Shenmue III (PlayStation 4) review "I have wasted my life."

I’m quite surprised that the outright embarrassing failure of Shenmue 3 isn’t widely derided. After digging around the internet for alternative opinions to counter my own prejudices, I can’t help but feel people are just being too nice about this game just for the sake of it.

When someone makes an error in life, it’s common for friends and family to attempt some form of sympathetic damage control. I’m sure we’ve all made stupid mistakes and screw ups and been told not to worry about them. Life goes on and you ride it out. However, no emotional damage control could be enough to salvage anything from this mess. Shenmue 3 hasn’t only tarnished the reputation of the entire series, it’s tarnished the sanity of its creator too!

Shenmue is a saga. A story of friendship, revenge and martial arts. Set in mid-80’s Japan, a young man named Ryo returns home from school to find his home ransacked by thugs. The leader of the group is man called Lan Di, a Chinese martial arts master. He confronts Ryo’s father, murders him and takes a mysterious antique mirror from Ryo’s home. Distraught over the death of his father, Ryo sets out on a quest for revenge and to find answers into why his father was murdered. Over the two games, Ryo travels alone into Hong Kong in pursuit of his father’s murderer and eventually tracks him down.

The original Shenmue titles on the Sega Dreamcast were radical forays into a different style of gameplay. A hybrid of adventure, role-playing and life/social simulation. They relied on an internal game clock that allowed you to explore and interact with an open world. They required focus on a daily routine and set schedule to adhere to, mixing together mundane everyday tasks with a whimsy and subtle magical realism. Combining this with the liberating experience of being lost in a new, exciting and unfamiliar environment, it walked so others could fly.

Unfortunately, that was over 20 years ago. Shenmue 3’s biggest flaw, according to mainstream critics, was that that it did not nothing to progress the series at all. This is true but it’s not Shenmue 3’s core error. Its error is that instead of playing like something that’s 20 years old, it feels more like a gross parody of it.
Everything that made the original title great has been hollowed out and replaced by something repulsive. It’s magical realism without the magic or the realism. The people you interact with in this strange world don’t even represent real humans, but instead repulsive hybrids of cartoonish parodies of what people might look to like if described by someone with a warped view of reality. They don’t even engage in real conversation with you. The first interaction with an NPC is this:

Ryo: ”I’m looking for someone called Yuan.”

NPC: ”No, I haven’t.

I waited 18 years and this was the first conversation I had. Great!
Don’t worry. Things get worse.

Shenmue 3 sees the story expand into two different hub worlds. One is a rural town and the other is a city. Just like in real life, if you arrived into a strange place with no money, you’d need to earn it pretty quick. You can do this by participating in mundane mini-games like chopping wood or betting in a casino. These are not atypical of the Shenmue world but since the whimsical and wonderful feel just isn’t here, the mundane grinding nature of these tasks are raw.
Even gambling is padded out to the point that it’s a chore.
Gambling itself is the worst culprit. You can’t gamble with cash so the game forces you to enter a redemption-like economy. You play games, win tokens, use the tokens to exchange for prizes in the arcade and THEN you can sell the prizes in a pawn shop. A cheap attempt in artificial length. You can even pay a fortune teller to predict what to gamble on to get some big gains. Unfortunately, these people are located far away from the arcade and are not even reliable in their predictions.

Other activities you can do is selling herbs you find lying around, catch chickens and ducks for a farmer and hire a fishing line. These tasks are more enjoyable and provide better rewards financially. However, they still offer a minimal return for the effort you put in. This can be even more frustrating because there are parts of the game where you MUST raise a large amount of cash to purchase a significant item to progress the story.

Another fatal flaw in Shenmue 3 is in the introduction of a worthless and gameplay inflating stamina mechanic. As the day progresses, your health will deteriorate and will need to be replenished by buying food from local vendors. This would make sense if you were recovering from a combat scenario, but your health declines automatically. The worst thing is that a lot of the items of food do very little to fill your life bar with the exception of garlic cloves.
So, you can buy a ton of relatively inexpensive garlic cloves to constantly top up your health which almost defeats the purpose of having it. Just a cheap attempt to further artificially inflate what isn’t there.

Unfortunately, these are only minor gripes in comparison to these next two major failures. Shenmue 3 is a story heavy martial arts game. However, this game contains bare bones when it comes to martial arts and story. The fighting mechanics in Shenmue 3 are nothing like any fighting game I’ve played. The original SEGA games had the same system as Virtua Fighter but since the developers were unable to use that system due to copyright issues, they decided that QTEs would be a better option instead. When in a combat scenario, once you’ve inputted a command you have to rapidly enter a quick time event combination to execute it. However, the commands are so rapid and leave no room for error, it’s almost impossible to pull off. Apparently, the reason for this was to break down the fighting mechanics so that anyone could succeed in winning, encouraging button bashing over skill.
The final strike that condemns the entire series backing into obscurity is its handing of the story. In a trailer released 18 months prior to the games release. A brief scene of Ryo and Lan Di standing face to face was teased heavily to generate hype. Imagine just for one second, waiting over 18 years for this to happen and finally seeing that scene! Well, it happens but nothing particularly interesting comes of it. There are some new characters added to enhance the experience but none of them are given the same level of character development that Shenmue 2 had. In the previous game, Ryo made deep friendships that pushed the quest forward with meaning. It felt there was something genuine there. However, with the new characters added here, they receive no characterisation , no personality and they are barely mentioned by name. Again, a hollowed out farce of what we had before.

What’s worse is that Shenmue 3 isn’t and never was meant to be the final game in the story. This means after 18 years of waiting and a mediocre final product, we are left with ANOTHER CLIFFHANGER ENDING This would be fine if wasn’t for two things. Firstly, the amount of story and lore explored in this game is incredibly minimal and tedious. The game even retells you information that was revealed in previous games and presents it as new. Any new details to expand the world and lore Shenmue is done subtly and meaninglessly. It makes references to minor events but adds nothing major to add. If anything, it just adds more unanswered questions after a 18 year wait.

For a martial arts story based game, Shenmue 3 is unable to provide us with anything that provides us basic fulfilment in any three of those categories. The marital arts are rough, the game is a slog and the story adds nothing we knew already. This list of failures brings me to my opening point. What happens now? Yu Suzuki had his one shot, missed it and now where do we go? Would the fanbase commit to another huge kickstarter? Would any sane developer want to commit to another project in this series knowing that they could be at financial loss? Would anyone trust Yu Suzuki to make another title of dubious quality? It’s looking likely that we will never know the answer now.

Community review by Vorty (April 25, 2023) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.