Shenmue Dojo

One thing that caught my attention during the Shenmue III Kickstarter twitch, was when Yu Suzuki was talking about Nocon Kid's HD Remaster videos of Shenmue I.

I got the impression from the live English translation that perhaps Nocon Kid would be joining the team or something, saying that Yu Suzuki and he "talked about some exciting things".

But looking at a more direct translation of what Yu Suzuki said, it doesn't sound like he was trying to reveal anything in particular:

I met Nocon Kid, who is Korean, when I was over in South Korea. He spoke very enthusiastically to me on various topics. Both he and I feel very strongly about Shenmue. Since he was speaking Korean, we had an interpreter translating after each sentence and so the conversation flow was a bit delayed - but it was an enjoyable meeting.

Still, if Yu Suzuki has actually met with Nocon Kid, then maybe there's a chance that he can be part of the official project.

Very interesting.
We’re all hoping he gets hired officially…whether by Sega, for the Shenmue remasters, or by YS to work on the Shenmue 3 flashback scenes…. doesn’t matter. At his level, the dude’s no longer just “some fan” with good intentions.

Give this man a job already, FFS.

He would certainly deserve a spot on the team as atleast as a QA tester or more. Him being Korean will present a language barrier so thats the only thing I can think of that would prevent him from working on it..but besides that he's done a brilliant job and if they can get him aboard then they should try somehow.

He seems like a hard worker, maybe he could learn Japanese. it's a completely different language, but Korea still has more exposure to Japanese stuff and has more Japanese people there (and JPN speakers) than most countries.

I wish that ichi 3d guy (saw his blog before I saw that he used to post under the name Wude here) would get hired too.

They should see about hiring as many fans as possible, to go along with fan funding. Lots of dedicated and talented modders that do stuff like explore inaccessible areas and levels, switch over voice tracks between versions, I mean yeah modding is a big thing with many games, but aside from CS, usually with not games that came out in 1999! Not at the level it is with Shenmue anyway.

This was an interesting part in the stream. Something else exciting happened in the stream? I only saw a little part of it. It seemed rather boring from my understanding.

I'm curious myself as to what "exciting" things he had in mind. Considering Suzuki saw the HD remake videos himself, perhaps he will hope SEGA remakes the Shenmue games in that quality now too :-p

I wonder if he will be the one who is hired to do the flashback sequences that Suzuki has been talking about? Or maybe even a fully commissioned Shenmue remake? That would be amazing.

The thing I like about Nocon Kid's HD videos is how faithful they are to the original material. I wish he could join in the development team at some stage, at least to do some debugging and quality testing.

shenmue852 wrote: He seems like a hard worker, maybe he could learn Japanese. it's a completely different language, but Korea still has more exposure to Japanese stuff and has more Japanese people there (and JPN speakers) than most countries.

The vocabulary is completely different but at least the grammar is very similar to the point that a strictly word-for-word translation works more often than not. So I can imagine learning Japanese being, at the begining at least, much easier than learning English if his native langage is Korean.
At any rate, I really hope Nocon Kid can get on board, he's definitely earned it!

masterchan777 wrote: The thing I like about Nocon Kid's HD videos is how faithful they are to the original material. I wish he could join in the development team at some stage, at least to do some debugging and quality testing.

It's both faithful and improved actually, especially the You Arcade scene that he did, with all the additional Sega arcade games.

...Hell, Sega should just jump on the bandwagon and offer us a KS campaign for Shenmue HD remakes with Nocon on board. It’s not like we wouldn’t give millions of dollars for it.

Not to mention that Nocon’s already done a good amount of the work (and a breathtaking one at that) all by himself. IMO, they'd be flat-out stupid not to hire him.

The only thing that bothers me with Nocon Kid is that I did not see any real artistic sense in his works. But I suppose this is not that important with a lead programmer behind him.

Those HD videos were so beautiful, my gosh. It really warms my heart to think how endearing Yu Suzuki is towards his fanbase too-- especially for such a highly revered corporate figurehead. That's what makes this series so special, because people have mutual respect for eachother and their work without boundaries. It makes me sad that some media critics and their odious ilk can't see this. Where else in the gaming industry can you find this level of genius, compassion, and respect?

Suzuki just seems like such a nice, humble bloke, yeah. He must have thanked us about ten times on the stream last night. The fact that he started crying a couple of times on the stream, just goes to show how much this project means to him.

Nocon Kid is a great example of dedicated fans that would share their skill in helping out this community. His work is fantastic. He continues to use his wise talents to create such fine detail of the areas in Shenmue 1. From the arcade to the Hazuki Dojo!