During the Sony E3 press conference this week, some major news regarding one of my favorite series finally dropped. Shenmue 3 is currently on Kickstarter and after my love letter to the series; you just knew I had to write about it.
Shenmue 3:
Shenmue 3 is of course the very long awaited sequel to the game that really started the open world genre way back on the Dreamcast. I’m not going to go too far into detail about the gameplay, as I already talked about it in my post linked above. The developers are asking for 2 million at the start, and a number of stretch goals revealed up to 4 million at this point.
There are some interesting things about this kickstarter that are in the back of my mind. First is that if it succeeds, the game will be available only for the PS4 and PC. With the 2 million basic funding goal, I have a feeling that they are receiving funding from an outside source, possibly Sony and that is being attributed to the goal. The reason is that the original Shenmue was one of the most expensive games released at the time and for the developers to go all out with the final game in the series. It just feels like it’s going to cost more than 2 million, even more so if they already going for a multi platform development
One of the reasons why this post is going to be so short is that not much has been revealed about Shenmue 3 and there are some big questions that have to be answered. One of those is whether or not we will ever see the original two ported or re-released at some point, as it has been over a decade since they were out.
Gameplay hasn’t been talked about yet, but we can assume that the series’ design of open world gameplay/exploration and fighting game mechanics will be present. This actually raises another point: Considering how the Yakuza series sort of carried the Shenmue torch for all these years, will Shenmue 3 borrow any elements or gameplay from it?
Almost There:
At the time of this post, Shenmue 3 has already gone past the 50% mark and it hasn’t even been a day yet. This had me confident that we will eventually get the ending to one of my favorite series which leaves us with one last question for this piece: Just how far will things go?
