From jeuxvideo.com via Google Translate (+ some edits for clarity)
Preview: Shenmue III: a playable demo that makes you fear the worst - E3 2019
It's been four years since fans counted days waiting for their polygon Messiah. Ever since ithit the mark at E3 2015, stuck between a trailer of The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy VII Remake , Shenmue III has fueled as much controversy as it has hopes - which we will probably and regrettably tone down.
Preview conditions
We were able to discover Shenmue III during a "behind-closed doors" meeting at the Deep Silver booth. The demo of Shenmue III was very short: 15 minutes in all and for all, with a timer and unable to play longer since the game was automatically blocked once the timer ran out. We played with Yu Suzuki, the game director and creator of Shenmue, with whom we could discuss a quarter of an hour after the game session. The demo was running on PC.
Hard not to feel a slight excitement when entering the box where we expect Yu Suzuki and his latest demo of Shenmue III. The man and his creations have marked the history of video games in a sustainable way and even today, many titles demonstrate the influence of Shenmue. From GTA to Assassin's Creed or Yakuza , everyone owes a little something to this forerunner of open-world, as we see it today. Suzuki knows it, as he tells us during the presentation: Shenmue is a heavyweight video game, many renowned developers have already told him how much his work inspired them (starting with those of Rockstar, he told us), and the players' expectations are enormous. Suzuki, however, is aware that in 2019, Shenmue will not be able to revolutionize video games as it did in the past. The director simply wants to " tell the rest of the story started in 1999. " Suzuki does not set the bar too high and it is to his credit. On the other hand, nothing prepared us for that we would see, not even the different Shenmue III trailers, which now seem all the more attractive to us.
A technique from another time
The images and trailers shown in recent years unfortunately do not reflect the sad truth.
It only took us a few seconds to understand the magnitude of the disaster. After a quick oral presentation to present the three objectives of this demo (the exploration of a small Chinese village, the discovery of several mini-games and the combat system), we were able to seize the controller and press Start . "And that's when the tragedy starts " as one would say: the demo begins with a short conversation between Ryo and Shenhua, which sets the scene. Extremely badly dubbed (in English ...), Ryo and Shenhua seem botto lack emotion, in their voices as well as in their animations. Ryo, stiff as a picket, painfully looks around him and the only thing that seems to move on his face are his eyes. Shenhua is doing better but she leavesus quickly: the two friends must find "the man with the scar". The camera moves behind Ryo and the player finally takes control, to discover a setpiece that is quite successful on the artistic level, but completely out of time technically. The whole thing is blurry and flickering; in many ways, the recent remasters of Shenmue I and II are more impressive. This is due to the ridiculous display distance and the resolution of the game, which seems to struggle to reach the bar of 720p. Which raises an eyebrow or two since the last trailers, or even the one posted online for E3, let us hope for something better.
We've talked a lot about it, but Ryo's facial expressions have not really changed since.
If the game is ugly, it's also due to the lack of life of the various characters. The animations, as basic as they go, do not honor the character of Ryo. He who was once so elegant, so charismatic, is only a shadow of himself. Postmortem rigidity, empty and inexpressive gaze, the hero of a whole generation is hard to see. He's not just inexpressive: he's just not alive. In any case, the demo never gave us the impression that this 3D model, relatively poorly animated by the way, was a living creature, a thinking being capable of feeling emotions. This reunion with Ryo was therefore quite nerve-wracking; it was a bit like seeing, 40 years later, a movie star you idolized when you were young. Hesitant speech, tremors, wheelchair ... Enough to damage a legend we once thought immortal. It's more or less what we felt when we discovered Ryo, 18 years after Shenmue II.
A base system still too limited
The minigames, at least, are successful. But that won't be enough ...
Some will argue that the style won't matter as long as the substance is there. Which would be a mistake, since the style here is light years away from what is acceptable. But the real problem is that the short overview we had of the substance isn't really much more reassuring. The few mini-games we tried were quite amusing, but the exploration and dialogue phases are completely ruined by the catastrophic animations of Ryo and a good part of the NPCs, as well as their dubbing. We came out of this presentation hoping that these were just simple place-holders, saved quickly for the needs of the international press. One last thing is the fights, which we could test for a moment and which did not convince us. On one hand because even if the animations in combat are better han the ones we had seen so far, they are still too mechanical to convince anyone in 2019. It's a shame since the combat system has some good ideas: the four ABXY keys are used to throw punches and kicks and some attack sequences can trigger small QTEs, which require to enter as quickly as possible the commands shown on screen to trigger special hits. Unfortunately, the special moves in question really lack panache and we miss a little the Shenmue II fights, which multiplied original QTEs to animate each fight in the manner of a Jackie Chan movie. The system here is less linear, but also less less cinematic, less fun. These gameplay choice swill certainly make the fans react: it's possible that some people appreciate the "Virtua Fighter lite" side of the experience, while others will regret the craziness of previous episodes. We cross our fingers, hoping we only saw once facet of the fighting system, gameplay type among a plethora of others. But all that we saw from Shenmue III so far does not invite optimism.
Our impressions
As it stands, Shenmue III is more like a student project put together with Unreal Engine 4 than a real video game expected to be release at this end of the year. There's still so much to do technically that we doubt Shenmue III can save the day by the time it gets released in November 2019. And we're necessarily very worried for the game: at this stage of the development, we didn't expect Shenmue III to still look like a prototype.
Rating: Alarming
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