Why have people been waiting so many years for a new Shenmue?

We explore the history of Shenmue. Why his name is very important and why the third installment is so expected.

It's finally here: Shenmue III. And many, especially the younger ones or those who never had a Dreamcast or were never very gamers, will ask themselves, "Okay... So what is a Shenmue?" Fear not, because at Gamesfera, in addition to informing you about new releases, we try to teach you everything about video game culture. Today we're dedicating our time to teach you about this franchise.

SEGA's first blockbuster

To begin with, we could say that this franchise was a precursor to the Yakuza and Grand Theft Auto based on the fact that they present us with a space to explore at our own pace and full of details. But to stay with that is to close ourselves a lot and abbreviate so much that we don't say anything at the end. The bad thing is that to understand it, we are going to have to do a mental exercise and go back to 1999, when the first Shenmue came out in Japan.

Are we already in 1999? Good. The Dreamcast was totally dying, failing to achieve exceptional sales after the failure of the Sega Saturn. Although it is possible to think that Shenmue was a very strong bet on the part of SEGA to revitalize the Dreamcast and therefore it is one of the most expensive games in history… History must be reviewed. Shemue had been in development for several years thinking about the Sega Saturn because the MegaDrive was too weak for what Yu Suzuki wanted to do.

When a game takes so long to develop actively, it is inevitable that expenses will go up without giving immediate results. In addition, when development moved to the Dreamcast, they divided the story to develop the second part at the same time so that they could release the two games only a year apart. It does not mean that Shenmue is one of the games with the most expensive developments in history, but not everything was to make a single game for the Dreamcast. At $ 47 million at the time, it could be considered the first AAA-rated game, or blockbuster in terms of ambition and budget.

A level of detail never seen at the time

Now comes the part in which we explain in what that money and years of development: the immense detail that it had at the time. We remember that we are in 1999 in Japan or in 2000 in Europe, and just a year ago Metal Gear Solid had been released for the PlayStation and This was considered to have "graphics"«. Dreamcast was a much more powerful console but Yu Suzuki decided to go further and provided all the characters with hand-made models and more realistic facial expressions so that they were not just a bitmap pasted onto a model.

And that's not counting how detailed the textures of the scenarios were in general, the realistic combat animations taken from Virtua Fighter, or that the characters' hands have individually modeled fingers, or that you can see small objects in detail. even if they have no use in history. Visually, Shenmue didn't even look from the same decade. The same at the playable level, which we explain below.

How do you play Shenmue?

Now ... What did SEGA see in Shenmue to consider him as his console seller? The answer is that it was ambitious and very detailed for what were games of the time. And it is even today. The story put us in the shoes of Ryo Hazuki, the son of a martial arts master. One day when he returns home he sees how a gang led by a certain Lang Di kills his father and mentions a mysterious mirror and then runs away. After this, the game sets us the objective of finding Lan Di within a certain period of time and the rest is up to us. We start our day in our room and have several hours before curfew to get through the game.

To advance in the story we will have to ask the other inhabitants of the town of Yokosuka to see if they have information or a small clue to find Lang Di or his henchmen. The hundreds of residents of Yokosuka will give us little clues that we must follow and explore at our own pace. They will tell us that we must find three descendants of Chinese clans who can help us in the search and who run local businesses.

Now, we have to find those local businesses in our own way by wandering around or looking at the maps that are distributed on the city's posters; or when they ask us to look for a house belonging to a private individual and we have to look outside each house to whom it belongs. These inconveniences, the result of inexperience with this type of game, today could be considered both serious design flaws or would be praised for improving the immersion in the game. Even the weather we see in the game accurately represents Yokosuka's weather reports from the time Shenmue is based on.

But the obsessive detail of Yu Suzuki gets in the way: the world is constantly moving with its cycle of day and night, all the inhabitants follow a particular schedule and can even die of old age ... That would make us wait if we have to go to a place at an exact time because an hour in the game is four real minutes. But in between we can explore the city of Yokosuka. We could collect figurines, drink sodas, train martial arts for the few times we have to fight, play arcade games like Out-Run or Space Harrier… Does this matter for the story? Not at all, but they are details that make the world of Shenmue a more detailed one.

The love of detail continues when we have to go to the port and get a job moving boxes on a forklift for days to get the next clue to find Lan Di. Another time we have to go rescue the girl who likes Ryo Hazuki who is kidnapped in the port late at night, but there are no buses anymore and we have to find a way to get there exploring a night version of Yokosuka that until then we had not seen. Moments that make the game a unique experience for the time and for today.

Why did Shenmue fail?

We could go on and on about everything that makes Shenmue special… But this is what made it hard to sell at the time. Today it could easily be sold as a detailed open world game. But let's remember that we are in 1999 and we are facing an ambitious concept and a mixture of styles never seen before. Yu Suzuki took out interviews in which he classified his masterpiece as a FREE (Free Roaming Eyes Entertainment). That description said little or nothing about the game. He told us that we can do what we want, but not what we want to do in Shenmue.

In addition, the PlayStation 2 was close to Japan with a number of launch games that even today could not be repeated. Groundbreaking titles such as Final Fantasy X, Gran Turismo 3, ICO, Jak and Daxter had been announced ... But the one that did the most damage was Grand Theft Auto III, which could bring that concept of an open world to the public that Shenmue did not understand at the time.

The Legacy of Yu Suzuki's Masterpiece

After that first game, a sequel would arrive the following year, but the sequel did not end the story. He was able to solve Quality of Life problems such as having a minimap, or advancing the time until the time we want, the story remains unfinished.

His biggest problem in retrospect is history. The story was originally intended as a 16-chapter novel. The first game would cover a few of them, the sequel a few others, and so on every game that would come out. But we already see that Sega can not continue the series.

The first title sold 1 copies. It is a very respectable amount when you consider that the Dreamcast had not sold many units, and was far from recovering the investment. The second part came out but it took so long that the Dreamcast had been discontinued, and to reach North America Sega sold the rights to Microsoft to publish it on the first Xbox. But Sega never abandoned Shenmue, did not forget or want to forget it.

For years they tried to move the franchise forward as an MMO or mobile game to take advantage of market trends but they were unsuccessful experiments. And Ryo Hazuki was seen in crossover titles like Segagaga, Project X Zone 2, and Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed. And finally, after years of fans asking for it, they ported the first two to current platforms, so it cannot be said that Sega does not want to continue it or let it die.

Now comes the third Shenmue

At Sony's E3 2019 conference one of the big announcements was that Shenmue III will be funded through Kickstarter. Be careful, not that it has been announced, but the opening of its Kickstarter. The project raised seven million on Kickstarter and is the most successful game on the platform.

But that figure is notably lower than the $ 47 million that the first cost without inflation and that the costs of developing games have skyrocketed. For this reason, it has had to have external investments such as Deep Silver, Sony for the PlayStation 4 version and Epic Games in exchange for having exclusivity in its store for the PC version. Time will tell if the investment and the wait has been worth it or not.