FIGHTING FIT
Nestled in the mist-shrouded mountains of rural China, Bailu Village is a settlement frozen in time. People live slow lives here among rice paddies, ornate Buddhist temples, quaint cottages, and fields of colourful wildflowers. There are some clues that Shenmue 3 is set in the 1980s – a woman’s oversized glasses, a bleepy arcade game – but otherwise life here has changed very little in the past hundred years.
It’s an ideal setting for a Shenmue game, a series famous (or perhaps infamous) for its languid, aggressively deliberate pacing. This is a game as slow and meandering as the old man strolling through Bailu’s marketplace deciding which kind of steamed bun to have for lunch. And the village’s steadfast resistance to a changing world, to the creep of modernisation, neatly reflects Shenmue 3’s position itself.
From its earliest days the Shenmue series has been divisive
This unlikely sequel sticks so closely to the formula of the first two games that it’s almost as if the last 18 years of game design series has been divisive, with opinion rarely falling in the middle. You either think it’s an emotional, groundbreaking masterpiece or an indulgent, clunky mess. There’s no in-between.
