Spoiler Warning: Beware of *minor* spoilers for Shenmue I-III and Shenmue: The Anime.
Before you get excited: there has been no announcement of a fourth game in the Shenmue saga! Sorry if the title of this piece tripped you up; that wasn’t my intention at all. Having just celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Shenmue II a short while back, this epic video game series has been on my mind once again, and I wanted to take a moment to lay out my thoughts on a potential fourth game… and why it would *absolutely need* to bring the saga to a belated end.
Before we get into all of that, though, I have a couple of important caveats. Firstly, all of this is just one person’s *subjective, not objective* opinion. If our views on the Shenmue series don’t align… that’s okay. I trust that there’s room within the fan community for polite discussion and differences of opinion. Secondly, while I was a huge fan of Shenmue and of Shenmue II back in the Dreamcast era… I didn’t buy Shenmue III at launch, and while I did eventually pick it up when it went on sale, I haven’t played it. And I also haven’t watched the Shenmue anime adaptation yet, either – though I plan to get around to it eventually!
I’ll briefly recap why I didn’t buy or play Shenmue III – because I think it adds a lot of context to what we’re going to talk about today. However, if you think that ruins my claim to being a “true fan,” or somehow invalidates my take… no hard feelings. Consider this an opportunity to jump ship if you aren’t interested in reading any further!
The tl;dr is this: it was patently obvious to me, even as far back as 2015, that if Shenmue III didn’t finish the story and wrap things up, the chances of Ryo *ever* getting an ending were slim to nonexistent. And… am I wrong? Look at the sales figures for Shenmue I & II – the port of the first two games. Look at sales figures for Shenmue III, which barely registered on the lower reaches of the Japanese sales charts before disappearing entirely. And look at the low viewing figures for the anime – and the lack of attention the single season brought to the games before it, too, was cancelled.
Yu Suzuki and YSNet refusing to take the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that was literally gifted to them by fans reaching into their own pockets and finally bringing Ryo’s story to an end is, in my view, incomprehensibly idiotic. If Yu Suzuki couldn’t find it in his heart to make cuts to the bloated gameplay and storytelling of the final chapters of the Shenmue saga, someone else should’ve been brought in to do it for him. I can’t speak for *every* Shenmue fan out there, but the one thing I expected from Shenmue III – the *only* thing I expected from it, to be blunt – was that it would bring the saga to an end.
There was no realistic possibility, in my view, for Shenmue III to suddenly open up this incredible saga to legions of new players. That ship had long since sailed, and as disappointing as it may be, Shenmue fans must accept that this is a very niche product. It might not have been, had things been radically different for Sega and the Dreamcast around the turn of the millennium… but that’s the way it shook out. Shenmue III was only ever going to appeal to a small number of folks – many of whom backed the crowd-funding project and so wouldn’t need to buy a copy of the game at release. There was never a snowball’s chance in hell that Shenmue III would do what the first game couldn’t and bring in huge numbers of new players.
If I’d been writing here on the website back in 2015, I’d have said exactly that. I’d have made my voice heard – in whatever small way I could – and tried to let Yu Suzuki and YSNet know that Shenmue III should be the final conclusion to the series.
Though, now I come to think of it, that request seemed *so* blindingly obvious back then that I don’t know if I’d have even felt a need to write it down! The shock that hit me when I found out that Shenmue III wasn’t going to be the end, and would just move the story along was… even a decade later, it’s almost indescribable how utterly *stupid* I found it to be.
And to be clear… everything that’s happened in the years since has only reinforced my belief that I was, very sadly, right. Shenmue III didn’t take off and bring in tons of new players. The port didn’t sell well and didn’t even make a blip on the sales charts. And even the anime – which took Shenmue to a new medium – failed to move the needle. Can you look me in the eye and tell me that my approach to Shenmue III was wrong?
I’m of the opinion, unfortunately, that Shenmue III will eventually come to be seen as the saga’s final chance. Even if Shenmue III Enhanced does better than the original incarnation of that game – which I doubt, but I guess we’ll see – I just don’t see where the money comes from to create a fourth entry in the series. Crowd-funding is out of the question; YSNet burned a lot of bridges with the Shenmue fan community over the course of its first crowd-funding campaign, and with the overall decline of crowd-funding in general, a second attempt probably wouldn’t even raise half of the almost $7 million that came in last time.
So… where else is YSNet gonna get the money from? Its crappy mobile games – Steel Paws and whatever the other one was called – aren’t ten-plus-million-dollar earners. ININ Games, Shenmue III Enhanced’s new publisher, doesn’t have the resources to put into a game like this… and on current form, they seem to be struggling with just an upgraded version of Shenmue III. And how can YSNet go to any publisher, or any investor at all, with cap in hand and say: “can we have all of this money to make the fourth part of a game series when parts one through three, and an anime adaptation, all failed?”
Photo: YSNet
Shenmue is kind of notorious in the industry, too, as “the game that killed the Dreamcast.” That title isn’t entirely fair… but it isn’t entirely undeserved, either. In short, any investor or publisher who knows *anything* about gaming is going to take one look at Shenmue IV and turn it down hard. Why invest ten-plus million dollars into a project that won’t earn its money back? Under the best possible circumstances, Shenmue IV might break even. But that’s not exactly a great pitch to investors, is it?
In any case, all of this was meant to be the preamble to my *main* point; the topic of this article. If, by some absolute miracle, the stars align for Yu Suzuki and Shenmue IV is able to enter development… it simply must bring the saga to an end.
What’s the key thing that YSNet – and Shenmue fans – have learned from the crowd-funding campaign, from the port of Shenmue I & II, from Shenmue III, and from the anime? Most people, as sad and disappointing as this may be, don’t care about Shenmue, won’t show up for Shenmue, and won’t spend a penny on Shenmue.
Under those circumstances, there is less than a microscopic chance that Shenmue IV does what none of those other projects was able to do. There’s a reasonably high chance that the game doesn’t even make its money back. So the fourth game *needs* to be the end.
None of us are getting any younger. Yu Suzuki is pushing 70 years old, and time catches up to all of us in the end. Shenmue III has been kicking around for seven years, at this point, and we’re still no closer to a sequel. A fourth game would be in the exact same situation – and many of us just don’t have fifteen or twenty more years to wait. If we follow a similar timeframe to Shenmue III, and pretend that Shenmue IV will be announced tomorrow… that means it’ll be ready for release in late 2030 or early 2031, and if it takes seven-plus years after *that* before a potential fifth game could be greenlit… well, Yu Suzuki would be 83 or 84 before Shenmue V would be ready. Continuing the saga at that pace seems completely unrealistic to me.
And I have a stake in this, too.
I’m on the wrong side of forty myself, and in the 2010s I was diagnosed with arthritis. Arthritis is already affecting my hands and fingers, limiting my ability to play games – especially for long periods of time or with demanding multi-button combos and time-sensitive button presses. I might make it to the 2030s and still be able to play, all being well, but if we start talking about a potential fifth game that might not launch till the 2040s? If I’m even still alive by that point – which, given my other health issues, is sadly not a guarantee – I really don’t know how well I’d be able to hold a game control pad or interact with brand-new games.
So this isn’t just me saying “what if Yu Suzuki retires;” this is me saying… I want to see this story come to an end, and if it’s going to be in video game form, I want to still be well enough and healthy enough to play that game. I don’t have another ten or fifteen years to wait before, to be realistic, that may no longer be possible for me.
So this piece is really a plea to Yu Suzuki and YSNet.
If you’re able to get the funding together to make Shenmue IV – and, despite everything we’ve discussed, I really hope that you are – then please, *please* take the opportunity that you missed in the 2010s and find a pathway to the end of Ryo’s story that can fit within the confines of a single game. Don’t make the same mistake again of assuming a new game will bring in untold legions of brand-new players, because I can promise you now that *it will not*. Shenmue is a niche saga with a small but devoted fanbase. If you have a chance to make a game, make it for us.
I want to clarify what I’m really asking for and what I mean when I say that the gameplay and story can and should be cut down, for the avoidance of any confusion.
Cutting down the story doesn’t mean we need to skip entire chapters of the game – skipping, say, all of chapters nine through thirteen. What it means is finding the most important narrative points for Ryo’s journey and building the game around them. Look at what Shenmue II did – there was a whole sub-story that took place on the boat to Hong Kong that was never adapted and didn’t make it into the final game. Why was that content cut? Because it was ultimately not necessary to Ryo’s story of revenge against Lan Di and the mysteries of the mirrors.
I still haven’t played Shenmue III, so I can’t say for *certain* that things like turtle-racing mini-games or the wood-cutting side-job are totally unnecessary to the story. But… it seems to me like *those* are where I’d start cutting if I were the one in charge of swinging the narrative and gameplay axes. There will be similar things in the planned continuation of the saga – places where cuts could be made to move things along at a way more reasonable pace.
There are many, many ways to cut down a game to save money on development *and* to ensure a complex story can fit in the confines of a single title. Use of generative A.I. tools is a controversial topic among some players, but given YSNet’s size and resources, a smaller indie studio – in my opinion, anyway – gets a bit more leeway and more of a free pass when it comes to their use. Generative A.I. has so many uses in the game development space, but one place where I could see it being incredibly useful for a cut-down Shenmue IV would be in cut-scenes. Shenmue already has its anime spin-off, so why not make cut-scenes that take place in between different areas or levels using that art style? Those sequences could convey key story points that weren’t able to be part of the game.
Then there’s combining different storylines. Instead of Ryo racing to another new location to track down a missing person, why not have that person be present in the town where Ryo already is? The boss battle from one area could be relocated to fit in a different one, and instead of having two towns for Ryo to travel between, why not stick with the same one? When I think back to Shenmue II, just as an example, it would’ve been possible to cut basically all of the Kowloon section of the game and have the Dou Niu/Yuanda Zhu arc take place in either the existing map or a much smaller side-area. That’s the kind of thing I mean.
And narratively… at this point, we’ve seen Ryo embark on this quest, encounter setbacks, and then seem to spin his wheels a bit. A tighter, more focused narrative would probably have to cut back on secondary characters, keeping Ryo and his quest front-and-centre. I don’t know what the ending is meant to look like, so I can only speculate about what kind of cuts would need to be made to the story. But there has *got* to be a way to get Ryo to his conclusion within the runtime of a single title.
Then we come to other ideas. Returning to a Dreamcast-esque visual style would probably cut down on development costs in some ways; the more complicated the tech, the more expensive it is to work with, as a general rule. Instead of having larger, expansive areas to explore, Shenmue IV could be much more linear, with smaller levels and a lot of exploration cut out.
Maybe that wouldn’t be “perfect,” nor true to the original style of the games… but if it’s this or nothing, what would you rather have?
That was the question that no one asked Yu Suzuki in 2015. If the choice is either cutting out a bunch of superfluous content or never making it to the end of the story, what should you choose? I know what I’d want to see – but that’s exactly the same red line I had back in the 2010s, and apparently everyone involved with the project went the other way.
I’ve said this before, but I don’t want to let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough,” to butcher an old saying. If the choice is a cut-down, smaller version of Shenmue IV that brings Ryo’s story to an end, or the desperate hope that the fourth game will *finally* be the moment where the series clicks for audiences, bringing in tons of players and cash to make a fifth or even sixth instalment… I know what I’d want YSNet to choose. I know what I’d want to see the fan community argue for, too. But I still feel, even seven years on from Shenmue III’s very real failure to do any of that, that Yu Suzuki still doesn’t agree. He has a vision of what the saga should look like, how many chapters it should encompass, how it should play, and how the story should unfold… and he doggedly refuses to deviate from that. You could call that admirable. Or you could call it idiotic to the point of being delusional.
In my view, Shenmue III should’ve been the end of the story… but it wasn’t. And if its failure hasn’t completely killed the saga, and if Ryo is granted a reprieve that – from a financial and a business standpoint – he simply has not earned… then that task will fall on the shoulders of Shenmue IV. That game, if it ever makes it to production, needs to bring the saga to a belated end.
If Yu Suzuki and YSNet can’t see that reality, then the series will *never* be finished.
I’ve chosen to write this now partly to get my thoughts in order, partly as a way to air some of the feelings I had a decade ago that I didn’t get to share… and partly as a last-ditch plea to anyone reading who might have some sway over YSNet or the future production of a fourth Shenmue game. For all of the reasons we’ve discussed… Shenmue IV must be the final chapter. If you’re lucky enough to get one last chance to conclude a story that I first got invested in more than a quarter of a century ago, please don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. Please be realistic about what this series is capable of and what it isn’t. And please, please… let us belatedly see the final chapter and bring Ryo’s quest to its conclusion. That’s all I want.
Thank you for reading. I realise this isn’t a *fun* topic, exactly, but I think this plea needed to be made and some of these things needed to be said. As much as I admire some folks in the fan community for being cheerleaders for Shenmue and doing what they can to draw attention to it, I think “toxic positivity” can creep in, sometimes – and some fans just have completely unrealistic expectations or ideas about how and where the saga should proceed. This criticism of Shenmue III and my plea for Shenmue IV to bring the story to an end genuinely come from a place of love, and from my desire to finally see Ryo get the conclusion that I’ve been waiting for since the turn of the millennium.
If you missed it, I recently talked about Shenmue II to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary. You can find that article by clicking or tapping here. And back in January, I talked about the hoax Shenmue IV trailer. You can find that piece by clicking or tapping here – though there’s some overlap with this article, so be warned! All of my other pieces about Shenmue can be found on my dedicated Shenmue page – click or tap here to head over there.
Thanks again for joining me. Hopefully, one day, if the stars align… we can all have one more adventure with Ryo. As sceptical as I am, I’m crossing my fingers and hoping for some good news.
Shenmue I & II and Shenmue III are out now for PC and PlayStation 4/5. Shenmue III Enhanced is coming soon for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and Nintendo Switch 2. The Shenmue saga – including all properties discussed above – is the copyright of YSNet, ININ Games, and/or Sega. Some images, screenshots, and artwork courtesy of Sega, YSNet, Shenmue Dojo, and Wandering Through Shenmue on YouTube. Some photos may have been upscaled using A.I. tools. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
