They may be generally shallow and one-note characters (even the important ones), but the fact that everyone has at least that single note makes the world feel more alive and real.That said, talking to everyone without being able to skip through lines of dialogue (unless they’re repeated conversations, like the hotel clerk who demands payment for your room every day) can be tedious, and the way you make your way down checklists which fling you back and forth across the large areas is frustrating. That thorough amount of dialogue was an impressive feat 20 years ago, and it’s one of the few things that’s still impressive today. The performances may be lacking, but I did appreciate that you can talk to literally everyone you encounter (with a few exceptions in the second area, Niaowu) and have a conversation about your immediate goal. I laughed at many line deliveries that were not meant to be funny throughout the approximately 40-hour journey, and though that makes Shenmue 3 fit perfectly next to its predecessors, it also makes it seem incredibly dated compared to modern contemporaries that similarly focus on dialogue and story. The voice acting for all of these conversations is hilariously bad across the board. The starting town, Bailu, is the more interesting of the two areas you explore, which you do as you quickly get down to the business of asking literally everyone for information about Shenhua’s dad. From there, you learn your new goal: to track down your friend Shenhua’s kidnapped father so you can continue your journey to find your father’s murderer, Lan Di, and finally, hopefully, kill him. “It begins exactly where Shenmue 2 left off by recreating that game’s final moments in this brand-new engine, which functions well as both a quick recap (a good, longer recap is available in the start menu, too) and table setting for what you can expect visually. I rarely, if ever, found myself stuck and unsure of where I needed to go next in the way I often did when playing the first two adventures. The structure of the gameplay is streamlined, combat isn’t as overcomplicated (but still remains challenging), training and improving your abilities makes more sense, and making progress is just generally better. That’s not to say there isn’t a compelling experience here – it just feels out of time and doesn’t reward the Shenmue faithful with meaningful revelations in the story.The good news is that nearly everything about Shenmue 3 improves on the two games that came before it in some way. In many ways, Shenmue 3 is a stark reminder of the leaps and bounds developers have made in the last 20 years. Time has not been kind to that original game, nor its 2001 sequel, as video game stories and performance capture tech have improved drastically. You lived Ryo Hazuki’s life, developing relationships and maintaining a day job in your Japanese hometown, all while trying to track down your father’s murderer so you could extract vengeance. The story of Shenmue began 20 years ago, and for its time the original game was an undeniable marvel in video game storytelling and world-building.
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