Shenmue_Legend wrote:Ideally, the fighting system should be so good that you can make the fights look like the ones during cut scenes.
This is, I think, Yu's train of thought on the matter.
But where he's diverging from most of us is that the player must be really skilled to get to that point, and I personally believe he's right considering his justification about Shenmue ultimately being an adventure game.
I know we'll replay the games over and over and put in the countless hours to get really good at more complex fighting moves, but what about the people who just play it through once? Asking them to get as good as a player at a fighting game might be a turn off, because it's maybe not really what they bought into the game for.
They could be a quick thinker who is good at other types of games, but maybe their capacity for button presses and memorisation of moves is lacking. I know there's been some talk already in this thread about it maybe "making the fighting for dumb people", but other things Yu has said indicate using your head more in combat and providing a challenge other than just being quick on the gamepad. Does that really sound like he's making it for stupid people? It sort of sounds like the opposite in some respects.
And y'know, Yu has talked about having a strong interest in making the game challenging for players who found elements of the original games easy. Scaling difficulty has secretly been one of Yu's major legacies in gaming. The basic and intermediate combat controls may be simple for most players, but what's to say there isn't something further for players with more skill?
Ultimately, Yu wants the player to feel good. It's a video game, and that's what video games are largely for. He knows this, and has been practicing this methodology for basically his entire career. You can even see this in something like After Burner with how the game would sort of lock on to enemies unbeknownst to the player so they could feel like they're good at the game. I can't really blame him for following the core pillars of how he makes video games.