large game, it’s restrictive in scope, as though Suzuki and his team wanted to build a virtual stage for the story to play out. Shenmue 3 does aspire to be different, however. Developers aren’t restricted by a metaphoric “stage”, and have a full range of movement, props, and “camera angles and cuts” to work with. Most games aspire to be cinematic in quality, and that makes sense since games share many of the same qualities as film does. In theatre, everything from the construction of the setting to characterisation needs to be delivered through the spoken word, and that in turn means that plays are written far differently to how films are written. There needs to be a crispness to the way that lines are delivered because in comparison to cinema, theatre relies on the spoken word to a much greater extent. It’s almost stilted, without being stilted. Where cinema aims for a naturalistic flow, theatre has a rhythm that’s more deliberate. There’s a different way that stories are written, and performances need to be approached differently. The thing that immediately struck me about Shenmue 3 is just how theatrical it is. Related reading: Shenmue 1 & 2 are available on PlayStation 4 as well.
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