It’s been a little over a year since the Kickstarter for Shenmue 3 launched, and series creator Yu Suzuki has now released a short video update for us.
As the long awaited sequel to two fantastic cult games on the Dreamcast, Shenmue 3 absolutely obliterated its Kickstarter targets not long after its announcement at E3 2015.
Recalling the past year, Suzuki said:
Your cheers at the Sony announcement still ring in my ears. Since then, we have been gradually bringing on new project members.
Late last year, we began using Shenmue 2 characters to do simple battle and conversation tests on UE4.
Suzuki then confirmed that everything has started to fall into place, and the entire team are optimistic that Shenmue 3 won’t disappoint.
He continued:
With our key developers on board, the prototype build started in January. It has been six months since the project has really taken off.
Battle and facial expressions are coming together, and cheers from the crew are growing. It makes me feel it will turn out to be a good game.
It’s certainly not a whole lot of information, but it should be enough for us to store up – like small woodland animals preparing to gather food for the coming winter months.
Alongside the video, developer Ys Net wrote that it’ll be a while before anyone sees the Kickstarter backer surveys, designed to allow backers to confirm their reward details, such as platform choice and T-shirt size.
Keep an eye on the Kickstarter Update page, or Twitter to find out as soon as a survey date is decided.
Shenmue 3 managed to bring in $6.3 million on Kickstarter, the most amount of flithy wonga that any videogame has ever earned on the crowdfunding platform.
The game currently has a tentative release date of December 2017, but don’t be surprised if it gets pushed back.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.