With the unskippable scenes, it’s a lot of downtime. But instead of running around at your own pace, you’re forced to follow Shenhua - you’ll run into a ton of invisible walls if you try to wander off - and question a lot of the villagers, who more or less tell Ryo to piss off as soon as he says hello. It’s the hour before you get to play all the mini-games, basically. The objective is to find the bookie with a scar, but my gameplay demo featured an earlier sequence when you’re headed to the village to look for clues about Shenhua’s father, only to discover that two thugs have ransacked one of the villagers’ homes. Searching for Shenmue 3 demo footage today will bring up videos of Ryo and Shenhua at a small bridge, a short cutscene of Shenhua heading onto the next settlement, and then Ryo wanders around playing dice, getting into punch-ons and losing at various mini-games. If this seems at odds with the Shenmue 3 gameplay you’ve seen online, there’s a good reason why. That’s super jarring given Shenmue 3 is a slowly paced game: you’re often waiting for animations to finish, fight scenes go into bullet time so you can input button combos, and many of the voiceovers and cut scenes are unskippable. All of the cut scenes also have really hard cuts. Over the course of the first half hour, I counted four separate scenes where Ryo and Shenhua chat on the run, stop, then start chatting again. There’s not some AI bug that’s just pushing them down the road and the in-game camera has to keep up: the designers choose where the characters stand, where the camera goes, and whether they move or not. Why would they talk on the road, stop over something fairly nondescript, and then keep walking again? The characters aren’t doing this of their own accord. The conversation keeps going, but then before the scene ends, the two start walking again. Halfway through the scene, the pair stop walking. In one of the first scenes, Ryo and Shenhua are walking down the road while they talk. And what I can’t get over is how inconsistent the scenes actually are. There’s a lot of stopping and starting in the first half hour, because every 40 or 50 metres you walk there’s another cut scene with Shenhua. Having seen most of that, I focused on advancing Ryo’s search for the bookie as quickly as possible, working my way to the marshal hall, which meant a lot of running back and forth with Shenhua that I never saw in the original streams of the Kickstarter demo. Most backers focused on all the mini-games you could play around Baidu Village, like turtle racing, Lucky Hit, and so on. It was a chance to see how the game holds up on the PS4 Pro - I’d previously seen it running on a high end PC - but also a chance to practice my kung fu. Kickstarter backers got their hands on a demo back in late September, but a slightly different demo was playable for two hours at a recent preview showcase held by the company’s local distributor, Koch Media. ![]() Shenmue 3 is in a similar boat, at least in the early hours of the game. So Bioware Austin makes do with what they have. It’s kind of a necessary evil, because the characters are meant to be static in the physical space where they are – you run up to the quest point or the quest NPC, and everything operates from that space.
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