I've been sitting on this post for about a week now because I wanted to see if the excitement would wear off before I wrote anything. It hasn't.
If you were anywhere near gaming Twitter on June 15th you already know what I'm talking about. Sony's E3 press conference, the one that's usually just trailer after trailer with barely any breathing room, and then Yu Suzuki walks out on stage looking like he can't quite believe it either, and says the words "Shenmue III" into a microphone. The crowd loses its mind. I was watching the stream at my desk around 9pm and I actually stood up out of my chair, which is not a thing that happens to me during press conferences anymore. I'm 34. I have a mortgage. And I stood up.
For anyone who wasn't playing Dreamcast in 2000 (RIP), Shenmue and its sequel are this weirdly slow, weirdly detailed open-world game about a guy named Ryo looking for the men who killed his father, except along the way you're also opening cash register drawers in a toy shop, driving a forklift for a shipping company, and playing a dice gambling minigame I sank probably forty hours into and never got good at. It ends on a cliffhanger. A real one, not a "sequel bait" one — Shenmue II just stops, mid-story, and that's been it for fifteen years. I imported the Xbox release of the second game from a shop in Hong Kong back in the day because it never came out in the US and I didn't care, I needed to know what happened next. I still don't know.
So when the Kickstarter went live that same night with a two million dollar goal, I didn't even think about it, I just backed it right there on my phone before I'd gotten up off the couch. Turns out I wasn't alone. The thing blew past a million dollars in something like four and a half minutes, which is apparently some kind of crowdfunding record, and cleared the full two million goal before the day was even over. I've watched a lot of Kickstarters come and go and I've never seen one move like that.
Ten days later it's still climbing, stretch goals keep unlocking (English dub, extra areas, all the stuff you'd expect), and I keep refreshing the page like a weirdo even though refreshing it doesn't actually do anything except tell me the number went up again.
Here's my one complaint, and it's a real one: a Kickstarter isn't a finished game. I know that. Everyone backing this knows that, or should. We've all watched crowdfunded projects turn into multi-year delays or just quietly vanish. Yu Suzuki hasn't directed a game in close to a decade. The budget here, even fully funded, is a sliver of what a AAA game costs now, which means this is going to look and play more like a mid-2000s game than whatever Bethesda or Naughty Dog puts out this year. Honestly I'm fine with that — I'd rather it stay weird and slow and a little janky, the way the originals were, than get smoothed into something generic. But I'm backing this on faith and nostalgia, not because I have any real evidence it's going to be good. Worth saying out loud, mostly to myself.
Unrelated tangent, but I still have my actual Dreamcast in a box in the closet and I periodically think about pulling it out and never do, because the last time I hooked up an old console to a modern TV the picture looked like it was being broadcast through a fish tank. Some things just get left behind, I guess, and I've made my peace with composite cables not being one of the fights I want to pick this year.
Anyway. I backed it at the tier that gets you a digital copy and your name in the credits, which feels like the right amount of money to spend on being seventeen years late to a cliffhanger. If you're one of the tens of thousands of people who also backed this in the last week and a half. Hi. See you in the comments arguing about whether Ryo should still be wearing that green jacket in 2015.