Shenmue 3 sales disappoint in Japan and the UK

[bell wood's jet cola]

Can I take the conversation in a slightly different direction?

I want to preface this all by saying that I'm a backer, and that I'm enjoying S3 a lot right now. But that leads me to the question that we've been asking for 20 years and that I don't think we've ever had a good elevator pitch for:

What is Shenmue?

This, to my mind, is the fundamental problem that is holding Shenmue back.

When my copy came in the mail and I was geeking out over it, my wife asked me "What is Shenmue?" and I failed miserably to give her a cohesive elevator pitch. I fumbled around about the story, about the play mechanics, about its place in history, and she was just perplexed as to why this game was so important to me.

As much as I'm enjoying Shenmue 3, I think there are some legit criticisms to level at Suzuki in terms of his managerial skills. Shenmue 1 and 2 I can kind of write off, way ahead of its time; no playbook on how these kind of games are supposed to go; released onto a failing system; etc. But Shenmue 3 doesn't have those kind of qualifiers. After a 20 year hiatus I don't think Suzuki did a satisfactory job of answering the question: what is shenmue?

It does not feel like Suzuki has leaned anything in the 20 year hiatus that the series took, he's still making some of the same mistakes. Yu is the man with the plan, he has the vision for the story he wants to tell, but putting that vision into motion in a way that is effective seems to be something he is struggling with. No one seems to know how to market the game, how to show the game off, how not to shoot themselves in the foot with their kickstarter decisions, and that's not even touching the game itself. How can we be in 2019 and Suzuki is still holding tight to his original vision of 16 chapters? How do you market a game where one of the core mini-games is throwing a rock into a pail?

Seriously....I'm throwing a rock into a pail to win a digital clock. This passes as enjoyable in Shenmue.

How the fuck do you market this game?

How do you explain this game?

I'm mashing buttons to make sure that my turtle wins the race. This is one of the game's more adrenaline pumping moments so far.

But don't forget, you're on a mission to avenge your father's murder while discovering the mysteries around his life and death.

But before you do that, be sure to go fishing, you're going to need some money so that you can buy new moves.

And buy some capsule toys with the earnings from fishing, you can pawn those off for more money eventually.

But hurry up, because the town is being overrun by thugs. A town that is full of martial artists.

The thugs who work for an antagonist who's motives are still unknown after two whole games.

The game is schizophrenic in what it wants to be, and this is 100% on Suzuki. And while I, and many people here, "get it" and love Shenmue for it, I think it's a very strange creative decision. I keep coming back to the author and editor analogy, Yu is an author of an expansive story, but he needs an editor who can help him focus his creative decisions. How do we blend this slice of life simulator, with a melodramatic soap opera, and the mystical & Kung Fu elements into a game that is open, but not totally open world? It can be done I'm sure, but it doesn't feel like Yu has an editor that helps him do it.

What we're left with is a game and franchise that doesn't know what it is. It isn't gamey-enough to be a blast to play in the traditional sense, doesn't market the epic scale of its world and all the shit you can do, and isn't laser focused on telling a compelling story. In the 20 years he had, Suzuki really needed to focus his efforts better, he couldn't afford to miss on this one. Instead, it feels like he doubled down, made a game for the fans, and hasn't done anything to address his limitations. Somewhere within the framework of Shenmue there is a smash hit of a game, but it feels buried under an unfocused attempt.

All of this sounds like I'm taking a giant shit on Suzuki, and I'm really not trying to. I LOVE Shenmue 3 so far, but it is also a very flawed game. I feel like I'm in some sort of no-mans land with the game. The 16-year old me committed himself to this franchise a long time ago, so I'm along for the ride no matter what; but the 34-year old me has definitely been left shaking his head that 20 years little seems to have been learned. I still can't answer what Shenmue wants to be.

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I pretty much agree with everything you've said. Dude went from making short arcade experiences—masterfully, by the way—to creating one of the most ambitious video game projects ever. It was quite the leap, and it sounds like SEGA effectively let him run the project with no boundaries. I don't think he ever really learned how to manage a big project successfully for reasons I don't think I need to explain, and here we are 18 years later.

Nagoshi's thoughts on his time working on Shenmue seem to sum it all up pretty well:

I was a supervisor on the team at first. As the project progressed, as you know, it had become bigger and bigger, and I couldn't put up with it any more. It was one of the turning points in my career. I talked to Yu Suzuki, as well as talking to my boss in the development division at that time, and said I would like to have my own division. And they made it happen for me. But we really could not see the end of Shenmue, and I was called by our CEO at the time. He said to me, 'Please get this game finished' [laughs]. So I was a producer and director for the final months of the project. I'd reviewed the whole project, looking at what kind of plan they had and the remaining workload. It took me more than a month to understand what was going on.

The CEO asked me how much time would be needed, and I told him six months. Myself, and the programmer and designer I most trusted, called the whole team and told them we had to finish the game in six months. We did it, but it was a tough and bitter project for me [laughs]. Suzuki-san also knew he had to finish the game soon, whatever the final result. He's the kind of person that, if he wants to do more, cannot stop himself, so someone must be there to do it for him. Our CEO knew that I was the only person he would listen to. Hard as it was to be asked to do it, I knew why it had to be me [laughs]. There's only one reason for why the project turned into such a panic. Suzuki had been creating arcade games for so long, and didn't write planning documents. But for console games, you have to have a blueprint, and it was such a big project.

He had a policy that we should not decide how a game should be on paper before we started making it. But we have to have guidelines, otherwise there's a risk that we overrun and fail as a company. Even if it was someone else's game, I learned the importance of that balance once again. I still think it was an epoch-making game at the time. If there had been a line producer or someone who was good at managing things, I believe the outcome would have been different.

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It also sounds like he had a tiny idea of how he wanted Shenmue 3 to work when he had a modest $2 million goal in mind and then probably fell back into his old habits once the money started coming in.With a few extra million, he could start thinking about adding mini games and wooden dummy cafe, and why not add a massive city while we're at it because the fans loved Hong Kong? I wish they'd thought about maybe hiring more experienced writers or animators instead of just focusing on "bigger is better," but I guess we'll see what lessons they've learned if Shenmue IV somehow materializes.



At least Yu still looks happy: