Shenmue III Release Topic

[pierrot]

I really enjoyed reading your thoughts, Blu. It was a very thorough write-up, and very entertaining. I'll see if I can provide a slightly different perspective for some of them.

I really was satisfied with the sound. Though the music got repetitive, I liked walking into different stores and areas and hearing different throwback tunes.

It's kind of funny reading this, because it seems like the majority of the fan base absolutely hated this part of the audio. I thought it was kind of interesting to walk into a kitchen and hear the darts theme--I don't really understand why darts was left out of this game; I love darts/super darts in the first two--but otherwise didn't think much of it either way. i was a little upset that the Carmine Quarter theme was used so briefly in a cutscene. I love that BGM.

I am take it or leave it on the capsule toys. The Sega characters were cool for the first two games, but in Shenmue 3 there simply were too many.

I'm not sure there were actually any more than in Shenmue II, but what I don't really understand was why the Shenmue/Shenmue II sets weren't used at all (the crates, cars, trucks, planes, boats, fountains, etc). They also could have made Shenmue III sets with things like the telephone box in Bailu, some of the temples/gates in Niaowu, Choubu-chan (hell, even a Choubu-chan set), etc. I thought the sets were pretty dull, and irrelevant, outside of a few like the SD characters, arcade machines, jet boats, and maybe a few of the other sets like weapons, TVs, radios, and furniture. There's also the fact that you can examine every capsule toy without even collecting a single one. So yeah, I thought there were some really curious choices with the capsule toys, but it's not terrible, in my opinion.

However, is there infighting with the Chi You Men or is Niao Sun just batshit crazy, burning old castles down to the ground. [...] I really enjoyed the ending. I like that you square off with Lan Di, and surprise, he actually isn't ready. It appears he is still lacking in discipline, composure, and ability. I am curious as to what happens now that the mirrors are in the hands of the Chi You Men. Is it now a war between two factions of the Chi You Men, with Niao Sun possessing the Phoenix, and Lan Di possessing the Dragon?

The politics is one of the things I'm most excited about in future content. I think it's possible we might find out some more about the Chi You Men in the story pack DLC. One thing I do know about Niao Sun is that in the original promotional materials, she was described as essentially a ruthless conniver, who takes pleasure in ensnaring people in her vicious traps.

As an aside, I recently realized, after looking through the Japanese wikipedia page for the series. that there's a bit of a quirk with Lan DI and Niao Sun's names. The Shitennou of the Chi You Men (which include Lan Di and Niao Sun) all seem to have what I'll call an 'imperial' name, and a 'guardian' name. 'Lan Di' is the imperial name (pronounced 'Lan Tei' in Japanese). 'Niao Sun' is the guardian name, with characters that literal refer to 'falcon bird' (pronounced 'Chou Jun' in Japanese). So for whatever reason, at least outside of the games themselves, they're referred to with opposite nomenclatures. By the way, Lan Di' guardian name is 'Sou Ryu,' or 'verdant dragon,' and Niao Sun's imperial name is 'En Tei,' or 'flame emperor.' At least that's what they are in Japanese. I have no idea how they're pronounced in Mandarin.

Why did there need to be hundreds if not thousands of items you could purchase from the shop.

Yeah, I thought it was kind of strange that there were so many items that didn't really seems to serve any functional purpose. In an interview Yu did with Famitsu, just after release, he was almost boastful about how every item had flavor text, too. I have two theories about it, though. One is that maybe the team was just better suited for modeling environmental objects and such. I have to believe it's a lot less investment to put modeling efforts into objects compared with NPCs, for instance. Another thought I had, which I haven't verified at all, is that perhaps the items in shops can actually be sold for profit if they're purchased at the low end of their price fluctuations. There's that side quest that has you looking for the best deals on items for that lady at the docks, so part of me wonders if that's also trying to hint at buying things cheaply, and selling them at the pawn shop for profit. The buy back price is always the same, anyway.

I felt like most of the sidequests were pointless and I soon felt they weren't my efforts. They were usually fetch quests, and I lost interest.

There were some side quests that I thought were kind of interesting. None of them were really spectacular, or anything, although I did miss a handful of them, anyway. Did you happen to do the haircut one? One of the things I would have liked is if there were some sort of 'mini-quest' when you're at a food stall or something, and one of the kid NPCs is also there staring at the food. Something where you could buy them something for some sort of small reward, or increase in reputation, or something. That's more the sort of thing I had expected for sidequests, but I don't hate what we got. The rewards are usually clothing, so that's always nice.

Additionally, where did the affinity / rapport system go?

It's there. It's in the form of Shenhua's affinity based on the conversation trees. Her mannerisms change very subtley, though, and they're probably not things that people in the West would pick up on as easily, but they're there. When Yu was talking about his original vision for this system, he mentioned that something like 70% of the dialogue in the game would be between Ryo and Shenhua, and that answers you give as Ryo would affect things like how other people in the village treat him. I'm a little relieved that it ultimately didn't go quite that far, since I already felt pretty superficially judged by some of the answers I gave to Shenhua. I get the sense from those statements Yu gave, that the rapport system was never really supposed to go beyond Shenhua. It seems like a lot of those stretch-goal features were fairly small features, in the end, as with the rag-doll physics, and AI battling.

What is this nebulous Kung Fu term that is thrown about?

Yeah, this is kind of one of those kung fu movie tropes, and the issue, as I understand it, is really that "kung fu" doesn't actually refer to martial arts directly. Like, you could essentially have kung fu in cooking. It's more like the result of (or possibly even the process of) extreme diligence in training. So people telling Ryo that he lacks kung fu, is basically like they're telling him that he hasn't put in the work.

[pierrot]

This is technically only tangentially related to Shenmue III, but there was a youtube channel that posted a two part radio interview with Suzuki Yu.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGPi8fZLL2w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B6rd3OH154
The interesting things about this interview are that it's from a radio show called "A-LABO INDEX," where Matsukaze Masaya (yes, that Matsukaze Masaya; the Japanese voice of Ryo) interviews a bunch of industry leading Japanese engineers. I've only listened to the first half so far. It seems like it was conducted just before the release of Shenmue III, and broadcasted at the end of October. (Blog posts here, and here) The first half is really all about his pre-Shenmue legacy, which is both extensive, and impressive.

I didn't realize he went to school for electrical engineering (basically). Now it makes sense, and I get why he's as capable as he is. Maybe it's why I can relate to his work more. There were some wild stories I'd never heard before, too, like how Bill Gates wanted to have an audience with Yu because he was interested in finding out how Virtua Fighter was able to run its graphical processing calculations so quickly. Also Steven Spielberg wanted to get Yu's autograph for his son, because he was a fan of Virtua Fighter, and liked games more than movies. Of course, Virtua Figher is also the only video game on permanent display in the Smithsonian as an exhibit on technology innovations. They talked about that a bit. Also, the dude went and actually flew fighter jets with part of his team, in Florida, in mock dog-fights! One of the things that just bled through the entire interview was the astounding level of R&D environment SEGA was. Prototypes for Hang-On initially attempted to simulate actual motorcycle physics, where accelerating would move the bike more upright, and they had a blower that would simulate variations in wind speed, as well. It was really interesting, from an engineering perspective, listening to them talk about the Power Drift arcade cabinet, and all of the possible mechanical failures that could occur from use. Apparently, on the hardware side of development, that group was hoping to get to full freedom of motion in the cabinet; Outrun swung out to the left and right, while After Burner had two axes of rotation in the left-right, and up-down tilt, but had limited range. Eventually they succeeded with the R-360 cabinet, for G-Loc, etc--which isn't Gimbal locked, so they would have had to program it with quaternions.

Something I didn't realize, but because Yu worked on research in 3D modeling when he was studying at Okayama University of Science, all of the under-the-hood calculations for his arcade games from the 80s were done in 3D, and mapped to a 2D space for the graphical display. It's just amazing stepping through his career in this interview. They also talk about the secret military technology requisitioned for the texture mapping in Virtua Fighter 2 (a 200 million yen chip). I remember reading about this not too long ago, but it's still pretty crazy. SEGA was really on the bleeding edge of technology in those days, and a lot of it was spearheaded by Yu.

The second half of the interview seems like it should be all about Shenmue. At the end of the first half they talked a bit about what led to the shift from arcade games, to a console epic, but that's a lot of stuff I've heard him talk about elsewhere. For instance, putting all of the know-how from over a decade of arcade games experience into a console game, and that sort of naturally led to a variety of gameplays that looked something like FREE (open world-ish) gameplay. I'll probably listen to the rest sometime later tonight, and possibly report back if I find anything wildly interesting.

[pierrot]

Well, the second half didn't offer a lot of info on Shenmue III, but it was still incredibly interesting to listen to. I was looking at Yu's major again, because it's sort of a curious name, but it's more like Electronics Science. In those days you had people like Bill Joy working in Electrical Engineering departments, when they would likely be considered Computer Scientists these days. There was a much less rigid dichotomy, but I guess Yu, as a kid, was interested in taking things apart--he turned a classical guitar into an electric guitar for his band in high school--but was kind of infatuated by the title of "programmer." He talked about, as a high school student, realizing that he wanted work with as much free time as possible, in order to pursue more of his hobbies. So he considered being a teacher, and also a dentist (because dentists' patients don't typically die from dentistry), but eventually went to school for programming, and cut his teeth on Fortran (unsurprisingly).

A good 40% of the second half of the interview was taking about his early life. They also touched on some of the technical demands of rendering frames of a video game, versus frames for movie, and sort of the more limited advancements in computers over the coming years, due to physical limitations (in the absence of some more revolutionary technology, or scientific advancement). Yu expressed his consternation with working with a bunch of black-box libraries in UE4, versus a custom engine, and not being able to tweak or calibrate as much (I can totally relate with this--libraries are handy, but I'd usually rather know exactly what my code is doing, and be able to optimize as much as possible, if needed). He actually talked a little bit about ray-tracing, too. I have a feeling that Shenmue IV could have ray-tracing going on. He was basically saying that it was like a far off dream for him back in the earlier part of his career. It was kind of funny, also, because Matsukaze Masaya brought up the fan on the Hang-On prototypes again, and Yu mentioned that he'd like to have smells as part of his games. Yu was saying if, like, Febreze technology improved to the point where it could create and eliminate targeted smells on command, then it would be the kind of thing he'd like to add to games.

On the Shenmue III front, he mainly talked about the features implemented based on feedback from the first two games (a more simple combat system, with level and difficulty mode scaling, time-skip feature, and more easily recognizable sign posting, so that the average person doesn't get stuck). Also, he mentioned that the camera angle for S3 is more like where he always wanted it positioned, to begin with, but in the first two games that sort of camera angle caused too much slowdown. I just thought that was interesting because so many people seem to hate that the camera angle changed from where it was in the first two games.

[pierrot]

Whoa! Whoa!
Whoa!
Whoa!

What!

[pierrot]

Oh, snap! I just realized that the character embedded in the face of the clock graphic of the HUD actually changes depending on the game difficulty selected. They're drawn in a very 'Chinese' (for lack of a better descriptor) font, so I'm not sure what the one for Hardest is. I don't recognize it, and I can't even really see what the strokes are to look it up. However, on Easy, it displays ”易” or 'i (pronounced 'ee')'/'yasashii' (lit. "gentle," "easy"), on Normal is displays ”普” or 'fu'/'amaneku' (lit. "wide reaching," "standard," but usually seen as "普通,” 'futsuu'), and on Hard it displays ”難” or 'nan'/'muzukashii' (lit. "difficult"). So, pretty obvious/typical characters for difficulty, but I was kind of surprised to realize that there's an immediately identifiable indicator for what difficulty the game is being played on. It bothers me a little that I can't think of what the one on Hardest would be. Often difficulties beyond "hard" are called "激難” or 'geki-muzu' (which is a non-standard reading, and not a word in the dictionary), but the character in the clock isn't ”激” like I would have thought. I might spend some more time on figuring it out later.


This kind of reminded me that I noticed something kind of interesting in the first game a couple weeks ago. I found out that the Steam versions of 1&2 HD actually do still have Japanese text, but the first game requires editing an .ini file, and the second game requires HEX editing a couple lines of code in the .exe file. So, I got those all set up for Japanese, and started installing all kinds of mods for them. While I was testing them out (holy shit are the footstep sfx in Ryo's house all kinds of fucking wrong, btw) I noticed a a phrase framed up on the wall of Fuku-san's room. I recognized it almost immediately, because it reads, "明鏡止水,” (meikyou shisui). I don't know if this is ever really picked up on by people playing in English, because this is the state of consciousness (removing all thoughts) that Xiuying tries to teach to Ryo, that he recalls while fighting Togyu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG5o5I0n23I (I'm also just posting this video because I thought it was really funny seeing it end with the missed QTE ). I was kind of shocked to see this phrase foreshadowed so early on, but also in a place that could be completely overlooked. It was pretty cool.


Final Shenmue thought for the day: I was reading a quote from Yu again, that I had forgotten about, that the story in Shenmue III draws from chapters 3-6 of the original 11 chapter outline.

These are all chapters where Akira is in the green kenpogi (well, in chapter six he seems to tear the sleeves off, but--), so I decided that now that I've unlocked that green kenpogi, from the Battle Rally DLC, on my next playthrough I'll have to put Ryo in that Kenpogi. Y'know, for thematic accuracy.

[pierrot]

Well, it seems like Deep Silver is doing their very best to bury Shenmue. So that's great. Also seems like Fangamer still isn't ready to ship anything, and I've taken over sole ownership of this thread. Cool--.

I saw some really amazing fan videos recently, though, and felt like focusing on them a little bit more by posting them here.

Did I-- Did I write this? This is one of the most incredible reviews of anything I've ever seen on Youtube. It probably belongs in the Smithsonian, next to Virtua Fighter.

This fan music video was really masterfully edited, too. This BGM was what was playing when I first entered the Save Shenmue temple. It was a really potent combination with all the fan pictures and stuff.

I'm awfully impressed by how talented a number of Shenmue fans are.

[Reprise]

Well, it seems like Deep Silver is doing their very best to bury Shenmue.

What? Have I missed something?

Also, Fan Gamer are shipping rewards right now. People have started receiving some of the higher tier rewards in the last week. It's a slow process and is in batches, but stuff is starting to get shipped out.

[pierrot]

Well, it seems like Deep Silver is doing their very best to bury Shenmue.

What? Have I missed something?

I guess some third party Deep Silver hired to analyze their sales forecast for the fourth quarter released a report that pinned a roughly $6 million sales deficit squarely on Shenmue III because of the 50,000 player PS4 playerbase estimates from this Gamestat trophy tracking website. Just typing that is all sorts of facepalm. The only thing I can really conclude from it is that Deep Silver actually wants to be the final nail in Shenmue's coffin. Either that, or they're just incompetent. They've been a really great source of negative press for Shenmue III for quite some time.

I'm honestly not even sure their involvement greatly improved things, in the long run. At the point they came in, it sounds like Bailu and Niaowu were essentially complete, but much smaller. Conceivably, the team would have been working on an equally scaled back Baisha in order to finish the game up. I really liked the expanded world, but most fans didn't.

Also, Fan Gamer are shipping rewards right now. People have started receiving some of the higher tier rewards in the last week. It's a slow process and is in batches, but stuff is starting to get shipped out.

Yeah, I know. The busts, flower calligraphy, grab bags, etc have been sent out, but those aren't things that Fangamer was in charge of producing, just shipping. There was that kickstarter update that gave rough estimates for things, but I contacted FG a week ago about the signed artwork that was supposedly being sent out in mid-January, and got a canned response about the timeline and that things would be delivered separately, despite the fact that higher tiers did appear to receive them already. They appear to be missing the February schedule, as well, for the CD and T-shirt. Fangamer just doesn't seem to have a very good operation going. I kind of get the sense that the schedule was Ys Net's attempt to hold their feet to the fire, and it backfired. I'm not that impatient, I would just like to know what the actual situation is.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Well, it seems like Deep Silver is doing their very best to bury Shenmue.

What? Have I missed something?

I guess some third party Deep Silver hired to analyze their sales forecast for the fourth quarter released a report that pinned a roughly $6 million sales deficit squarely on Shenmue III because of the 50,000 player PS4 playerbase estimates from this Gamestat trophy tracking website. Just typing that is all sorts of facepalm. The only thing I can really conclude from it is that Deep Silver actually wants to be the final nail in Shenmue's coffin. Either that, or they're just incompetent. They've been a really great source of negative press for Shenmue III for quite some time.

Apparently it's the parent company of Deep Silver, Embracer Group, who hired the analyst and released the report where they talked about the revised financial predictions? While that does explain things somewhat, it's still weird to me that Deep Silver's parent company couldn't just ask Deep Silver how much Shenmue 3 sold. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps they thought that it would, very specifically, be a bigger hit on PS4 than it actually was, regardless of PC sales? Clearly some element of corporate higher management that goes way over my head in how it functions XP

[Reprise]

Oh wow, that's pretty stupid about it being based on those estimates. Some good news is the story quest DLC pack is out on Tuesday!

About the rewards, I'm planning/hoping to move soon, so I do hope they hurry up. Although I'll probably set up a redirect, I don't know what kind of postal service they will use. I'm assuming just normal mail, but who knows.