The deliberate pacing slows the action right down, and that is part of a ploy by Suzuki and his team to encourage you to settle into the world, but will come across as unsettling for people used to more kinetic energy in video games. ![]() In challenging the normal way that game narratives are told, Shenmue 3 immediately establishes itself as an outlier that a lot of players will struggle to get along with. Suzuki’s script is filled with repetition, conversations are the dominant way through which the narrative is pushed forward, and even the fight scenes take place in staged arenas, just as though you were watching Hamlet and Laertes have at one another. Furthermore the narrative rhythms work just like you’d expect from theatre. Though it’s a large game, it’s restrictive in scope, as though Suzuki and his team wanted to build a virtual stage for the story to play out. Shenmue 3 does aspire to be different, however. Developers aren’t restricted by a metaphoric “stage”, and have a full range of movement, props, and “camera angles and cuts” to work with. Most games aspire to be cinematic in quality, and that makes sense since games share many of the same qualities as film does. In theatre, everything from the construction of the setting to characterisation needs to be delivered through the spoken word, and that in turn means that plays are written far differently to how films are written. There needs to be a crispness to the way that lines are delivered because in comparison to cinema, theatre relies on the spoken word to a much greater extent. ![]() ![]() It’s almost stilted, without being stilted. Where cinema aims for a naturalistic flow, theatre has a rhythm that’s more deliberate. There’s a different way that stories are written, and performances need to be approached differently. The thing that immediately struck me about Shenmue 3 is just how theatrical it is. Related reading: Shenmue 1 & 2 are available on PlayStation 4 as well.
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