Back شينمو 3 Arabic شينمو 3 ARZ Shenmue III German Shenmue III Spanish شنمو ۳ Persian Shenmue III French Shenmue III Italian 쉔무 III Korean Shenmue III Dutch Shenmue III Russian
| Shenmue III | |
|---|---|
 Japanese PlayStation 4 cover art, featuring Ryo and Shenhua | |
| Developer(s) | Ys Net |
| Publisher(s) | Deep Silver |
| Director(s) |
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| Producer(s) |
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| Designer(s) | Aki Tsuchie |
| Programmer(s) |
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| Writer(s) |
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| Composer(s) | Ryuji Iuchi |
| Series | Shenmue |
| Engine | Unreal Engine 4 |
| Platform(s) | |
| Release | November 19, 2019 |
| Genre(s) | Action-adventure, life simulation, social simulation |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Shenmue III[a] is a 2019 action-adventure game developed by Ys Net, published by Deep Silver for PlayStation 4 and Windows and produced by Shibuya Productions. Like the previous Shenmue games, it consists of open-world environments interspersed with brawler battles and quick time events, with a day-and-night system, variable weather effects, non-player characters with daily schedules, and various minigames. The story continues the quest of the teenage martial artist Ryo Hazuki, who searches for his father's killer in the mountains of 1980s Guilin, China.
Yu Suzuki conceived Shenmue as a saga spanning multiple games. Shenmue and Shenmue II were developed by Sega AM2 and published by Sega for the Dreamcast in 1999 and 2001. The original Shenmue was the most expensive video game ever developed at the time, though this development also covered some of Shenmue II and groundwork for future Shenmue games. They attracted positive reviews and a cult following, but were commercial failures.
At E3 2015, following years of speculation, Suzuki launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund Shenmue III, with Sega having licensed Shenmue to Suzuki's company Ys Net. It became the fastest campaign to raise $2 million, in under seven hours, and ended the following month having raised over $6 million, making it the highest-funded video game in Kickstarter history at the time. Further funding came from Sony and Deep Silver and crowdfunding on other platforms. The development team was much smaller than that of previous Shenmue games, though key staff from the original team returned. The game was built using Unreal Engine 4.
Shenmue III was released on November 19, 2019, 18 years after Shenmue II. It received mixed reviews; some critics described it as outdated, while others praised its faithfulness to the franchise. Retail sales were low, but exclude digital sales and copies sent to Kickstarter backers.
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