Some people here hate this idea but I think Ryo reasons with Lan Di about how his father may have died, whether it was the Chi You men or if the mirrors are cursed, and they do a time skip in the ending and the player can beat him in a spar.
Love the towns in it and atmoshere, even if wasn't the ideal Shenmue 3. I'm fond of it.
I just passed the 2000 yuan 50 years old wine. What's the next money gate?
Very late in the game a
I think the best way to get people hyped would be conclusion, the nostalgia of returning to Yokosuka 'the scouring of the shire' in the 2nd half and the old battle system if they can manage it.
I fear Shenmue will always be cursed between the ambition that video games can allow, and the business justifications behind their creation.
I would agree that it can be time to cut the fat on certain things and that linear is the way to go. I love all the extras and immersion but it's okay if those things are absent if the actual story is there. And for all the things that add immersion, eating individual food ingredients every few minutes to build up stamina is an immersion breaker when I'm eating 5 pieces of garlic or something.
I get what you say. But I think a lot of people would complain if we didn't get a "true Shenmue experience" in the first place.
It when you compare it to Yakuza where you just walk up to question marks for sidequests, loads of silent NPCs and enemies are everywhere. It never feels like a place to me, even though those games are good for different reasons. I think you still need pointless details to make it Shenmue even if you scale the world down or bring back some old locations.
Exactly. He was on top of the world when he envisioned Shenmue as a 6-game epic. Circumstances have seriously changed. I sincerely doubt the Shenmue 3 we played is the Shenmue 3 he'd envisioned in 1999, so it's not like he isn't already compromising. In my opinion, he did not prove Shenmue requires multiple games to satisfy our curiosity. Shenmue 3 suffers from a severe dearth of storytelling & action. Time to bring the story home.
I mean Suzuki can bring all Shenmue 2/3 gang to Yokosuka in a single final chapter if he want to and show how Ryo's ass is kicked by Lan Di while Fuku-San and Ine-San are watching but would that make any sense?
Why are we hung up on Yokosuka? There's nothing saying that we have to go back at all. There's nothing saying that the game MUST end with Ryo winning a fist fight. Personally, I don't care if we ever see Japan, Nazomi, Fuku, Ine-San ever again. Yu does not need to be a slave to nostalgia, he needs to be a slave to telling a good story and doing it efficiently. Maybe Ryo was originally intended to go back to Japan, but maybe that's too much to fit into the game, but maybe it also makes sense to change the story that Ryo is actually happiest in China and finds a life there that he never had back in Japan. Maybe we never revisit any of the characters from S1 and S2 even though that was the original intent. People come and go from your life all the time, we don't get to say goodbye to all of them. Just because the game got its start as a Virtua Fighter RPG doesn't mean that Ryo's character needs to stay on that path mindlessly. Perhaps it makes more sense to take the story in a different direction.
I just used it an example that was used here. Final act could be anywhere in the world.
I think that might have been me suggested Baisha Village or another town as the first half/sorting out
Disagree. They're
What are your expectations for how the story ends? Are you expecting a full reunion in Japan?
They can say Shenhua is a secret granchild of an old emperor and on her mum's family tree were some kind of spirtualistsShenhua might be the daughter of a phoenix, her mum and her grandfather, a dragon and the mirrors were built for her family, but she reject the prophecies and destiny. The theme I guess would be about letting go. Ryo/Lan Di lets go of their revenge for their fathers' murdersthe emperor visited Bailu VillageShenhua lets go her family's destiny for her because the old empire is gone. Ren lets go of treasure. Sun can't let go of power and is destroyed by the mirrors and other chi you officers (who don't have to be important). Xiuying may be forced to kill her brother if he's too far gone and save her friends "to act without hesitation, to do what is right" and let go of the idea that he's the brother she grew up with.If Lan Di was taken as a child by the Chi You and they killed his dad, he may change his ways
The Chi You men could be explained by a few lines, as descendants of the exiles of the old empire, because they were a cult of death which is what the Chi You god may be and you connect it to the theme of letting go and they can't let go of revenge for the banishment of their fathers.
You can explain plenty of this by elders, scriptures or Chi You explaining it since Ryo is headed to an important placeI think you can answer multiple questions at once and connect it up in one game and with one cohesive theme so it's not as complicated as it may seem. I think you would probably need at least two towns and maybe two strongholds for where some of the mirrors go.near the cliff temple
I think you can explain lore of the Chi You's origins in a few lines, a few conversations and explaining the family histories, just as long as the emotional pay offs makes sense. Then it wouldn't feel rushed. You have something like the original SW films that often told the lore in simple ways but it told you use just what you needed to know. For the most part it worked.
youve nailed my issue. It feels like they didn't really prioritize anything and just threw a bunch of random stuff at the wall. I feel like Shenmue 3 lacks an identity and sense of purpose compared to the first two games.
None of this is impossible to wrap up in one 20-30 hour game.
Yep. If you want to finish the series, accept compromise. We've already lost throws, which I think was a bad compromise. I'm sure we can limit the stores we can walk into, etc. if we truly want to get this series to its final conclusion.
Zimming sounds easy to me, just phone his sister or another character contacts her and honestly it would be really effective and heartbreaking if she's forced to kill him to save her friends. There's always a couple of secondary antagonists anyway. It said in her temple when Ryo scrubs out the the wall, DAN "To act without hesitation, to do what is right" which would be nice foreshadowing. The series doesn't like to celebrate murder but I wouldn't mind if they made it more ambiguous since Ryo may have alredy killed Do Niu. Xiuying has to learn to live with herself making a decision she hates, of course like Yin/Yang, darkness and light inside her.
I'd rather still have 4, the stories always ranged from goofy to poignant, but overall they were fun experiences.There's no appeal in a book finising the story, there has to be some kind of journey if you do a 4th or final one.
