Shenmue: The Animation was announced in 2020 as one of the “partner” shows between Crunchyroll and Adult Swim. At the time both companies were owned by telecom AT&T. The phone giant has already sold off one and is in the process of unloading the other onto Discovery, so no one knows how long the partnership will actually last. But it got us a Shenmue anime.
It has been a weird ride for fans of Yu Suzuki’s RPG-slash-life-simulator Shenmue. The original game, released in 2000 for the Dreamcast, was one of the most innovative of its time, one of the first to attempt an authentic, living, breathing world where people went about their activities as they do in reality. Suzuki managed to get a sequel out before the Dreamcast prematurely bit it, but only Europe would see the original release — Americans got an XBox port.
Shenmue 3 is so close, we can feel the punches. The latest trailer from Sega, Ys Net and Deep Silver hit the Net this morning, and they make one thing clear: Ryo’s fists will get a workout.
This is something you might not expect to hear about until after a game comes out, but developer Deep Silver, publisher YsNet and exclusive PC distributor Epic Games Store are now offering refunds to Kickstarter backers of Shenmue 3. The reason: some of them have been demanding it. Loudly.
Here’s something we never expected to hear. The websute USGamer caught up with Yu Suzuki, director, writer and pretty much everything behind the existence of the Shenmue series. The reporter asked Suzuki if Shenmue 3 would be concluding the story of protagonist Ryo…not really a question most other reporters felt like asking, because obviously it would, right?
A new trailer for Shenmue 3 dropped over the weekend. At two and a half minutes and with real gameplay footage, it’s the most revealing look we’ve gotten to date for the highly anticipated sequel.
Shenmue 3 is closer to reality than ever! Yu Suzuki and his development team revealed the first full trailer for the long-anticipated closer to the Shenmue trilogy today. Considering this story was left incomplete on the original XBox, it’s been a substantial wait.
We’ve been waiting for Shenmue 3 since 2015…..well, truthfully, we’ve been waiting for it since Shenmue II on the original XBox; we just never had definitive hope until recently. But now that we know it’s coming, it would make sense for Sega to rerelease the first two games, wouldn’t it? This release may be anticipated among the faithful, but there are only so many of us, and new fans would be a great help toward higher sales.
As you all know, Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki and his team have been working on the long-awaited third game in the Shenmue trilogy for at least two years now. It has been far longer since either of the first two games saw a retail shelf. Shenmue 2 came out for the original XBox and the first Shenmue was released even longer ago, on the original Dreamcast. People who were born when that game came out are now about to graduate high school.
The Shenmue 3 Kickstarter launched on June 16th, 2015. It’s been two and a half years since then, and we haven’t seen much of the game, but in this case that’s a good thing. A Shenmue sequel that could be done in two years (with today’s development standards) wouldn’t be a game that was very good.
Whether or not a retail version of Shenmue III will actually be available upon launch for consoles is still not clear. According to VG24/7, an email exchange with the developer Ys Net stated that the company was still unsure whether it would make a physical edition of the long-awaited sequel available for PlayStation 4 players to buy.
Yesterday, the $2 million funding goal for Shenmue III was smashed in just a few hours. However, despite the obvious success of the Kickstarter campaign and the intense interest in the game, questions were raised about how such an ambitious title was ever going to be able to be developed with such a tiny budget. This is especially when you consider that the first two titles in the franchise are some of the most expensive games to ever be made.