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Old 11-24-2019, 02:56 PM   #1
Lindz
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Shenmue 3 thread of it exists! And sucks!

Okies I guess most everyone an their mom knew what the game'd be like prior to release, but I sure as heck didn't! I backed the game some years ago then went on an information blackout. Like I heard about it getting a crappy publisher, selling out on pc, and have day1 dlc/season pass. But about the game itself be it story, gameplay, music, I knew nothin' which left me totally unprepared last monday to pop in my copy and find out I'm playing generic modern videogame >.<

wtf is stamina doing in Shenmue? Ontop of that whys stamina also hp? Wait, whys hp in Shenmue? Whats going on here?? In the previous games Ryo could run all around town and inside buildings non-stop fullspeed all he wanted but now suddenly can't because??? Now you're punished for running. Like your stamina/hp is constantly going down no matter what you're doing but just moving around at a decent pace is punishing. And when its drained just about all the way...

...ya gotta here Ryo whine about being hungry. Or make him eat like 5+ garlics. Cause thats fun and engaging videogame gameplay right? Also a totally healthy diet is like 20 whole garlics a day right? btw as ya might expect, foods not free. You start with $200 (wheres my $20k from Shenmue 2??) and these things are like $9/$10 a pop. So ya take up a job! Which imo is worse less fun than crate carrying and super less fun than forklifts. The first alternative is the great new feature of...

...gathering herms from pre-set harvesting spots. Thats right, can't escape havesting in this day & age! Mercifully theres no crafting attached to it but I wouldn't be surprised if they had plans for that at some point. But wandering around either painfully slowly or by running still eats up your stamina/hp so really you end up in a work to eat and eat to work loop! Or ya get money the Shenmue 2 way of savescamming the heck outta gambling. Though even thats compromised in this game...

...instead of gambling money you instead spend money on tokens which you then use to gamble away. And instead of getting money back you get tokens. Which you then exchange at a place that isn't within the direct vicinity of the gambling spot for prizes. That ya then sell to a shop thats mercifully nearby the prize hut. For some amount of money. In two hours of doing this in Shenmue 3 I walked away with maybe $6000 whereas in Shenmue 2 I'd acquired over $20000 in about 1 hour. I dun see $6k lasting me the whole game cause ya need to keep Ryo healed up...

...since you no long start fights at full health unless ya manually fill it up yourself by eating beforehand. Ya also don't get your health restored after fights anymore neither! Doesn't regenerate during a fight either. Instead you can now chug down literal health potions mid-fight that'll restore half your health. But ya don't start with any of those and they cost something like $200+ soooo, ow my pocketbook! You can extend your max stamina/hp but that just means ya gotta eat more to fill back up an also...

...ya gotta level grind! Yes! RPG elements are here! Thought ya could escape those? As if! Shenmue 3's idea of grinding is attaching it to super bleh mini-games and super bleh sparring! The mini-games increase your stamina/hp while the sparring increases your attack stat. However as far as I can tell you can only increase attack by mastering moves. You start with 3 and can buy 2 more from a shop. Getting more (at this very early point in the game) requires you to trade in sets of herbs or capsule toys so in order to get stronger I guess ya gotta grind those things? And ya better get stronger cause...

...I couldn't win the first actual fights of the game at Kung Fu Level 1. I squeaked by the first pair of mooks with my button mashing prowess but the next one was a straight up roadblock. Mind you, I'm playing on Easy difficulty. Shenmue 1/2 didn't have: leveling up, health potions, any difficulty settings, and their battle system was far more "complex" and yet here I lose all because I didn't level grind...

Spoiler: show
btw the fight I kept losing? story dictates ya lose it anyway. get the guy down to like 2 health and then your cutscened into a loss! brilliant!


...so I've spent about 7 1/2 hours on the game so far, just about all of it being 0 fun. Set the game back on the shelf for 3 days before picking it back up yesterday for more grind. Most of the playtimes been grinding either money or levels. How very fun and Shenmue-like right?? Thought I'd be continuing a 17 year old story but ehh whatevs gambling an punching a wooden poles what we've really been waiting for! What I didn't wait for was a 14gb day 1 patch, so I didn't an still have not downloaded it cause I don't wanna cripple my internet for a week (but hey the day 1 on disc dlcs good to go!)!

Aside from the gameplay theres the presentation. I think the game looks good an I like the dub. The rest of the way the game presents itself is a mess. The game icon on my PS4 is a black square with the games title in the center which looks extremely bad sitting next to Shenmue 1 & 2's squares which were those games' beautiful (japanese) boxarts. In the game itself the menus and hud are straight up horrendous looking, also who ever heard of the menu open button being R1, like whaaaat?? There are numerous subtitle issues in which whats being spoken is not exactly what the subtitles say. This game (as 1/2 also did) still lacks seperate 3rd/1st person camera settings, and still lacks a "disable mini-map rotation" toggle. Which leaves the now much larger map all the more confusing an useless to me. Its got QOL stuff like being able to load your game from within the menu as opposed to having to reset. There are also 4 difficulty settings, which can be changed during the game at any time, though whether they actually do anything is beyond me since Easy has not at all lived up to its namesake.

Maybe now that the early game grindings over I can progress the game abit an resume doing more usual Shenmue-like stuff? One can only hope!
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Old 11-24-2019, 07:07 PM   #2
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Kickstarter is sadly a horrible platform for big games. Between this, Mighty No. 9, and Star Citizen, it really seems like anyone playing off of nostalgia and hype are lightly to crash and burn.

Only Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has kind of stayed true to it's word. While there are other successful games, most have been small indie titles, not huge ones.

Hopefully the game picks up. I don't have a horse in this race, but I still feel bad for the fans who hoped this would be the glorious return of their favorite title only to get hot garbage.
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Old 11-25-2019, 05:44 AM   #3
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So the original game cost $50M to make, and this one only had $2M in kickstarter seed money...why would it be anything approaching its predecessors in quality?
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Old 11-25-2019, 04:19 PM   #4
Lindz
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki View Post
Kickstarter is sadly a horrible platform for big games. Between this, Mighty No. 9, and Star Citizen, it really seems like anyone playing off of nostalgia and hype are lightly to crash and burn.

Only Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has kind of stayed true to it's word. While there are other successful games, most have been small indie titles, not huge ones.

Hopefully the game picks up. I don't have a horse in this race, but I still feel bad for the fans who hoped this would be the glorious return of their favorite title only to get hot garbage.
I didn't have or want hype like as I mentioned I went into this blind an that may be harming my experience some. Though that doesn't mean the stuff I find bad isn't bad. People who're used to modern games full of bloat/padded rpg elements an such may think nothing of this games spin on those. Those who followed the games development saw this stuff coming an had time to steel themselves for it. But neither of those are me! I predominatly play jrpgs and I do in fact enjoy grinding, however I enjoy it optionally. Very few jrpgs especially in recent years have notable grind walls just to get through the story.

In the 13 days before my copy of 3 arrived I'd spent 11 of those days replaying 1 & 2 an I did spend a good amount of time in both games just messing around with jobs, mini-games, capsule collecting cause they were fun an entirely optional. Had they been required I'd prolly have been sour on the series from the start and not have backed 3! An ya know what I still enjoyed the heck outta 'em!

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So the original game cost $50M to make, and this one only had $2M in kickstarter seed money...why would it be anything approaching its predecessors in quality?
They raised $7,179,510 from Kickstarter/Slacker Backer stuff. Got fiancing from Shibuya Productions who was their partner from the start. Got an untold amount of money from their eventual publisher Deep Silver. And earlier in the year sold out to Epic Games for another undisclosed amount of money (which more than likely predominatly went to the publisher but eh). I doubt the total ballooned to $50 million (which was split between Saturn development of the game and then totally reinventing it for Dreamcast) but it didn't need to be to make a decent game. Despite my rant Shenmue 3 is proof of that!

I take issue with the modern game design elements they for some reason thought would go over well and fit in with Shenmue coming off the first two games. Strip away the obligatory grinding, anti-run stamina junk, and unless story related go back to making work/making money optional! The combat will still be crud but the combat in Shenmue 1/2 sucked anyway sooo really all they need ta do their in my book is make the Easy mode actually easy! Without dumb stuff being mandatory what you're left with is basically Shenmue. Wandering around talking to peeps in order to find another person to talk to and/or beat up. While, -entirely at your own leisure and disgression- collecting capsule toys, gambling, playing at the arcade, taking on optional fights, or progressing the game.

Also LOL at any reviews saying this ones game design is stuck in the past just huge amounts of LOL at that. If only that were true, this game would be good!
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Old 11-25-2019, 06:10 PM   #5
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Having never played Shenmue, and only briefly looked over Talon's topic and Wikipedia, I'm having trouble understanding what the original game was like, what changed and why you don't like those changes. Everything you've described sounds like elements of a mobile gacha game - stamina, money, and grinding? What's that stuff doing in an open-world console game?
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Old 11-25-2019, 07:56 PM   #6
Lindz
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Oh an despite all the time I've put into the game I've not yet encountered a QTE yet. Ya know those things that're kinda what Shenmue popularized (until they became unpopular).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Doppleganger View Post
Having never played Shenmue, and only briefly looked over Talon's topic and Wikipedia, I'm having trouble understanding what the original game was like, what changed and why you don't like those changes. Everything you've described sounds like elements of a mobile gacha game - stamina, money, and grinding? What's that stuff doing in an open-world console game?
Its not just gacha game mechanics but thats a good comparison! Lots modern games (that I don't play) don't let you run at full speed forever, theres usually a stamina meter that at least refills on its on, usually after a short bit (still stupid, still sucks) which at least is better than Shenmue 3 making you spend money to eat to refill it. They're also loaded with rpg elements/leveling and having all kinds of junk to pick up off the ground (usually for crafting). Shenmue 1/2 didn't have that stuff an I dunno why they've showed up here.

In those games ya could spend time improving the power of your individual moves. There were no visible stats nor levels. It was worthless cause I could mash my way through those games cause the combat was bad but that was a grind which existed but was entirely opt-in. Same for working. In Shenmue 1 getting a job was part of the plot (and kind of a point of no return) which helped push it forward. Was the only way to get money outside of your 500 yen a day allowance and working it got you lots! The tradeoff was being stuck at the harbor until like 8 p.m. each of the five days the job lasts so you had lotsa money but little time to spend it. In 3 working isn't pushing the plot forward directly, its just enabling you to buy food so you can train harder to level up to get back basically the first fight of the game.

I should mention that 1/2 didn't have alot of battles. They're waaay more "adventure" than "action". In my last playthrough of 1, I got into 11 fights the whole game, I think with 1 of them being optional? Across its 16 hour playtime. In 2 there were 18 mandatory fights (with 11 optional cause I suck at QTEs) across 23 hours. Which makes it super bizarre that they'd focus a buncha different systems around combat. Especially cause 3 isn't looking to be fight heavy itself.
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