Gio Corsi Visits Yu Suzuki & YS Net in Tokyo | Shenmue 3

Earlier today, Gio Corsi, Director of Third Party Productions & Developer Relations at PlayStation, visited Shenmue III's director Yu Suzuki at the YS Net offices having flown into Tokyo earlier in the week. Gio tweeted out this group photo, tagging the official Shenmue 3 account:

Link to tweet

With Gio and Yu are two other executives from Sony: John Drake, Director of Portfolio Strategy for Global Third Party Relations, and Executive Producer John Sanders.

The Shenmue III Kickstarter of course received great promotion at its launch from the Sony stage at E3 in 2015, and Team Yu has written a useful summary of how Sony's Third Party Productions came to be involved with Shenmue III here on Facebook.

Ever since, Gio Corsi and Yu Suzuki have shared photos showing visits during the game's development such as in September 2016 (Tokyo), December 2016 (California) and May 2017 (Tokyo).

Today's meeting is sure to feed speculation among Shenmue fans as to whether anything may be planned in Sony's next State of Play update (timing to be announced), for example. A major event, E3, is also imminent (11-13th June, 2019) however while it is known Shenmue III will be there, Sony has announced well in advance that they will not have a presence at E3 this year.

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A Visit to The Forbidden City | A Look Back in Time to Predict the Future!

In this post we welcome back James Brown to the blog to share a finding arising from his recent trip to The Forbidden City in Beijing.


Minor possible spoiler warning: this post contains general speculation on future Shenmue story content. (Please treat this lightly as Yu Suzuki may well have changed and/or rearranged the original story now, so events may no longer happen as illustrated).

And now, over to James!

Hello, it's James Brown here once again and I want to personally say thanks for having me back on PhantomRiverStone.com for my second guest blog post!

Today I wanted to share with the Shenmue community, something that may not have been noticed widely thus far in Shenmue history.

Back in 2014, Yu Suzuki excited fans as he took to the stage for the Shenmue Classic Game Postmortem at GDC 2014. Fans at this point were not aware of any behind-the-scenes talks about a Shenmue 3 project, and were anxious to see if it would turn out to be more than just a look back at the games now long history. As great as the presentation was, fans were disappointed that no new future Shenmue information was announced or talked about - although it's now been revealed that Yu Suzuki had a meeting at this event in a secret back room with Sony representatives Adam Boyes and Gio Corsi.

As part of the presentation, Yu Suzuki revealed an old timeline, consisting of movie poster style tiles, displaying how he originally planned the series to go through each of its installments. At this time, the game was still being referred to as Virtua Fighter RPG, and so Akira was the main character that can be seen in the images, instead of Ryo.

The illustrated tiles presented by Yu Suzuki at GDC 2014

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Gio Corsi Visiting Yu in Tokyo [May 17, 2017]

Hot off the press! Sony's Gio Corsi has tweeted out this photo taken with Yu Suzuki - accompanied by a copy of the limited edition of Shenmue.

The text reads, "Hanging with old friends talking about games!", and was copied to the official Shenmue 3 twitter account.

Gio Corsi holds the title of Director of Third Party Productions & Developer Relations
for PlayStation at Sony Interactive Entertainment America. (As well as being a lover of great ramen.)

The photo is taken in front of what looks like office cabinet doors, reflecting fluorescent strip lighting - it would seem a reasonable assumption that Gio was paying a visit to the YS Net development studio.

Gio arrived in Tokyo last week and will be in Japan through to the end of this week, for a total of two weeks.

With the E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) event now less than a month away in Los Angeles, the timing of this visit is unlikely to be coincidental and will fuel the hopes of fans that plans are being formed for Shenmue III to make an appearance in some form at the show - especially as the PSX event last year passed by without mention.

Our fingers are firmly crossed!

Link to tweet: @giocorsi

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Yu Suzuki Currently In California

Yu Suzuki has met earlier today with Gio Corsi, Director of Third Party Productions & Developer Relations. The PlayStation Offices are located south of San Francisco in California.

Gio tweeted the photo below of the occasion, mentioning that Yu even put his signature to a Ryo Hazuki forklift model. (Hopefully Yu's wrist is holding up from his daily signing of the many pieces of Kickstarter reward art!)

The smile of someone who has been treated to a preview of the latest Shenmue 3 progress?

The L.A. Kickstarter Dinner

While information has been scarce regarding the timing of the Los Angeles Kickstarter dinner reward, it is believed to have been rescheduled to some time this month, from the original tentative June timeframe,

If this is the case, with Yu in California everything seems aligned for the dinner to take place this week.

Let's see what is revealed later in this month's Kickstarter update.

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Shenmue's Absence From PSX 2016

The two-day PlayStation Experience (PSX) 2016 event took place over the weekend, and while there had been some anticipation among the Shenmue community for something new on Shenmue III to be revealed, in the end this turned out not to be the case.

I was among those who been hoping that Shenmue III would get a mention. There was the tweet from Cedric Biscay suggesting the possibility of something being shown in December, together with various other factors in the weeks and days before the event that all appeared to point to a reveal at PSX (confirmation bias!).

Furthermore, PSX seemed to "make sense" as it would have provided a high level of public exposure for the game, and timing-wise would have slotted in nicely ahead of the release of the trial version due some time in 2017.

However while the outcome is somewhat disappointing, the absence of Shenmue III from PSX was always within the realm of possibility.

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Recent sightings of Yu Suzuki

With the 2016 Tokyo Game Show in full swing, Yu Suzuki has also been out and about recently!

Visiting Tokyo Game Show, First Business Day

Suzuki's message: "Here to check out TGS. Snapped with Torishima-san :-)"

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