Today's post was contributed by yuc02, who has translated a recent Chinese-language article reporting on an interview held with Shenmue III director Yu Suzuki and animation producer Hiroaki Takeuchi at the recent G-Fusion Tour event in Xiamen, China. The report was published on sohu.com.
The article translation is in two parts, with this being Part One.
The translation starts below.
Dialogue with Yu Suzuki On the Birth of Shenmue - Part 1
Original text & images from http://www.sohu.com/a/283337668_628730
“A video game is a reconstruction of reality, but it doesn’t mean that the game will be more addictive the more realistic it is. What interests gamers the most will always be the gameplay.”
On December 16th, following an invitation by WeGame, publication group YouYanShe arrived in Xiamen, and participated in the G-Fusion event along with Shenmue’s creator Yu Suzuki. Aside from the announcement that WeGame will publish the Simplified Chinese version of Shenmue 3, we also chatted with Suzuki-san, and learned many things about Shenmue, Chinese culture and his experiences during the early development years.
Concerning what people wanted to know about the most, which was Shenmue 3, the Simplified Chinese version will be released on the WeGame platform, and the WeGame team will also take care of the localisation and translation of the game. Oasis Games will handle the Chinese PS4 version. Since the Shenmue series has not formally entered the Mainland Chinese market previously, this will be the first time old and new gamers alike will be able to experience the delights of Shenmue via Shenmue 3, with its story set in the background of China.
During the interview after the press conference, we learned some more details on Shenmue 3, including:
- In 2017, Yu Suzuki said that the gameplay content/mechanics would be 30% new, with 70% similar to Shenmue 1 and 2. After further development efforts, the split is now around 50% new and 50% existing.
- Apart from graphics improvements over Shenmue 1 and 2, this time a lot of focus will be put on the overall interaction of the different gameplay elements. While Shenmue 1, 2 and 3 are all story-driven adventure games, mini-games, side-quests, daily interactions and so on will also have feedback effects, and will not be completely isolated from the main storyline. This feature has been considered before but could not be realized then due to limitations.
- More emphasis will be placed on replayability and freedom. The game will feature extra options upon first completion to encourage multiple playthroughs, and satisfy the “hardcore” gamers, although casual gamers should still be able to enjoy the game very much.
- Fans of the mini games from the previous installments will be glad to hear that most of those will return, including forklift driving, Gashapon [capsule toy machines], Excite QTE etc., as well as new additions.
- Shenmue 1 and 2 used a simplified version of Yu Suzuki’s Virtua Fighter system for battle mechanics. For Shenmue 3 this is no longer necessary, so the battle mechanics are all-new. Due to Yu Suzuki’s love of the Chinese martial arts, much focus will still be on the realism aspect. AI Assist will be available to help those not so experienced with fighting games.
- Shenmue 3 will have identical PS4 and PC versions.
Yu Suzuki's China Interview Report Part Two: Early Game Development Years [YouYanShe Publication Group]
This is the second part of a translation by yuc02 of a recent Chinese-language article reporting on an interview held with Shenmue III director Yu Suzuki and animation producer Hiroaki Takeuchi at the recent G-Fusion Tour event in Xiamen, China. The report was published on sohu.com.
Part Two below focuses on Yu Suzuki's earlier years in game development. Go here to read Part One.
Dialogue with Yu Suzuki On the Birth of Shenmue - Part 2
Original text & images from http://www.sohu.com/a/283337668_628730
Aside from Shenmue, we also talked with Yu Suzuki about stories from his early game development years, as well as his views on the video gaming industry. Although his iconic status as one Sega’s top developers in the 80s and 90s has meant that much has already been written about him, it was still fascinating to hear his views and stories in person.
Prior to working on Shenmue, Yu Suzuki’s work mainly revolved around arcade gaming. At that time many titles were developed from his AM2 studio (Outrun, Space Harrier, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop etc.). One can say that he’s worked in, as well as advanced, almost every gaming genre available.
But in actual fact, he was still not fully satisfied, and wished to try more things on the home gaming front. Yu Suzuki explained that “At the time the golden rule with arcade games is that average play times must be limited to 3 minutes per credit, and given the 30 seconds or so for changing between machines, that left around 2 mins 40 seconds for the developers to showcase the game".
Under this tight constraint, Yu Suzuki admitted that he was getting “wearied both in body and mind”. During that period home consoles were far behind arcade machines technically, but had the advantage of not having a time constraint. “The most popular genre for home console games in Japan were RPGs, but there wasn’t anything that was what I envisaged at the time, so I wanted to put all my experience together and create my own home-console RPG game.” This of course manifested itself to be Shenmue.
From today’s viewpoint, open-world games are now the trademark for AAA budgets, although one may argue that some are now growing tired of the genre. Nevertheless it is still the most popular type of gaming experience for gamers and developers alike.
However in the early 90s many people did not understand the open-world concept, so one could argue that Shenmue was truly "something ahead of its time”. Yu Suzuki explained that at the time he never thought about an open world, he only wanted to design a game that gave players a lot of freedom (“free to play”). Perhaps Yu Suzuki’s many decades’ experience in arcade games “gave him an edge” over the design of Shenmue. This level of freedom didn’t just manifest itself in the many different play modes, or the lack of time or story-driven constraints, in fact it was the realism factor that made it close to being a “life simulator”. Nowadays many similar games aim to achieve this goal, to which Yu Suzuki comments:
“A video game is a reconstruction of reality, but it doesn’t mean that the game will be more addictive the more realistic it is. What interests gamers the most will always be the gameplay. Due to limitations in the past, perhaps one way to differentiate oneself used to be by making the game more realistic. However now the aim is to differentiate oneself by making the gameplay more fun.”
One could see his viewpoints from his personal experience. While he was at university, he was very interested in games created on the Apple II computer. Although those at the time were very basic both in graphics and gameplay, he understood the spirit of the creators in trying to convey their ideas despite being restricted by technology. It gave him a “sense of mission” for his future creations.
Yu Suzuki described this sense of mission as a “RPG Roadmap”, of which he is just one of the prime movers for its advancement:
“Even though one may fail experimenting with new ideas, nevertheless we need people to try these ideas. If the developer only considers if the work will be successful commercially, while it’s important to consider, it shouldn’t be the only factor, as otherwise the gaming industry will find itself struggling to advance.”
At the end of the interview, we like many other gaming journalists presented our treasured games to Yu Suzuki-san for his signature, which he generously accepted and fulfilled our wishes.
After so many years, gaming technology and gamer choice have evolved massively. How far will the previously heralded “ahead of its time” Shenmue series advance with Shenmue 3, no one can say right now. However, it doesn’t matter if one sees it as an emotional return of the series for its fans, or as an experiment in the RPG and open-world genre, it will be something worth anticipating.
Extra Content: Hiroaki Takeuchi
Hiroaki Takeuchi used to be a professional Virtua Fighter player in Japan, and he laughingly described himself as “public enemy number one” at high school. It was because of this that he joined Yu Suzuki’s team and started working in the games industry. Apart from Shenmue, he also worked on anime titles such as “
5 Centimeters per Second” and “
Your Name”.
Shenmue 3’s animation producer Hiroaki Takeuchi showed us the Apple II game “
Mystery House 2”, which was one of Yu Suzuki’s favorite games while at university.
Shenmue 3 to Include Previously-Cut "Chapter Two Content" - Yu Suzuki
During his visit to China for the G-Fusion event last month, Yu Suzuki carried out a number of interviews including an audio interview for a podcast by GameCores.
This post is a sneak-peek of part of the full interview, courtesy once again of yuc02 (who can be found
on the Shenmue Dojo forums). In this extract, Yu talks about the origin of the codename for the project, "Project Berkley", and the meaning behind the name of the ship Ryo takes to Hong Kong. Finally, he reveals plans for Shenmue III to incorporate certain content that had been cut from earlier in the story due to constraints.
Background:
According to a
2001 interview, the name of the cut chapter was to have been "Chapter 2 - The Boat", covering Ryo's journey from Yokosuka to Hong Kong, and was to have involved an encounter with Chai. In the end it was scrapped, however it did remain in the form of one of an official Shenmue Side Story manga entitled "Chai & Ryo" that was included with the Xbox version of Shenmue II.
First page of the Shenmue Side Story "Chai & Ryo" that was originally intended to be a playable chapter.
The interview extract starts below.
Original text and image from https://www.gcores.com/articles/105359
YS = Yu Suzuki
Q: Let’s talk about Shenmue. Due to the massive interest in the Shenmue series, you have already revealed many of the stories to other journalists in the past, therefore let's talk a bit in detail about two other things that people haven’t yet mentioned.
Firstly, at the beginning the game was given the codename “Project Berkley”, is there any special meaning behind this name?
YS: It’s actually like this (laughs). Because we realized at the start that this would be a completely different game to anything else on the market at the time, and its scale was unprecedented, we wanted to keep the project very confidential. Because of this we wanted to give it a very cool sounding name, like something from a spy movie. In Japan there’s this phrase
bakkureru (ばっくれる) meaning to “pretend not to know” or “feign ignorance”, and by coincidence that there is a place in America with a similar sounding name, so we chose this “Project Berkley” codename.
* In Japanese, the word Berkley is pronounced "bākurē", sharing similar sounds to the word "bakkureru".
Q: So Berkley* was just a homonym for bakkureru?
YS: Indeed (laughs).
Q: I didn’t realize that a question that had us puzzled for a long time, had such a simple answer!
YS: It was just a codename!
Q: There was also a period during development that the game was called Genpūki*; why wasn’t it used in the end?
* Genpūki (玄風記) means "Tales of the Mysterious Wind".
YS: Actually it was just that we thought the name sounded too normal. We wanted to give this special game a deeper, more artistic name.
Q: But you did use the name in the game somewhat, as the ship that took Ryo to Hong Kong was named Genpūmaru*.
* Genpūmaru (玄風丸) = The Mysterious Wind ("maru" is a suffix commonly signifying the name of a boat).
YS: Indeed. As the first chapter was structured as an open world, in the ensuing chapter on this ship we had a rich variety of different content prepared, including story and other elements. However due to many objective reasons we had to cut out most of this content, but I don’t want to say too much, because in the upcoming game perhaps the players can experience this for themselves.
Q: So you mean the deleted “Chapter 2 content” that many people still wonder about will be present in Shenmue 3?
YS: (laughs) Yes, please wait in anticipation!
* End of translated extract *
This last bombshell regarding content from the previously-cut Chapter 2 is exciting news to hear. Will it be a flashback-style recreation, or massaged into a different form with Ryo's new adventures in Guilin? That remains to be seen, but it would seem likely that Chai will be involved! For speculation and discussion on this topic, see
this thread over on the Shenmue Dojo forums.
Thanks to yuc02 for the translation! Full interview translation to follow.
Steven Spielberg's Reaction to Virtua Fighter RPG Helped Greenlight Development
A photo of Steve Spielberg visiting Yu Suzuki and the development studio during the 1990s has emerged online, in an written interview by Japan's 4Gamer with the then-business-director of AM2 ( Hisashi Suzuki - yes, another Suzuki!).
With Steve Spielberg was Mark Cerny, who was not working at SEGA at the time but was accompanying Spielberg for another project.
Sega Development Studio tour. Top: Hisashi Suzuki (AM2 business director), Yu Suzuki (AM2 development head), Hisao Oguchi (AM3 development head), Steven Spielberg, Mark Cerny. Bottom: Mie Kumagaya (AM3 developer) and Steven Spielberg's son.
Due to Spielberg's enthusiastic comments ("wonderful!") on being shown Virtua Fighter RPG, Shenmue's early form, apparently SEGA's CEO was put in such a good mood that he greenlit the start of full-on development.
A second photo of Yu Suzuki with Steven Spielberg and son has been previously shared before online:
Yu Suzuki with Steve Spielberg and son, most likely taken during the same visit as the previous photo.
It's interesting to identify that this photo is likely to have been during the same office visit, based on the matching clothing.
The 4Gamer article contains other interesting anecdotes about Yu Suzuki and Shenmue so we hope to be able to provide a translation of these parts on the blog in the future.
Source:
4Gamer (Japanese)
Yu Suzuki's Research Trip to China Part 3: An Invitation from Yu | Translation
This topic was selected by Phantom River Stone patrons in our monthly poll for a topic choice.
In the early 1990s, Yu Suzuki made a seminal trip to China. His objective was to research and gather material for his upcoming Virtua Fighter 2, and this research also influenced his concept for a "Virtua Fighter RPG" which eventually came to be known as Shenmue.
Previous posts in this series:
- In Part One, we translated blog posts about the trip by Kazunari Uchida, the person who accompanied Yu Suzuki.
- In Part Two, we translated Yu Suzuki's own comments about his trip, and how his findings would be useful for the development of the Virtua Fighter series.
This post is a translation of the first of a set of articles documenting the China trip, again written by Kazunari Uchida. They were published in 1994 as a series in the Japanese Beep! MegaDrive Magazine.
The translation begins here.
Yu Suzuki: China Research Trip Journal by Kazunari Uchida
The Genius That is Yu Suzuki
When talking about Yu Suzuki, he is often described as a "programming genius". But wherein does his genius lie?
Is he called a genius due to his creation of hit title after hit title in the 10 years since distinguishing himself with Hang On? Or because the ideas themselves are remarkable? Or is it due to his thorough pursuit of reality that characterize his games, together with the programming methods used in its implementation?
On the other hand, someone who has been called a genius gets unconditionally placed upon a pedestal, and others may have the impression that they are not very approachable. But, in that sense, I feel uncomfortable in labeling the Yu Suzuki I know as a "genius".
The image I have of him is someone who is never without an amiable smile on his face, who is self-effacing and has a somewhat non-mainstream sense of humor, but is very sure of his own mind: in short, someone who is good-natured and free-spirited. There's not the slightest hint of the unapproachability associated with the word "genius". When he was developing Hang On, I spent a day with him in order to gather article material for a motorbike magazine, taking photos and speaking with him; that was the start of our acquaintance.
For around the last 5 years, partly due to our both becoming busy in our respective work, the extent of our interaction dwindled to the occasional exchanging of letters from places to which we traveled.
However, when I met him again for the first time in a long while, what a surprise: he had his own office with an expansive view of the city on the top floor of a building; managed a staff of 100; was hailed as a programming genius; and had become a role model for young people aiming to become game programmers,
I sat down with a sun-tanned Yu, just back from Florida, in his bright office which was decorated with snapshots from locations around the world. When I first visited him at SEGA for an interview, his work area was like the corner of a small workshop; he wore drab gray work clothes and had a drowsy expression from working throughout the night - but now that all seemed a mere vision from a faraway past. But when I started talking with him again like in the old days, he was still that same good-natured and free-spirited person.
The Aim for Virtua Fighter II
"How about going to China?"
Right after this past New Year, he called me early in the morning and burst out with it - just like that, without so much as a New Year's greeting. No doubt he would have given it the utmost consideration before choosing me as his traveling companion, but when the time came to express it there was no beating about the bush; just those simple words. That's one of the traits that, once you get to know him, makes him such a friendly person.
"China? Sure, let's go."
I'm not one to talk though: without properly engaging my hung-over brain, I agreed in an instant.
And that was how the trip was finalized.
However, it wasn't until much later that I learned that this trip was to carry out research for the sequel to a game announced late last year, Virtua Fighter: the 3D fighting game Virtua Fighter II.
With Virtua Fighter, Yu Suzuki introduced two main concepts.
The first of these was making use of digital graphics, not creating pictures with an animated cartoon. This is a technology that allows creation of 3D images by melding together small triangles called polygons, something also used for Gulf War simulations. With an animated cartoon, varying 2D pictures are prepared, with flat figures moving on top of them, but with this technology the computer produces a 3D image in real-time according to the player's inputs. The point of view can also be set to any direction, so the image's movement and immersiveness are improved dramatically. This technology is something he had already made use of in Virtua Racing, but in order to apply it to the complex movement of human figures, there were a heap of factors that had to be surmounted, starting with a huge amount of programming.
The second concept was trying to faithfully reproduce the movements of actual martial arts, rather than setting up killer moves. While other fighting games boast absurd killer moves not able to be performed by humans as selling points, he has tried determinedly to make the characters fight like flesh-and-blood humans.
The reality he aims to achieve is to minimize the barrier between the game character and the player; to overcome that barrier and create the illusion that you yourself are playing. That's the direction he wants to take things in.
For that, he starts off by placing himself for a moment in the shoes of the game character.
For example, with Hang On and the series of racing games that followed, he actually drives the motorbikes and super cars at a circuit: he first of all tastes the real thing experientially.
Then, in addition, he carefully collects data from pro drivers and matched the data against the sensations he experienced to create a near-perfect simulation. From there, it goes through a process to refine it down to a game that "even a 10-year old can fully enjoy for 3 minutes" and his game is complete.
For Virtua Fighter, he watched over 50 martial arts videos and movies, and furthermore met with several martial artists. On top of that, he devoted himself to kung fu to such an extent that he suffered a complex wrist fracture. With that forming the foundation, he made the game following the concepts outlined above.
With the upcoming Virtua Fighter II, he is pursuing an even higher level of reality. At our last meeting before our trip, Yu spoke with a boyish smile and a twinkle in his eye:
"In Virtua Fighter II, I'm using a system called Model 2, and plan to apply textures. At the moment, the outlines of the figures are jagged, but in this next game they'll become much more human-like. The movements should also look much smoother, so clumsy deceptions won't fly. There are 8 characters in the current Virtua Fighter, but I'd like to give them more detailed moves and polish up their movement. Just as if the 8 of them have made progress after undergoing training.
"Of them, I particularly want to focus on Akira, who is like Virtua Fighter's lead character. He employs Bajiquan, so I definitely want to meat a Bajiquan master. And, if possible, I'd like him to show me even just one of the Ba Da Zhao (Eight Great Methods) of Bajiquan.
"As well as that, I'm planning to add four more characters in VF2. I'm thinking of having one of them use Drunken Boxing. It's a style unique to Chinese martial arts, and its complicated movements will be a perfect fit for the new game. But the problem is that Drunken Boxing is defensive and doesn't involve active attacks, so it doesn't match the characteristics of a competitive combat game. How to overcome that is something I'll need to consider. Also, although it's still just a vague idea, I'd like to have one of them use a style that mimics an animal's movements: Praying Mantis, Crane, Monkey... China has a lot of wonderful martial art styles. I'd like to see as many styles as possible".
For me, to actually observing Chinese martial arts certainly sounded interesting, but above all, I was looking forward to getting to see a side of Yu Suzuki that I previously hadn't known. I secretly planned to get to the bottom of why in his industry he was called a genius while during the research trip; and so, I set off with him to China.
third.shenmue.com
