Are you getting the t-shirt from the kickstarter also, Segata? What's in the custom case in the upper left?
Reprise wrote:I'll avoid spoilers, but it turns out there's a part in the story that requires you to search Tao's and various general stores. The interactions become available in that section of the game and seem to remain available following that part of the story.
Ah, okay. I was kind of thinking that it could be something that opened up after a period of time, but it just seemed weird for that to be the case in that shop.
What in-game day is everyone on? I'm just about to hit April 1st, and still have some areas of Hakkason that aren't available yet, it seems like. It feels like the days just fly by compared with the other two games. I never really do any time skipping, either. I'm a little concerned about hitting an end screen later in the game, because I took too long. I don't know if it would make any difference that I've found Shenhua at this point, and those endings wouldn't make quite as much sense, but it's still a minor concern I have.
I did get that white lure, and I even completed the work vehicle set twice over. I guess the nice thing is that the sets are all worth enough this time to actually make it profitable to go after those ultra rare ones. I do kind of wish that instead of making a bunch of really small sets, there had just been a few different machines that had multiple groups in them. Like, put all the 2 yuan gacha into a single machine, all the 5 yuan gacha into a single machine, etc. At that point they could raise the odds on the rare ones a little bit, and it might not feel as disheartening to just get an Ine-san, or orange lure/racket over and over again. Another minor complaint I have is that the pachinko physics feel kind of messed up. I'm not surprised that they're different from Shenmue II, but the ball just has way too much energy. I could usually find a route to a certain winning slot, in the boards in Shenmue II, that would get me more winning results than losing, but in these ones it feels like the ball can just go almost anywhere, from almost any starting position. I can still kind of luck in to wins a lot of the time, but it doesn't feel as worth doing, or as fun as in Shenmue II, which is unfortunate. Especially with the boards that have actual prizes, but they're only worth the amount it costs to play. I've just been playing them to get the trade-in set for a scroll. I guess there was actually one other little thing that was kind of bothering me, but it seems like it's just a new tradition in modern games: Having a bunch of items that serve the same function, but at slightly different costs, and generally in a less economically efficient way than other, stronger items. I don't get this. It bugged me way more in The Outer Worlds, because that game is just overwrought with a bunch of functionally useless items, I just feel like any gains that might be had by giving the player options for consumables is undone by unnecessarily padding the pool of available items. At least the nick-knacks have some other purposes besides just being "junk."
These complaints aren't reflective at all of my enjoyment of the game, though. They're just little niggles--every time I use this word I seem to look up the etymology just to convince myself that it
probably wasn't derived from hate speach--that I occasionally think about while playing.
Did anyone give the forklift toy back to the kid, by the way? I still have it in my inventory because he was inside his house, blocked by his blind, deaf, and dumb grandmother when I wanted to give it back to him, and the next day I guess I progressed the scenario beyond the point that I could actually give it to him. I had the most hysterical conversation with him, about the birds and the bees, though, involving the story of Momotaro. It's probably the hardest a video game's dialogue has made me laugh in quite a long time. I was also tickled pink by Ryo describing to Shenhua why he wished he could get potato chips from the shops in Hakkason.
Which actually brings me back to Shenhua; I'm a bit conflicted by this iteration of her. Part of me feels like--and I don't really want to say it because her new VA had that message to the fans saying she hoped she could fill the shoes of the VA from II--that it might be on the acting, or the acting director. She feels a little more listless and fragile in III. Shenhua in Shenmue II felt more lively, and with a lot more inner strength than she does this time around. I'm hopeful that it's just concern for her father, at this point in the story, that's driving that feeling, but we'll see. I do really enjoy how things like the way she wakes Ryo up in the morning, or how she sends him off when he leaves for town kind of change as their bonds grow through the conversations each night. It's also starting to annoy me the way she says "Ryo." She always has that little pause between it and whatever she says before, and the way she says his name always sounds exactly the same. Like, there's no variation in intonation at all. It's like they only ever recorded her saying his name once, and spliced that into all of her dialogue.
Speaking of those kinds of subtle details, it's nice to see that as the Maho, and Sunken skills grow through training, that they start to look a bit tighter, and cleaner, kind of like how move animations would change with greater proficiency levels in Shenmue I (I couldn't really tell if they did that at all on Shenmue II, though). I've only really noticed the bar for Maho get lower, but Ryo's Sunken really went from just a close range punch, to really driving his shoulder forward after rotating his hips, and finishing with his body facing the camera. It's getting a lot more reminiscent of Bruce Lee's form. This Hardest difficulty is really firggin' hard, though. I take like one or two solid hits from an enemy, and I'm down into red health. I'm trying to beat Byakko, at the moment, to get to 4-dan, but I can only seem to get him to about a third of his health. My kung fu is level 8 I think (level 5 attack, and level 4 constitution). I really love the BGM in combat, though. Damn is that a hot ass jam! All of the music is pretty glorious, though.
Anyone ready to call this the best game in the series yet? I keep feeling like it could get there, but something is holding me back from putting it above II. Maybe it's just that II has been so close to my heart for so long, but it does feel like I could end up basically having to seat this above it as the best game of all time. I did a really bad thing, that I'm really upset with myself about: I looked at the metacritic pages for Shenmue III. Basically seems like my fears about it not being given a fair shake weren't unfounded. My favorite non-review is, 'This would have been a good game X (5 to 15) years ago.'
Is there another video game franchise where people seem to want to troll the fans more than with Shenmue? Sonic, maybe?
