FIGHTING FIT

SHENMUE 3 is as flawed as it is wonderful, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

- Andy Kelly

Nestled in the mist-shrouded mountains of rural China, Bailu Village is a settlement frozen in time. People live slow lives here among rice paddies, ornate Buddhist temples, quaint cottages, and fields of colorful wildflowers. There are some clues that Shenmue 3 is set in the 1980s – a woman’s oversized glasses, a bleepy arcade game – but otherwise, life here has changed very little in the past hundred years.

It’s an ideal setting for a Shenmue game, a series famous (or perhaps infamous) for its languid, aggressively deliberate pacing. This is a game as slow and meandering as the old man strolling through Bailu’s marketplace deciding which kind of steamed bun to have for lunch. And the village’s steadfast resistance to a changing world, to the creep of modernization, neatly reflects Shenmue 3’s position itself.

This unlikely sequel sticks so closely to the formula of the first two games that it’s almost as if the last 18 years of game design never happened. And honestly, as a fan, I couldn’t be happier. From its earliest days the Shenmue series has been divisive, with opinion rarely falling in the middle. You either think it’s an emotional, groundbreaking masterpiece or an indulgent, clunky mess. There’s no in-between.

If you belong to the latter camp, I’ll come right out and say it: Shenmue 3 won’t change your mind.

At all. The passage of time has only heightened the things that people criticise it for. The cumbersome controls, the abundance of cutscenes, the QTEs, the aching slowness of everything. But if you love these games for their idiosyncrasies, indefinable charm, sense of place and warmth, this is really as perfect a continuation of the series as you could hope for – with a few caveats.