Whoo, first off, hey everybody. I've been lurking for years. I think the last time I actually posted was when I was in high school. Anyway.

While I love the story of Shenmue, my favorite aspect is exploration. I can seriously start up my Dreamcast and spend hours taking in the scenery, staring at the detail and love put into some of the most mundane objects. I absolutely love the opportunity to explore suburbia: the grassy plains and forests of other games bore me. Certainly someone else agrees?

So would a project like this be possible? A story-free, fan-made Shenmue game, with a completely original city to explore? Surely a large undertaking but I think TRYING would be fun at least. I would absolutely love building a detailed city. You could even use existing Shenmue resources. It'd be great to have some new area to explore. I've seen some cool fan games made in all kinds of engines, like a Silent Hill game made in the Unreal engine...why haven't any Shenmue fans attempted this?

What do you think of such an idea?

Man, I pray this leaks someday.

I thought this was a really creepy topic until I suddenly remembered you actually go and say goodbye to people.

Damn USA, get your shit together!

I'm way late to this party, but I'm a firm believer that any game could have been possible on any previous generation... story wise. If we were to take Shenmue and attempt to put it on the N64, there would have to be considerable changes made. Beyond the obvious graphical hit, Shenmue on N64 would be text based story like any Zelda game. The soundtrack would have to be compressed or even be completely redone in Midi (I personally love Midi music in many games).

I saw some art that proves that any great game could be put on just about any previous generation with serious concessions to graphics and other features. My favorite series, Uncharted, would have still been awesome on Genesis or SNES. Check out the art below:

http://oi51.tinypic.com/6oos5d.jpg

I'd totally play that! Sadly, none of the voice acting would be included as the 16bit days didn't really allow for great audio. Imagine the Uncharted theme song as a Midi file. It would be both hilarious and awesome at the same time.

It should be noted that the SNES would probably not display this nearly as well as you'd like. Interesting idea though!

Awesome interview--really makes me wish more people knew who he was, because he's a goddamn legend.

I think when I was younger I would have loved to see a lot of characters return, but thinking about it now, the concept of Ryo travelling and meeting an entire fresh cast of characters with each wildly different location is very interesting. Not only do we have the concept of a man so bent on revenge he's leaving behind all the places and friends he makes, but also a concept where each entry (or chapter if you will) represents almost kind of a new "world" each time, with new people to meet inside of them.

Disc 4 is sacred to me on a personal level. Unless a replacement is a very near match then I wouldn't be happy.
That said, what can I realistically expect after 16 years? And the fact that Shenmue 3 is even happening. Beggars can't be choosers I guess!

If I could just beg for one thing, actually, I'd really like them to get a VA for Ren that sounds a little closer to the Japanese version. What a damn fine job the Japanese VA did on Ren!

Investigating what?


1. Sega is a business. You need to remember that. They owe us nothing.
2. Shenmue is:
a. Loaded with licensed products.
b. Loaded with voice acting.
c. In a business sense, an abject failure in the past.

It's 100% reasonable (and should be expected) that Sega would need to look at this properly; they need to decide if they're going to re-new the licenses ($$$) or replace them with dummy ones, re-open past contracts with, hell, let's say a metric "fuckton" (to put it scientifically) of voice actors ($$$), consider the cost of porting it, etc., and weight that against the amount of prospective money they could even make on it, all with the "this failed once" in the back of their business-tuned minds.

Oh, no way!

The first two jars are definitely senbei (Japanese rice crackers), but I'm still not 100% sure what the blue snacks are. I will say, though, that they're definitely blue and not tinted by the glass.