Shenmue III Reviews

Bro what is this game? I loved the original Shenmue games but this feels so clunky. I SO WANT to enjoy this game I really do but the amount of frustratingly boring busy work it throws at you. Plus the combat absolutely sucks. The original combat was a bit all over the place but it did at least flow. This is super janky and you often feel like you have little to no control over actually landing the hits you are trying to land. The health/hunger system sucks. The designer (who doesn't play video games) seems to think a fun and interesting gameplay loop is spending literally 3-4 hours of your play time chopping wood with a mini game or holding a squat position. Plus apparently there's not even an interesting or satisfying resolution to the story as this progresses on. I love the original 2 games. I have re-played them since the re-master release. I still really like them. This game is just frustrating. It looks beautiful and it follows the same odd janky charm that the original had but it has so many more frustrating long and just literally boring elements. Putting intentionally boring things in to pad out the gameplay length is very poor game design. Wanted to like it. I'm 8 hours in and I'm pretty much unsure if I want to commit to the rest of it now. I have limited time and I want to enjoy the games I am playing and I feel like I'm just pushing through all this tedious stuff just to get to boring frustrating fights that don't respond well to do more boring tedious stuff to then wade through disjointed surreal conversations. The first 2 were a lot more fun. This was very disapointing