Anime adaptations of video games are nothing new, but it's rare when they present an opportunity to actually improve on the source material. Such an occasion could occur with the upcoming Shenmue anime series. Based on the video game trilogy from Sega and Yu Suzuki, the anime has been greenlit for one 13 episode season.
If it's successful enough to get renewed, Suzuki should take the opportunity to just finish the saga. With the Shenmue games never being truly successful, an anime may be the only way to bring the decades-old story to a close.
The original Shenmue was released in 1999 on the Sega Dreamcast after years of development. Originally intended as an RPG prequel to the Virtua Fighter franchise, the game told the story of teenage martial artist Ryo Hazuki as he searches for the man who killed his father in front of his very eyes. A landmark in immersive gaming, Shenmue paved the way for the current trend of open-world interaction in gaming. It was also one of the most expensive video games to produce, especially for its time. Despite this grand ambition, or perhaps because of it, neither Shenmue nor its sequel was especially profitable, and Sega put the series on hold.
Funded through Kickstarter and other means, Yu Suzuki was finally able to produce the long-awaited Shenmue III in 2019. Unfortunately, the game generated a litany of controversy, which itself led to general apathy upon release. It received decent reviews, but many of these came from longtime fans, with the rest of the gaming press at large caring nothing about the title. Within the fandom, the biggest point of contention was that the game didn't drive the saga's storyline forward after almost two years of waiting. Said story was never particularly deep or complex, but it felt particularly stretched out with the latest entry.
A constant point of comparison to the arguably outdated Shenmue franchise is Sega's Yakuza series. Produced after Shenmue first went on hiatus and with its latest release soon hitting the West, these action-adventure crime games are seen by many as doing what Shenmue tried, but far more successfully. This can be seen not only in their much more accessible and enjoyable gameplay but also in their stories. While the Yakuza games are almost all connected in telling the story of Kazuma Kiryu's life, they each can stand alone by virtue of solid individual plot structures. They're not Shakespeare, but they're well-written, with exciting twists and turns and well-developed characters.
On the other hand, all 3 Shenmue titles when combined have enough plot for possibly one game, with the third entry doing the least to propel the story forward. While all of these elements explain the franchise's shortcomings in achieving mainstream success, the story issues can easily be fixed with the anime.
Yu Suzuki constantly struggled with the higher-ups at Sega concerning his direction for the first two Shenmue games, and the free-range that he had with the third game shows why. His lack of an editor allowed him to wallow in the excesses of his own creativity, resulting in a game that failed to deliver storywise. In the anime, however, the storyline which he envisioned through the games will have to be filtered through actual writers, who will undoubtedly produce a better-told story with more character development.
The 13 episode season will contain events transpiring in both Japan and China, which seems to suggest that it will adapt the first game and at least the beginning of the second. If this is the case and the rest of Shenmue II is saved for a potential second season, said continuation should also adapt the scraps of the story within Shenmue III. From there, any subsequent seasons could finally tell the remaining 60 percent of the saga which Suzuki has been planning for years in a far more affordable and commercially viable medium.
Given the lukewarm reception to the third game, it's highly unlikely that a Shenmue IV video game will be made anytime soon. Shenmue will never again be a revolutionary landmark in gameplay, especially given the third game's horrendously dated mechanics. It can, however, finally finish the game's story in another medium.
