Genre: Adventure
Developer: Ys Net
Publisher: Deep Silver

Where the first two games had a hundred million yen's worth of custom development, Yu Suzuki had to go the pre-packaged route this time via Unreal Engine-- and what a choice it wound up being, with areas like the hotel interior and the various building exteriors looking downright photo-realistic! Screen space reflections grace almost every surface, and on top of that the character facial models simply have to be seen to be believed. In a nod to fans, the user interface's layout, fonts and prompts were adapted from the Dreamcast originals.

Video game music has been on death watch for probably fifteen years-- but here comes Shenmue III, like a kung-fu master revealing some lost art form, with its spine-tingling, atmosphere-generating combination of traditional oriental music and melodic bass-line leading Jazz-fusion works so familiar to those who enjoyed the first two titles. Corey Marshall returns as Ryo, and the rest of the voice acting cast perfectly strikes the series balance between quality and eccentricity.

Other than shifting character and camera movement to the analog sticks, Shenmue III plays exactly like the first two games: Ryo wakes up each morning, and it's up to the player to balance practicing martial arts, exploring, obtaining clues and journal entries via other characters, and earning money. The loss of the Sega license hurts the arcades, but the new mini-games are fun. While large, the game's two areas also feel very intimate, more like the first title than the second.

There is some gating of player combat progression behind toy capsule "farming" and gambling-- at least some degree of padding seems lamentably necessary in today's video game era. But in every other respect, Shenmue III has completely side-stepped the past eighteen years' worth of medium degradation, to the point where the title looks, sounds, and feels like it came out immediately after the second game, but with a cutting edge coat of paint-- it's an almost astonishingly faithful and wonderful follow-up. Hopefully the wait for part IV won't be as long!