Ping-ponging around town like this gets old quick. The campaign is mostly comprised of you walking around endlessly, asking people for leads and gathering items for a litany of unremarkable reasons. There are plenty of things that drive me nuts about Shenmue III, but there are also a lot of little things that make me smile.Īlas, while picking peonies is fine and dandy for awhile, the main story always beckons, and this is where the gameplay really suffers. I feel inclined to play it in the same way I’m inclined to play mobile games when it’s a low-stress, soothing gaming experience I’m after. It’s an epic revenge saga that gives Ryo lots of reasons to kick ass, and yet most of the experience is defined by mundane things like finding linens in drawers, fishing, walking through a sunflower grove, asking people for directions, and buying mooncakes and steamed buns from street vendors. Shenmue occupies an interesting space in gaming sphere. Read More: 25 Best Games Not Available in the U.S. Whatever your mood, the game’s got an activity that’ll suit your needs, even if all you want to do is tap one button over and over again for an hour. It’s an almost zen-like feeling to just decide that, instead of tracking down the thugs that beat you up the other day, you’d rather go help a local boy find a soccer ball so that he can practice to be a footballer one day. The wonderful thing about the gameplay loops is the sense of leisure that washes over you when you realize that the game can be played at any pace you like. I understand that this isn’t a AAA title made by a studio with deep pockets, but the environmental design is so good that I wish the rest of the presentation reached the same heights. The facial animations are slightly less crude, and the combat animations look fine, but it’s hard not to cringe at how awkwardly the characters move about. For starters, Ryo walks like an action figure with less points of articulation than an off-brand G.I. Frankly, the animations are stiff at best, and disconcertingly broken at worst. The character models are another story entirely. Read More: 20 Most Disappointing Games Ever Made This isn’t the most technically impressive game you’ll see, but the tech meets the needs of the art design, at least when it comes to the environments. Later in the game, the environments really open up in scale, with large city streets that serve as a nice contrast to the intimate opening section. The quaint little houses and markets of Bailu are adorable, and the grassy hills they’re nestled into are so pretty it’s almost heart-warming (don’t get me started on the flowers-oh god, the flowers…). I love how detailed and well designed the game’s three main areas are, and moreover, I couldn’t get enough of the mood they evoked. And a lot of what makes me feel this way is the fact that most narrative-based games these days are just operating at a higher level than Shenmue III in this respect.īut just as often as the game’s dialogue threw me out of the experience, the game’s environments pulled me back in. I genuinely believe that if the dialogue and acting were done at a higher level, the game would benefit from it. There’s an argument to be made that the odd writing and acting is endearing in a B-movie sort of way, but I just can’t buy this as an excuse.
No matter how good the broad strokes of the overarching narrative are (and they are decent), listening to consistently bad dialogue undermines the story, period. The dialogue is a serious issue, particularly because it’s in a narrative-driven game with tons and tons of unskippable dialogue scenes throughout. There’s a moment when Ryo is meant to innocently flirt with an elderly lady by saying “Excuse me, gorgeous.” But the actor delivers the line as if he has no clue of the context of the scene or the way real people speak.
The actors’ performances are poor across the board as well. It is unignorably stilted and incoherent almost all the time, with characters awkwardly asking questions twice, at times completely ignoring what they’re saying to one another, and almost always sounding unnatural and robotic. The dialogue, by far, is the game’s greatest drawback. Unfortunately, the old formula shows its age in several ways, which distracts from the overall experience pretty persistently. Read More: The Games You Need to Play in 2020
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