Later on, there’s one gang member who he’s struggling to defeat. Young Hazuki is always getting his ass kicked, but he never gives up. Ryo also isn’t portrayed as this unstoppable badass - he’s a kid with potential. Shenmue takes itself much more seriously, and fights are rare unless you keep up with your training at one of the dojos. The main difference between Shenmue and Yakuza is tone - Yakuza is over-the-top, funny, and full of random battles. Dozens of shops litter the streets, there are back alley brawls, arcades filled with video games - though you’ll find a Virtua Fighter ripoff with penguin avatars over the real thing here - various gambling games, wooden dummies, martial arts classes, sparring, jobs, and loads more. The amount of “stuff” you can do is overwhelming at times. You can see why the Yakuza games often get hit with a Shenmue comparison. It’s the most beautiful ugly game I’ve ever played. After a while, your brain turns off to the fact NPCs materialise a couple of meters in front of you. The second location is particularly impressive, one of the most dense video game places I’ve ever explored. From the first village, with its sunflower fields, rice paddies, pumpkin patches, and falling cherry blossom leaves, to the second city with its grand temples, bustling markets, and massive arcades - it’s an interesting world to inhabit. And those graphics? Everyone might look like a doll, kids might have massive bobbleheads and adults might have shrunken heads like Beetlejuice, but Shenmue 3 has some stunning environmental design. Ryo: "I’m looking for someone called Yuan"Īfter a while though, it becomes weirdly endearing in a “this guy are sick” kind of way. Old Man: "Come to apprentice under me have you?" Every single actor delivers their lines with the gusto of a teenager who’s been forced to clean their room, and the dialogue doesn’t help. It has a much lower budget than all of the big releases this year, and that’s immediately apparent in the weird camera cuts, the acting, and the graphics. Shenmue 3 might have broken every record imaginable for a crowdfunded video game, but this is not a triple-A game. He speaks like he’s been lobotomised and can’t swivel his head like a real boy. He wears tight blue jeans, but he can still kick your head off your shoulders. He’s a soppy martial artist with a heart of gold, who can stop your heart with a one-inch punch, often gets battered by pensioners, and goes to bed at 9pm every night. In Shenmue 3, you’re searching for both Lan Di and the treasure, accompanied by a girl called Shenhua, whose father has also been kidnapped by some thugs made entirely of rump steak. Your dad was killed by a man called Lan Di who was searching for a mirror - the key to some treasure hidden in Hong Kong. Since the story began 20 years ago, here’s a quick run down: you are Ryo Hazuki, a nice Japanese boy who likes smashing people up. Squat near a wooden dummy and sharpen that horse stance and raise your endurance, spar with other martial artists to boost your attack power, drive a forklift and chop wood to get money to spend on new martial arts scrolls so you can learn more moves. It’s a simulated life, where you grind away in a job, grind away at your training, and occasionally procrastinate so you can have a short break from that grind, only to find more of a grind in those side activities. Shenmue is a series that reveres martial arts, to the point where the act of playing the game is like a drill of its own. It takes consistent drilling to make this feel natural, for you to instinctively raise that leg. Instincts make you throw out an arm to protect yourself from an incoming kick, but the correct response is to turtle up and raise your knee to meet your elbow, creating a wall of bone of your own. Thai kicks hit hard with a full shin, like a baseball bat sculpted from bone. If you block an incoming kick with your arm, it could snap like a twig. If you’ve ever practiced Muay Thai, you’ll know that one of the first things you need to learn is the leg check.
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