The last installment of the Dreamcast’s Shenmue franchise is more than just a fantasy game within SEGA designer, Yu Suzuki’s, head. It is real. The concept exists and has for some time. The second Shenmue game, released in 2001 followed a 1999 open world adventure, designed to give the player almost total autonomy and simulate real-life events, such as weather effects, time, and physical needs (sleep, hunger etc.)

While somewhat commonplace in today’s games, these complexities were almost non-existent in early Dreamcast works, at least not at this intricate level.

Suzuki states that there will be a lot of internal explorations for the main characters, making the game even deeper and more thought-provoking, almost emo. “Shenhua will ask lots and lots of questions like these and the answers will get stored in the game and affect the outcome of the player’s relationship with other characters. It’s like a personality test.

Since the Dreamcast is no longer a viable platform, the new game, tentatively entitled Shenmue City will be played as a mobile game for Yahoo! A 1990s concept on a 2010 mobile platform could make for an interesting play. Read the entire story here.

Dreamcast's Shenmue concept in the works, 5.0 out of 5 based on 8 ratings

Tags: Sega Dreamcast, Windows Mobile Games

This entry was posted on Monday, January 3rd, 2011 at 08:00 and is filed under Classic Game Sequels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.