Happy Birthday Yu Suzuki!

June 10th is Yu Suzuki's birthday - Happy Birthday to Yu!

You are an inspiration to people throughout the world, and we are thrilled that the Shenmue series continues on.

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Analysis Part One: New Shenmue III Scenes from PS4 Kiosk at Walmart

Previously-unseen footage of a Shenmue III teaser has recently been discovered at a Walmart store. It was first discovered by Cebman who was visiting the games section and selected Shenmue III at a PS4 demo kiosk. To his surprise, the teaser that played contained a number of new scenes from the game. The video ends with the old release date (before its change to 19th November) and so it represents an accidental leak of a video created prior to the rescheduling. However, it does contain some exciting snippets of scenes so in this post, we'll run through and examine each of the new scenes in detail.

Thank you to yuc02 for contributing to this post and for confirming Chinese character meanings.

Notes:

• The release date advertised at the end of the teaser shows that it was created for a release of 27th August; the release date has now changed to 19th November. 
• All scenes in the video are marked "Work in progress. Game not final."
• Images in this post are of reduced quality as they are screen-grabbed from a hand-held recording of the monitor.

The video may be viewed here if you have not yet seen it, or to refresh your memory before we walk through it. (Video footage credit: praj from the Shenmue Dojo. Image stabilization has been applied).

Read on to see what tiny details are hiding in these scenes.

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Yu Suzuki on Shenmue III: Extra interview Content | Translation

Earlier this year in April, we translated Japan's Weekly Famitsu magazine interview with Yu Suzuki about the latest state of Shenmue III, from an issue of the printed magazine.

Related links:

• Yu Suzuki Speaks to Weekly Famitsu on Shenmue III: Part Two | Translation
• Yu Suzuki Speaks to Weekly Famitsu on Shenmue III: Part Two | Translation

Soon afterwards, Famitsu published a web version of this interview on Famitsu.com which excluded some parts and also contained some additional content. We've translated the extra parts below.

The interview starts off with Yu Suzuki demonstrating pre-recorded footage of his Shenmue III gameplay in Bailu village.

YS = Yu Suzuki

Q: By the way, were the motions for walking and so on motion-captured with Masaya Matsukaze this time?

YS: No, it was someone else.

Yu explains that this time, Masaya Matsukaze's performance in the game is solely for voice acting.

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Deep Silver's Shenmue III Pre-Order Page & River Li Image

Deep Silver has opened a new and sleek-looking Shenmue III pre-order page on their website, which can be accessed at shenmue3.deepsilver.com. It provides links to a number of retailers around the world, based on the country and system selected. Languages supported on the page's drop-down are English (UK), English (US), German, Spanish, Italian and French (but not Japanese, which is expected as Deep Silver is global publisher excluding Japan).

While the media section of the page does not contain any new slides (and the "View Trailer" link currently plays the Prophecy trailer from Gamescom 2018), there are a few points of interest worth highlighting.

New River Li Image

The site gives an outline of the types of locations in the game:

"Shenmue III lets players explore a gorgeous, charm-laden, and danger-filled China. From festive towns to dark and dank enemy lairs".

"Festive towns" would obviously point to Niaowu, with its brightly-lit lanterns. While no specifics are given, could the "dark and dank enemy lairs" mentioned in the site's description refer to the Chi You Men's den in Baisha..?

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Poll Result: Patrons' Choice Topic for June 2019

Every month Phantom River Stone holds a poll among our patrons to choose a topic for the blog in the coming month. The results are in for June's topic. After tallying the votes (including accumulated votes from previous months) it was a draw between topics, so Switch cast the deciding vote. And so the winning topic was...

"Was South Carmain Quarter in Wan Chai slightly mis-translated into English?"

Shenmue II's South Carmain Quarter is home to Lotus Park and is the district in which the Yan Tin apartments are located. The district name has a nice distinctive ring to it in English - but it does not quite retain the full meaning of its original name.

In this post we'll look at how the English translations of the district names match up with their original meaning in Chinese characters.

Watch for it later this month!

For early access to this and other articles published on the blog, check us out on Patreon. Link to Phantom River Stone on Patreon.

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Shenmue III Participation at E3 | Kickstarter Update #101

Hot on the heels of the previous Kickstarter Update regarding Shenmue III's revised release date comes Kickstarter Update #101, announcing that Yu Suzuki will be attending E3 2019 (June 12 - June 14). The news reads as follows:

E3 is just days away and we are planning to be in attendance. Together with Deep Silver we are now finalizing all the details.

S3 at E3

Shenmue III is scheduled to have a room in the business area open to the media. Expect to see S3 info from media around the world! (Yu Suzuki is not planned to participate in the exhibit hall events.)

E3 2019 Official Site

Thank you always for your support!

This confirms the news leaked via Twitter by a member of the press last month that Shenmue III would be playable by the press at E3.

As per today's announcement, although the game will be exhibited only in the event's business area (which is not accessible by the general public), we can look forward to reports on the gameplay by the global media attending.

Link to announcement: Kickstarter Update #101

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Shenmue III Release Date Revised to 19th November | Kickstarter Update #100

YS Net and Deep Silver yesterday released an announcement regarding a revision to the release date of Shenmue III. The revised release date is 19th November. The full text is as follows:

04 June 2019

A Message from Yu Suzuki & Deep Silver

Hello Everyone,

Today Yu Suzuki & Deep Silver would like to give a message concerning the release date.

Shenmue III will now release on 19th November 2019.

[before] August 27, 2019

[new] November 19, 2019

Whilst almost ready, the game simply needs a little more refinement before being truly finished.

We feel that the extra time we have will help us deliver the true Shenmue experience players around the world deserve!

We thank you for your patience and understanding,

Yu Suzuki & Deep Silver

This delay will no doubt come as a disappointment to fans who have been counting down the days to the previous release date since being decided in August of last year.

A complicating factor is is how this change in release period may effect Shenmue III sales and general awareness among players, in a release period where other, big-name releases may steal the limelight and headlines (Death Stranding, for example, is currently scheduled earlier in the month on November 8th).

However, out-weighing this in my eyes is that if extra work is required on the game, then spending the extra time is the right decision. The alternative - releasing before the critical eye of the public a game that lacks polish, or worse, one that suffers from obvious bugs from the outset - could seriously damage its reputation. After such a long wait for this game, it would be a shame for it to be compromised for the sake of a few months and I trust that Yu Suzuki has our best interests in mind.

As a side-note, when the original release of Shenmue in Japan was delayed in 1999, the What's Shenmue demo was distributed on the originally-scheduled release date to people who had pre-ordered. I would love to see something similar done for the timing of the "Shenmue III demo" reward for backers, but this would of course depend on developer resources.

No mention was made in the announcement of plans for next week's E3 (June 11 - 13), although we know that Shenmue III will be playable by members of the press. The change of date will no doubt affect the way in which Shenmue III gets marketed at Gamescom 2019 (August 21-24), and other later events also now come into the picture such as Paris Games Week (October 30).

Link to announcement: Shenmue III Kickstarter Update #100

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Shenmue Passport: Hidden F355 Challenge Feature

The topic for this article was selected by patron vote during our monthly topic poll. To help support the blog and vote for a topic you'd like to see, check out our PRS Patron page.

Shenmue and  F355 Challenge, another game created by Yu Suzuki, have several elements in common as we looked at in the previous post.

• Related post: Shenmue's Ties to F355 Challenge

One of these is an hidden menu item that can be accessed only in the Japanese version of the Shenmue Passport (with a VMU holding F355 Challenge driving data) that allows players to graphically review their driving performance.

In this post, we'll translate the manual that accompanies the Japanese Shenmue Passport disc to outline these driving analysis functions.

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