We all know that video game fans can be a little… passionate. Fans of the adventure series Shenmue, though? They’re straight-up insane.
I say that with nothing but love, of course. Fan insanity makes the world go round. Without crazy fans we wouldn’t have Mother 3, or Project Eternity, or Kotaku.com. If not for rabid fans, the Xbox One might still have an online check-in requirement. Fan craziness is a good thing.
Crazy fanbases also create nutty, amazing images like the collage above, put together by members of a Facebook group dedicated to bringing Shenmue back to life. (The last Shenmue game came out over a decade ago — a promised third Shenmue was never produced.)
The goal here? Get someone, somewhere to make Shenmue III. And given that Sega, the publisher behind Shenmue, is as unresponsive as a company can get, fans are asking Sony to strike a deal and get a third Shenmue game on the PlayStation 4. It helps that in an interview with me a couple of months ago, Sony’s Adam Boyes mentioned Shenmue as one of the titles on their big list of potential Games To Rescue.
By the way, for about a week after I published that interview, I got hundreds and hundreds of Twitter spam messages from Shenmue fans, because again, Shenmue fans are insane. I still love you, Shenmue fans, but please don’t spam me on Twitter. Thanks in advance!
Comments
11 responses to “Shenmue Fans Sure Are Crazy”
I want more Shenmue
perhaps I’ll try…. another
So close!
I have never played a Shenmue game, can I get some idea of what it was like and whether it was any good?
At the time it was completely original, time passed, day & night cycles. Conversations, a semi-open world.
you could buy items in stores and pick up 3D objects from tables and examine them.
There was an arcade with playable 80s arcade games.
Full fight system based on Virtua Fightr.
it was a revolutuin at the time, a lot of modern games should thank shenmue.
Id say playing the old ones now wouldnt have the same effect.
To many games have incorporated ideas from it, they seem normal now.
It invented QTEs and is still possibly the only game to get them right. You could look after a stray cat. Combat felt like a slower, more deliberate DOA. A major feature of the game was collecting figurines.
It was a mess. A glorious mess, but a mess just the same. It experimented witha lot and got most of it right. If it were re released now or would need a dramatic overhaul.
Edit: nobody plays VF anymore so I went with DOA for the combo and grapple stuff. But Jimmu is right. it was functionally the VF combat system.
I think the likes of Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace are more responsible for the invention of QTEs. That’s all they were.
Well the both of you seem to think that there is no point going back to it, so I might have to give it a pass unfortunately.
Oh no, it’s totally worth it. But you’ll have to give it a little bit of retro goggles. It basically invented a whole lot of things that are standard now.
I haven’t played Shenmue, and have played very few games with QTEs, so my opinion on your question should be taken for nothing.
Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace were just memorising button presses. One slip and you were dead. QTEs in Shenmue did cool things like alter fights as they happened based on how well you did them instead of being the PRESS NOT TO DIE flavour we got from the old Don Bluth gaming. I suppose you are right in a way, but I figured actually including them as a gameplay element and actually having them make sense made it the first to really use them properly.