I didn’t expect to like Shenmue 3. I’d been warned that the game is slow and creaky, and from images I’d glimpsed, the visuals looked like the graphical equivalent of North Korean fashion – simple and outdated. I never played the original Shenmue or its sequel, which came out in 1999 and 2001 in Japan, respectively, on the Sega Dreamcast. Back then I was watching my friend play through the four discs of Final Fantasy 8 on my PlayStation, dreaming of playing football for England, and wondering when the PlayStation 2 was going to come out, with its mythical Emotion Engine. Over the years, I’d heard of the awe and fondness this series evoked in the people who’d played it: the sense of atmospheric reality that Yu Suzuki, the creator of Shenmue, had conjured.
But I am entirely free of nostalgia – having no memories whatsoever of the first two titles – and here I was in late 2019 loading Shenmue 3 on my PS4. Why? Because I’d been asked by this site’s editor to review the game on the basis that I come from the area where the game is set: Guilin.