Shenmue 3 IS a Reality on Kickstarter!

[db]

Well, system masters, as predicted, Shenmue 3 is on Kickstarter. Yu Suzuki announced it tonight at Sony's E3 presentation. Anyone else have a nerdgasm?


Damn! It was only 6% funded when I started to post this. It's already at 26%

[db]

And less than 9 hours later it's fully funded!

[Transatlantic Foe]

Love the first game but I got bored with 2. Digital only for PS4 is odd, suggests it might not be that grand a scale but I guess it's early days. Hopefully it finishes the story and doesn't try to lead to more games which never happen...

[soera]

Im upset at the digital only PS4 as well.

[ShadowAngel]

Jun 16, 2015 2:30:03 GMT db said:

Anyone else have a nerdgasm?

Yes. ME!

Holy faeces, i'd never thought i'd see the day where Shenmue 3 is announced (outside of April Fool's of course) and i still can't really believe it. Also i can't believe that it's already at over 2.3 million dollars.

Here's hoping that all stretch goals are reached with money to boot so maybe we get Unreal 4 Engine based Remakes of Shenmue 1 and 2 because i totally need to know the place where Sailors hang out

[Centrale]

Yes! I can't express how happy I am about this. For all of us, and for Yu Suzuki.

[lorf]

Blew my mind when I read about it this morning. I've been saving up for Smurfs 2 but just dropped $300 on a pledge for this!

[Centrale]

Yeah... that $300 tier looks like the sweet spot. Why couldn't it have been last year? I had a lot more work last year and would've kicked that in immediately.

Ultimately, though, this is probably the ideal timing to launch the Kickstarter. I'm not sure if Sony has a financial stake in it, but they were probably amenable to such an unusual move of featuring it in their E3 presentation since their lineup of games for the remainder of 2015 is kind of lean.

[Batman666]

Yes, it was amazing and great following the counter this morning when it passed the 2 million mark!



We can always hope that the interest shown (and how fast it got backed up) will make Sony or SEGA to take notice to re-release the first to games in time for the 3rd one in some 2,5 years.

[db]

Glad to hear everyone's excited about this. Check out Johnny Millennium's reaction to it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDeBJnb5dVY

Emphatic much?! Aw, who can blame the guy? It's a unicorn many thought they'd never see

[gallos_11]

I'm sorry, only a Dreamcast release would touch me...

[ShadowAngel]

Jun 16, 2015 21:42:02 GMT db said:

It's a unicorn many thought they'd never see

The funny thing is i remember getting Shenmue 1 for the Dreamcast (whcih still is nowhere near my top 5 consoles of all time) and i played it and 20 minutes later went back to to play something else. My first impression of Shenmue was literally "What the rubber duck is this even? Where do i need to go, what do i need to do?" and i played Ultima VII before which would put many gamers to tears today because it gives you no help. I played Shenmue some time later again with some advice from my brother and suddenly i got this "Holy faeces, this is amazing" moment coming up, i understood where to go, what to do, the arcade with Hang On and the other games was a total blast to me and it truly is the only game where working was fun, the forklift stuff was fun. Collecting all the toys was great (Alex Kidd still looked like faeces in it's capsule figure form)
But it was slow (sometimes waiting for hours for a person, like at that tattoo studio) and the Motorcycle sequence suffered from the horrible Dreamcast gamepad, that's the only flaws here.

Shenmue 2 to me was even better, it was more action filled with more interesting characters (Joy, Hong Xiuying, Ren Wuying who kinda reminded me of Bender from Breakfast Club for some weird reasons), more mini games and a more intresting landscape Wan Chai, Kowloon Walled City which was the setting Yu Suzuki first wanted for that game back in 1993 when he started it after a visit to China.

I went a bit crazy about Shenmue 3 finally becoming a reality with quite a few friends going "I never played Shenmue" or "I heard about it...is it really that great?" which might be a problem. 14 years later we have a new generation of gamers and a lot of people from back then might have moved away from gaming. People who hadn't played Shenmue on the Dreamcast probably will not unterstand what this is all about, why Shenmue is held in such high regards by a few fanatics who remember it from the Dreamcast, who played it and looked behind the few flaws (slow, damn QTE's) for the great story and quaracters. I somehow fear that it will get a mediocre rating because it's "Just" a sequel to a 14 year old game with younger gaming going "It's not legendary like Final Fantasy, it's not hyped like some game from Bethesda". I hope i'm wrong though because Shenmue still ranks very high in my greates games of all time list and it left a very deep impression which us waiting so many years for the conclussion (or at least a contuniation), to me it's even bigger than the wait for Duke Nukem Forever with hopefully a better end.

[Centrale]

As I've thought about it hypothetically over the years, one idea I had to give Shenmue more mainstream appeal is to emphasize the fighting aspects. Include a multiplayer fighting mode. Maybe build upon the concept of training a fighter as seen in the Yakuza series' last couple of entries (Yakuza has certainly borrowed a lot from Shenmue, why not return the favor?) The fighting engine in Shenmue was already surprisingly robust. Push it even further so that fighting game fans can sink their teeth into it and it'll have lasting appeal beyond the single player storyline. Of course, fighting games are kind of niche these days too, but it could expand the potential audience a bit.

[db]

I know what you mean, SA. It's a genre defying game. I've come to describe it as a sort of real-time martial arts based Animal Crossing with a story that's more for older kids and adults Argh! You beat me to the punch, Centrale! I was going to say my great hope for this Shenmue is that Suzuki do what he originally intended for it, to make it a sort of open world Virtua Fighter with a story. He had to settle for QTE back then but I certainly think the level of technology is here now to give us this...and yeah, that's sort of what the Yakuza series is without the Shenmue story, if I'm not mistaken.

Oh, and yes, there'd better be plenty of in-jokes about looking for/finding sailors

[englishinvader]

I hope they make this game available for Linux. At the moment, it's only Windows but they've said that other platforms haven't been decided yet which gives me a faint lingering hope.

Also, they haven't given any mention of the specs they have in mind. Not sure if this is enough to make me upgrade my PC and go back to Windows slavery.