The gamiest element I’ve found is something I didn’t discover until I’d already been running around the second environment for a good 15 hours. And since Shenmue started life as the Virtua Fighter RPG, that’s not quite good enough. That said, while the new skill move editor is great, allowing you to map five mastered moves to R2, toggled with L1/R1, the fighting itself still feels lightweight compared to Virtua Fighter. For many gamers that just isn’t enough, but then the venn diagram of that kind of gamer and people who master a real martial art probably doesn’t have much crossover. Even so, they do the job - and in terms of martial arts training, you could argue it teaches discipline and patience. Aside from that, the mini-games are painfully basic and mostly involve tapping X. The rest of your time is spent doing some basic, rather laboured detective work, trying to find out who can help with the current problem, usually opening up a new area of the map to explore. It was vital that Ryo’s voice actor, Corey Marshall, returned to make the game feel authentic, and he’s put in a stellar performance here. The sheer volume of recorded dialogue is frankly unbelievable, and the quality of the voice acting is the best it’s been in the series. Every shop has a shopkeeper with a distinct character, and every character will speak with a decent voice in reply to whatever question Ryo is asking at the time. Every single shop sells everyday items you can use, collect in sets or trade on. Not least because capsule toys aren’t the only thing you can buy. It’s never been so cohesive and it’s brilliantly done. So basically all the mundane, apparently extraneous stuff is all channelled back into Ryo’s journey towards Kung Fu mastery. Tokens win prizes, prizes can be sold for money, money buys you moves. You earn money by chopping wood, catching ducks or fishing, but the gambling system uses a separate currency: tokens. Levelling up your Kung Fu works better when your vitality is full, so you need to buy food. These teach you martial arts moves, which must be practiced and mastered at a dojo. Capsule toys come in sets, and sets can be sold at pawn shops or traded for skill books. But where the old Shenmue’s capsule toys meant nothing and money were hardly used, now everything has a purpose and is interlinked. You can fish, collect capsule toys, play in arcades - though sadly there are no Sega classics to play this time, which is a real shame - and gamble tokens on several basic minigames. Your daily life involves saying good morning to Shenhua, the girl from the end of Shenmue 2 who is your companion for this adventure, then heading out into a world that mostly couldn’t care less if you were in it or not. Mostly, however, the gameplay is just very mundane. Maybe it’s because it still feels like a Dreamcast game, even emulating some haze filters typical of first-party Sega titles back in the day, making you feel impressed that Shenmue could look this good. Somehow Shenmue still impresses even though it’s not really up to the highest modern standards. Given that the game holds up to such scrutiny, the few technical hiccups are entirely forgivable. You can run across the city in one go and then examine individual fruit skewers on a market stall, all without a loading screen. Even so, there are many moments of obvious beauty, with gorgeous lighting and phenomenal detail, and all despite the impressive scale. Textures load in after a second or two, water reflections actually ‘reflect’ any 3D object above it on the screen space, shadows and details visibly pop in in the distance, and materials look just a little more ‘matte’ compared to real life. Now, let’s get this out of the way early on: despite running decently well, Shenmue 3 displays all the idiosyncrasies of the now rather aged Unreal Engine 4.
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