Incidentally, I tried doing Horse Stance in real life and managed about 10 seconds, so fair play to Ryo on some incredible thigh strength. Training takes the form of incredibly basic mini games such as Horse Stance, which is basically a slow, easy, upside-down Flappy Bird. ‘Split some wood’ is either a helpful past-time or an absolutely filthy euphemism
You can also train at the dojo to increase Ryo’s health and to improve his damage output. Fights usually come down to spamming the same combo at foes and hoping they aren’t blocking. You can input combos manually or cycle through moves to be automatically triggered by the R2 button, rendering the entire system pointless but making it more accessible. It’s a basic but functional combat system based on combos learned from skill books. Ryo is often tasked with defeating thugs or sparring with kung fu masters to advance the plot. When you’re not talking to NPCs and being pulled into the shadow realm, Shenmue 3’s other main draw is the combat. Did I mention that this game is 90% people talking? It’s infuriating. So, if Ryo and Shenhua are walking down the path towards the village and someone needs to say something, you get warped into the cutscene dimension. You see, every line of dialogue – every single line – takes place within a cutscene. But that’s not even the worst thing about the dialogue. It’s just so bloody tedious and leads to a phenomenally slow pace as you trudge through endless streams of poorly written and woefully delivered dialogue. NPC: “The monks have trained here for centuries.”
Ryo himself is the worst culprit – 90% of his dialogue is just repeating what someone else just said back at them with a question mark on the end. Characters take forever to say nothing – there are entire conversations that could be condensed into a single sentence. It’s a Japanese game, made by a small Japanese team, so you have to allow some leeway for imperfect translations and cultural differences, but, even so, the writing is shocking. Shenmue 3 is faithful to its Dreamcast roots in both its gameplay and mechanics – which is either a blessing or a curse depending on your nostalgiaīut even the best voice actors in the world couldn’t save the atrocious dialogue in play. At least in previous titles the voice acting was entertainingly awful, here it’s just sub-par. Ryo and Shenhua’s returning voice actors are the worst, while the rest of the cast offer spirited attempts to save the material they’re working with. The series’ almost legendarily terrible voice acting has been supplanted with something much worse – merely below-average voice acting. This is where Shenmue 3 falls at the first hurdle. This leads into the classic Shenmue experience of talking to random NPCs until you find the one who will advance the plot. It’s not so much that your princess is in another castle, and more that she’s been to about 400 castles on the way and left you a breadcrumb trail to follow. As with previous titles, the story advances at an utterly glacial pace thanks to its constant goal-post moving. From here, you must investigate the kidnapping of Shenhua’s father and seek out clues to his whereabouts. The story picks up right where Shenmue 2 left off, with Ryo and Shenhua in Bailu village. But if you’re looking for a good video game then I’ve got bad news for you. If you’ve had your nostalgia goggles surgically implanted into your face and you’re just looking for a continuation of the story, then Shenmue 3 will scratch that 18-year itch. Now it’s here… well, nightmare would be hyperbolic, but it’s certainly a disappointment. A threequel nearly two decades in the making, Shenmue 3 once seemed like an impossible dream.
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