Let me be blunt, Shenmue III is a terrible game. Like irredeemably bad. And it pains me to say this, since legions of Shenmue haters will no doubt take this opportunity to declare the whole series a garbage heap. So let me be clear: I love Shenmue I & II, and it’s undeniable that the first game was completely revolutionary. But Shenmue III shakes up the formula in a big way, and in doing so, fails to deliver a crucial element core to the original games’ appeal.

At first glance, Shenmue III appears to be exactly what we were expecting: a continuation of Shenmue’s story, more of less the same game we could have gotten in the early 2000’s. Except it isn’t quite that, because combat in that game would have been skill-based and fun, while the combat in this game is a sloppy wet mess.

Yep, you read that right: They ruined the fighting gameplay in Shenmue III. The series that began development as a Virtua Fighter RPG is absolutely no fun to play in the one area which you’d expect it to shine. Series creator Yu Susuki did not translate over the combat system from Shenme II into an updated game engine, instead opting to overhaul it completely.

Apparently in an effort to make Shenmue more accessible to a wider audience, a new “simplified” combat system was implemented, one that jettisons all skill-based fighting gameplay. The result being that it is not possible to fight well in this game, and outcomes of fights are entirely dependent on Ryo’s stats and the stats of his opponent(s). It’s such a horrendous design decision, it basically kills the entire experience.

Instead of combat controls giving you four buttons corresponding to Punch, Kick, Throw, and Dodge like in the first two games, Shenmue III instead turns all four face buttons into generic “Attack” inputs. Thus in order to “simplify” combat, the game combines four basic and easily understandable commands into four arbitrary buttons of randomness. The in-game instructions actually encourage you to just mash buttons and see what happens. No really, that is not a joke.

Without a dedicated Punch button and Kick button, it’s pretty difficult to guess what kind of move your inputs might produce, let alone remember how to perform any specific techniques. They also removed directional inputs from the system altogether, so there’s literally no context for anything. Actually performing moves now involves a random sequence of nonsense inputs. For example, pressing X, O, O does an elbow attack, pressing X, X does a sweep kick, and pressing X, X, ▢, ▢ performs the Tornado Kick. You basically have to rely on the Auto-Attack button to consistently perform the few moves you really want to use.

This nonsensical mess is already infuriating, but wait, it gets worse! Due to the way Shenmue III’s combat system uses a string of 2-4 button presses to determine what move is actually performed, there is a HUGE lag time between input and execution—I’m talking like a full second here! Because of this delay, it is absolutely impossible to react to anything your opponent does. Not that visual cues would be much help here, since fights look so floaty and lifeless. Whether a blow connects, get blocked, or whiffs completely, the animations will fully play out regardless, resulting in an ugly-looking, disconnected mess. Despite the series’ history, I’d argue that the combat system doesn’t even qualify as 3D fighting gameplay this time around.

So yeah, the combat sucks now. I guess I’ll call this Strike One. Though if I’m being honest, ruining the fighting this badly is unforgivable and ultimately disqualifying. (But if you still feel like reading on from here, have at it!)

As previously mentioned, outcomes of all fights are entirely dependent on the combatants’ stats. It would appear that the developers focused their efforts on Stat/Level building this time, instead of refining combat. Unfortunately this approach means a lot of grinding, which is completely devoid of fun. Players can slowly increase Ryo’s attack and endurance stats by playing three terrible and overly simplistic mini-games over and over and over again. (And by “slowly” I mean the stats increase at an excruciatingly, glacially slow pace.)

Here’s Ryo’s robust kung fu training regiment:

Horse Stance

In this mini-game you intermittently tap the X Button in order to bend Ryo’s knees and keep his squat stance suitably low. There’s a colored line overlaid on screen for you to follow that changes green to red to indicate how you’re doing. And it’s exactly as interesting as that sounds.

While the exercise depicted is basic martial arts, and arguably the most fundamental physical training possible, it is also super boring. Its gamification here does nothing to make the task more interesting or engaging. So without the physical experience of actually doing the horse stance yourself, this mini-game amounts to nothing more than mind-numbing tedium. (A criticism which one could extend to this game as a whole.)

One-Inch Punch

A timing-based mini-game that comes the closest to approximating the thinnest veneer of fun. Two vertical lines sweep in from the sides of your target and you want to press X at the exact moment the meet in the center. This task at least gives the impression that your timing and reaction speed is being tested. Might as well get that in now since IT’S ENTIRELY ABSENT FROM COMBAT!

Any enjoyment derived from One-Inch Punch evaporates quickly. While it would probably make a decent WarioWare microgame—played for 5 seconds and quickly followed by something else—Shenmue III forces you to play this game repeated for couple minutes each time. And you really have to grind all three of these a lot if you want to progress through the story.

Rooster Step

OK, the third training mini-game is somehow the worst. You would think it’d be hard to conceive of a training mini-game that’s even duller than Horse Stance, and yet they managed to pull it off. Rooster Step consists of Ryo walking in a circle, that’s it.

But wait, this mini-game is even worst still! You don’t actually control Ryo in the Rooster Step game. Ryo just walks around in a circle automatically, while you control a green line on the floor like a clock hand, trying to keep it pointed through the middle of Ryo’s stance. This is strange for a couple reasons. First, it’s both boring and feels bad to play; swinging a clock hand icon around a fixed circle is janky and surprisingly unpleasant. But more importantly, it’s the only time in a Shenmue game in which you don’t control Ryo, and this breaks the consistency of the game as a whole.

The whole point of Shenmue is live out Ryo’s adventure through his eyes. That’s why his character is so thin on personality; he’s mostly a blank slate for the player to inhabit. Throughout every part of Shenmue—from training, to fighting, to driving a forklift, drinking canned beverages, using vending machines, playing arcade games, asking random citizens if they know any sailors, etc.—you interact with the world as Ryo does. Then suddenly, for this one mini-game, Ryo does his own thing and you just control an icon on the floor. The dissonance it creates is extremely jarring, like having an out of body experience. It just happens to be the most boring out of body experience imaginable.

If the new combat system wasn’t already the worst element in Shenmue III, the food/stamina system would definitely be it. Ryo’s stamina now depletes gradually over time, which is just awful. Running from place to place, as video game players are wont to do, will quickly drain your stamina, leaving on the verge of collapsing with just a quick jog to the town square. (This is especially true at the beginning of the game, before you’ve started grinding away at mini-games to raise your endurance.) The result being that you are forced to walk casually about the game world, taking your time to enjoy the natural vistas and maybe collect herbs as you go. That might almost be relaxing, if it wasn’t completely infuriating.

You need to eat food in order to gain your stamina back, which I hate. If the combat system was Strike One, then the stamina system is Strike Two. It wouldn’t necessarily be terrible if food was readily available and nourishing; like if one apple and banana provided enough fuel to sustain Ryo for a day. But alas, that’s not the case, as most simple foods in the game provide hardly any sustenance. (Only fermented garlic, for some reason, provides a tangible boost.) Also, only special energy drinks can be used to recover health in the middle of a fight, so be ready for that crap.

So your stamina depletes over time and you have to eat food to gain it back, but—oh yeah!—that means you have money to buy food. And you know what Ryo doesn’t have? Money. You can do jobs like chopping wood or selling herbs, but the payout for the work Ryo does is barely sufficient to pay for food, let alone to cover the added expenses that crop up in the course of the story.

It soon becomes clear that this game wants you to take your chances playing gambling mini-games in order to pay your bills. However, even the in-game economy has been made extra convoluted this time around. No gambling activities allow you to bet cash on anything, instead requiring you to use tokens. Despite gambling being much more straightforward in previous titles, this game opts to muddy the financial waters.

In order to make money through gambling you must:

Exchange money for tokens
Use tokens to play a gambling game
Win the gambling game to gain more tokens
Take tokens to a prize exchange and be awarded some random prize
Take the prize to pawnshop and sell it for cash

Thus Shenmue III’s economic cycle of Money > Tokens > Prizes > Pawnshop > Money is unnecessarily drawn out.

Now I will admit that I genuinely enjoy the wood chopping mini-game. It feels like a classic Shenmue diversion and the arcade-like music that kicks in when you’re doing well is pretty sick. But as a source of income, it just pays so, so badly. Plus your tolerance for shallow mini-games is going to be strained by those “training” exercises, so you might not be able to stomach it.

Foraging for herbs is, shockingly, the best division in the game. The environments of Shenmue III are well realized and legitimately beautiful, so collecting herbs from the side of trails and outskirts of town provides some extra incentive to explore, to see the sights. If you manage to collect a big enough variety, you can also sell herb sets for a decent payday, so foraging might be the only thing keeping Ryo alive.

Did you love playing Hang On and Space Harrier in the previous games? Well too bad, because there are no Sega classics in this game.

One thing Shenmue III manages to do better than previous entries is giving the player some options to skip ahead in time, or jump Ryo to certain places the game knows you need to go. This is handy when, for example, someone you’re looking for won’t be back at their shop until 8PM. It’s also nice at the end of the day when you can simply warp back to Shenhua’s house. These quality of life improvements are much appreciated.

It sounds like some players have complained about the English dialogue spoken in this game being awkward, poorly acted, and/or outright nonsensical. And to these folks I’d like to say, “Yeah, obviously. But you’re doing this wrong: subs before dubs.” Back in Dreamcast days, we had no choice but to play the game horribly dubbed in English. We don’t have to go through that anymore. Take it from me, the dialogue works a hell of a lot better in Japanese. And it’s performed better too.

That said, this game’s cutscenes are still super stilted. They’re also often bizarrely directed, with several weird cuts right in the middle of conversations. This seems like the biggest way in which Shenmue III carries on the series’ traditions, as the storytelling has always been slow, and not often particularly smooth. Shenmue loves drawing things out, diving into minutia and sidetracks, and just generally showing little respect for the player’s time. I am happy to report, however, that the late night conversations between Shenhua and Ryo are actually pretty charming, and went a long way towards endearing me to these characters.

Ok, so combat totally sucks and the stamina/food element is garbage, but this game might still be worth playing if you’re invested in the story and characters of Shenmue, right? Uh well…not exactly. But that brings us to Strike Three: this game doesn’t progress the story in any meaningful way. It appears to be almost entirely filler, just padding out the overall narrative.

Oh, I’m sorry, did you think Shenmue III would wrap up an epic gaming trilogy? Hahaha, no! Yu Susuki has been pretty clear in saying that Shenmue’s story has 11 chapters and that he imagined it would likely take five games to tell the complete tale. So rather than this game concluding the epic story we’ve been waiting two decades to see play out, it just keeps the engine idling until Shenmue IV.

Since nothing of consequence occurs in this game, you could easily skip it and just pick things up at Shenmue’s next iteration. And you know, that is genuinely disappointing. We waited for this game for nearly 20 years, we’ve hoped and dreamed that we could play it, some of us (myself included) even backed the Kickstarter campaign for it.

We asked for more Shenmue and we did technically get more Shenmue. But our collective wish on a monkey’s paw came at a terrible price, as the game we’ve received hasn’t grown with us in the interim. It does nothing to adapt mechanics and elements done better by other games released within the last 18 years—Will someone please have Mr. Suzuki play a Yakuza game, thanks!—nor does it entirely stay the course.

The real problem with Shenmue III in that everything new in the game is bad. The combat system, the stamina element, the in-game economy, and ultimately the story itself; it’s all worse than what we played in Shenmue I & II. Updated visuals are nice, but sadly the magic of the originals is gone.

I love Shenmue and consider myself to be a diehard fan. However, if further installments are going to play like this game—with its lousy, insipid combat system—you can count me out. I’m fairly confident the story conclusion my brain has come up with over the last two decades is better than what Mr. Suzuki actually has in store for us anyway.