Shenmue III First Gameplay Preview

“Can you open drawers and closets like in the old games?” I asked Yu Suzuki, the man behind the Shenmue series.

“Of course” he said. “It’s Shenmue, after all.”

That was the moment I realized that Shenmue III was going to be all I could have hoped for.

“Every time I hold the controller to play the game, it feels like a dream come true,” Shenmue III co-producer Cedric Biscay told me. Biscay was originally a fan of the Shenmue series himself, but as the CEO of Shibuya Productions, he was instrumental in helping Yu Suzuki’s YsNet fund development of the game, long before the crowdfunding campaign had made Suzuki over $7 million.

Of course, Biscay wants to promote his game, so his comments should be taken with a grain of salt. But when I finally got to see the game, I knew exactly what he meant. With the third installment coming 18 years after the last iteration, Shenmue still isn’t for everyone. But for the fans, it indeed looks to be “a dream come true”.

“Every time I hold the controller to play the game, it feels like a dream come true” - Shenmue III co-producer Cedric Biscay

In the years since Shenmue II’s 2001 release, video games have evolved, especially in the open-world genre that Shenmue helped conceive. Yet few other games allow the player to do something as detailed as pull a random comb out of a drawer. And Ryo Hazuki, Shenmue’s protagonist, often even has something to say about these minor objects he investigates, in voiced dialogue too. Modern adventure games like Heavy Rain and Life is Strange or walking simulators such as Gone Home have achieved similar depth in their exploration, but Shenmue does it within a full-fledged open-world environment. Most gamers might prefer to web-swing through a bustling city or shoot wave after wave of soldiers, but if opening a fridge or investigating a tangerine while going after a mysterious man who killed your father sounds more appealing to you, Shenmue III should definitely be on your radar.

The original Shenmue and Shenmue II had hundreds of unique NPCs wandering through their locations, and if Ryo approached them, each one of them reacted with fully voiced dialogue. From a pizza restaurant to the local dentist, Ryo could enter every single shop or facility in those games, with store shelves fully explorable and quirky shop owners who had something unique to say each time you came by. Suzuki wants that same detailed and rich explorable environment in Shenmue III, but how do you do that with only a fraction of the budget that went into these original games?

After sitting down with Suzuki, and watching approximately 20 minutes of gameplay footage, it was clear to me that this had by no means been an easy task. Suzuki seems to have pulled it off anyway, but only because he wasn’t afraid to make sacrifices.

Shenmue III’s environments and game systems don’t seem to be as deep and sophisticated as they were in the original games. The game is still fully voiced and Ryo has many characters to talk to, but he can no longer interact with every single NPC he encounters in Bailu and Niaowu, the two countryside Chinese villages his adventure will start with in Shenmue III. The battle system and part-time jobs don’t feel as fleshed out as before, and most of the game’s music is reused from the original games, be it with many pieces that were never used in the originals. Graphically, the game is obviously not an AAA title either.

But all this shows how Suzuki has taken a realistic approach towards the development of Shenmue III, carefully analyzing what his team is capable of. It seems to have resulted in what does not feel like a dumbed-down version of Shenmue, but a game that focuses on its true essence.

Freedom and everyday life

Suzuki tells me that he sees player freedom and everyday life as the two most important features of Shenmue, and everything he showed and explained to me about the game could be connected back to those two main themes.

“I haven’t done proper research, so maybe I shouldn’t say this, but Shenmue III might just have more voiced dialogue than any other game to date,” he said. “When we brought the script to the translation agency, they were astonished by its volume.”

"Shenmue III might just have more voiced dialogue than any other game to date” - Yu Suzuki

Anyone who has played the original games knows the incredible amount of dialogue they contained, but Suzuki believes there’s even more of it this time. That makes the fact that Ryo will no longer be able to talk to every character feel like a positive thing rather than something to worry about. By giving up on the ability to interact with characters who won’t do much more than show you the way to your next destination anyhow, Shenmue III should be able to add additional depth to the characters who really matter.

“The game’s world has increased a lot in size,” Suzuki told me. “Bailu and Niaowu are now approximately the same size as Shenmue II’s Hong Kong. We originally planned to have about 50 inhabitants for these towns, but now Shenmue III has a total of about four or five hundred NPCs.”

Shenmue III is a fully explorable environment, from shops to drawers to characters who speak to you in fully voiced dialogue. With these essential features intact, the third installment will undoubtedly feel like a continuation of the Shenmue experience.

The ability to zoom in on any object and see the world through Ryo’s eyes makes exploration a lot more engaging. Just like in the originals, the player can switch to a first-person viewpoint at any time, and in Shenmue III you can also walk around while holding the zoom button. By clicking the left analog stick, you can also adjust the camera distance from Ryo, in a similar vein to Red Dead Redemption 2’s camera options. For the first time in the series, the camera can also be moved 360 degrees with the right analog stick, so you won’t just be looking at Ryo’s back.

Realistic flow of time and weather effects are two other aspects iconic to Shenmue that are back. One in-game day passes in approximately one hour, and Ryo needs to sleep during the night. When he wakes up, the in-game calendar changes to the next day. This may all sound obvious, but even though having time pass in open-world games is pretty much commonplace nowadays, few games implement calendars and realistic sleeping routines for their characters.

Shenmue was also one of the first games to implement real-time weather effects. In Shenmue III, this is implemented and modernized. As co-producer Cedric Biscay mentions, aesthetic features like this are easy to enhance thanks to modern development tools.

“If it has rained in the morning, there’s a chance you can still see puddles in the evening,” Suzuki explained. “Footsteps become easier to spot on mountain paths as well.”

A completely new feature to the series is the ability to change Ryo’s wardrobe. By going into the menu, the player is free to choose the shoes, jeans and upper wear for Ryo at any time. Clothes can be bought at shops, and thus the player will gain more options to coordinate Ryo as they progress.

Shenhua and Ren, two other main characters who join Ryo on his adventure, won’t have these same options, but Suzuki said he is looking into the possibility of adding additional costumes for them post-launch as DLC.

Shenhua, the heroine of the Shenmue series, no longer looks like the tomboy country girl she was in Shenmue II, but this change of character design was intentional.

“Creating a more feminine design made it easier for us to create an appealing character,” said Suzuki.

But while her looks might have changed, Shenhua’s personality and the way she interacts with Ryo have remained true to Suzuki’s original vision.

As you can see in the latest trailer, released at the Monaco Anime Game International Conferences, Shenmue III definitely does not have the graphics of a modern AAA title. Given the fact that it started as a Kickstarter project, this is no big surprise. But for older gamers who remember Shenmue as the most expensive and best looking game of its time, this can be easy to forget.

Still, Shenmue III is by no means an ugly looking game. The characters and their animations might not live up to modern standards, but the game features beautiful environments of rural China. It should also be noted that many characters we saw in the trailer are probably not main characters. Even in today’s biggest blockbuster games, there is a difference in detail between main characters and random NPCs. What makes Shenmue a special case is that pretty much any character has enough personality and importance to the story to be included in a trailer. They might not be the best looking characters, but I hope to fall in love with their unique personalities like I did with the old ex-military martial artist Yamagishi-san and quirky harbor laborer Delin in the previous games.

Main characters like Ryo, Shenhua and villain Lan Di look a lot better than other characters. From Shenhua’s skin to the texture of Ryo’s leather jacket, the detail in these character models shows significant improvement. In older trailers and screenshots, many fans complained that the main character did not look like the Ryo they knew, and while that still can be said to some degree about the new trailer, Ryo looked better in the gameplay footage I saw.