10 High-Profile 2019 Video Games You've Already Forgotten About
3. Shenmue III
Shenmue was one of the first hipster franchises in video game history. The first two games were, until recently, locked to the Sega Dreamcast. The Dreamcast was a beautiful console that never quite broke into the Playstation and Nintendo bubble, but its flagship franchise Shenmue broke the mould of what video games are.
From painstakingly complex combat through to a seemingly open world where everyone has a story to tell, Shenmue became a beloved series for those dedicated few.
When the creator Yu Suzuki launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund Shenmue III, the internet went berserk. By the end of the campaign, Shenmue III was the highest backed game in history with an eye-watering $6.3 million and catapulted the game into the psyche of all players eager to get to grips with Suzuki's "true open-world".
We did certainly get a beautifully realised world, with hundreds of characters to interact with, but where Shenmue in 1999 felt fresh and imaginative, Shenmue in 2019 was stiff and frustrating. The voice acting was comically poor, the character models looked unnatural and the gameplay itself moved at a snail's pace. Shenmue III, for all its promise, didn't deliver a game to justify the 4-year hype.