0rganiker wrote: It's funny, I was going to post a thread exactly like this yesterday but didn't want to take away from the excitement of the campaign ending.
This worry is legitimate, and it doesn't help that everything we hear from Yu is a translation because a lot of what he's been saying seems to suggest he will change things based on fan input.
You can see how bad this can turn out just by looking at the Star Wars prequels. It's fairly apparent that Lucas let the outside world's perception of his work affect how he went with the prequels. He ended up emphasizing certain characters that were fan favorites, even though it really didn't make sense in the context of the story. This is the worry.
I don't think anyone wants to play a game that doesn't show us anything new. One of the reasons I love the Shenmue series is because it takes me to places I wouldn't go to based on my own thoughts. I don't want to see an echo of my own vision when playing the game, I want to see what it was supposed to be.
There's also the fact that just because a lot of fans want it doesn't mean that it's the right course of action. As a teacher, I get a lot of feedback from students, and sometimes they'll have a consensus about a suggestion that I unquestionably know would be detrimental to their education. The problem is that THEY aren't teachers, so while I still listen to and value their opinions, I also know that in some cases they simply don't know what they're talking about.
You can sort of see this when it comes to Yu's reaction to Nozomi's popularity. I think the poll question was worded poorly, and should have been more along the lines of, "which character would you like to see more of?" The way Yu talks about that poll, it makes me think that was his actual question. His response about Nozomi's popularity is basically "it doesn't really make sense to bring her back." Since he knows this, it's kind of disappointing for him to see how many people like her because he can't use that for his next game.
All that said, I don't think Yu is really the type of person to let others affect his vision to a great degree. Just to be cautious, though, I feel like maybe we should find a way to make it clear that we don't want this game warping into some sort of fanfic.
WHOA whoa whoa whoa man, lets back this train on up, you are getting WAY ahead of yourself here.
1st of all the story for Shenmue is complete. Suzuki has had the story planned out for quite some time, you may want to go back and watch the postmortem of Shenmue they had last year, that was when I raised an eye brow about the possibility of there being a Shenmue 3 announcement at some point, and in that regard there were bread crumbs laid. If you watch it though, keep in mind the spoilers of the next chapters 6-11 dont really reveal too much, it shows some art work of the next few geography locales a few sketches of Ryo and his comrades at the time and vague very brief narrative description for that chapter but at that point everyone was just so interested to get some kind of media for Shenmue and there was alot of things we never saw before and it was just great great stuff, worth checking out, i'll post it below.
2nd trying to compare film and trying to compare games really isnt fair. I can understand some cinematic exceptions to that, but games and especially in regard to Shenmue, they have a different engaging atmosphere than film and its something that film just simply cannot achieve and vice versa.
I trust Yu 100% on this. I think Yu has a big opportunity to make magic happen yet again, and I dont think anything is going to get in the way of his vision, he has everything planned out, no need to worry about story changes man. The post mortem obviously has great stuff in it and it shows that Yu clearly has alot of this already planned and envisioned, just now he gets to finish it, a decade and a half later.