Yokosuka wrote: Thanks a French article, I now understand why he talked about 16 chapters. In fact, it has always been 11+5 chapters. The 5 chapters were bridges between the main chapters. That's why we had the boat and the train as unique chapters.
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1) From the Dreamcast Official US magazine 2000 November uploaded by Telekill ( viewtopic.php?f=3&t=48738 )
Shenmue 1 : Chapter 1 to 5
Shenmue 2 : Chapter 6 to 10
Shenmue 3 : Chapter 11 to 16
with Shenmue 3 supposed to be the last episode.
2) Then we got this image from AM2 according Shenmue Master
and the following informations :
Chapter 1 Yokosuka
Chapter 2 The boat (cancelled)
Chapter 3 Aberdeen
Chapter 4 Wan Chai
Chapter 5 Kowloon
Chapter 6 Guilin
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
3) Then the 16 chapters became 11 in 2014 :
4) The last Yu's tweet answer after the kickstarter :
https://twitter.com/yu_suzuki_jp/status ... 9539212288
5) Nico Nico interview https://youtu.be/IntCDAc6c8Y?t=50m00s (from Switch's translation)
Chapter 1 Yokosuka.
Chapter 2 Hong Kong
Chapter 3 Train (cancelled)
Chapter 4 ?? Arrival at Guilin (moved within Chapter 2) ??
Chapter 5 Meeting Shenhua (moved or partially moved within Chapter 2)
Chapter 6 Meeting Shenhua
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
To be precise, Shenmue I is the whole of Chapter 1, as is. And Shenmue II corresponds with the Hong Kong chapter. The part about meeting Shenhua was originally in Chapters 5 and 6. I moved just the part about meeting her to Shenmue II. Actually Chapter 3 was on a train. The scenes take place inside a train. So Chapter 3 hasn’t been used at all. In total there are 11 chapters, and so I could properly visualize how they would fit together, the first thing I did was to make a novel. So that's the form I put them in, and I use it as a base reference. It's not meant to represent the exact scenarios for the game, though. I don't use it to decide "this event goes here, this quest goes here, this flag gets set here" and so on. It doesn’t directly dictate the scenarios for the game. Rather, it's one of the things I use to drive the scenarios for Shenmue. With Shenmue III, even if I forcibly took the story through to the end of Chapter 11, well... You see, I make decisions to keep or exclude various parts as I go along. Now, at this point I don't know whether Shenmue III will have 30 hours of play time or 60 hours, but if the story is forced to advance along, I could tell that this wouldn’t produce a satisfactory result as a game. So, although unfortunately the story won’t reach the end with Shenmue III, it was a decision I made for the sake of the game's quality.
6) Mon Aug 31, 2015 Kickstarter interview
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=49016
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ys ... ts/1336892
Question : Can you tell us more about the composition stage?
Yu Suzuki : Shenmue III is based on the 11 chapters created 17 years ago (1998), and each chapter is set in different regions. For example, the first chapter was set in Yokosuka, second was set in Hong Kong and so on. However with Shenmue III it won't do to complete just one chapter's worth in one region, so I have restructured the underlying story to fit the budget.