Exclusive: Shenmue 3 Ready for Next-Gen

Amazing revelations as Sega's mythical sequel prepares for reality on next-gen platforms. It's nothing to do with the newly announced Ryu ga Goto Ku from Toshihiro Nagoshi. It's AM2 - and it's back, with Shenmue 3.

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Yu Suzuki has very little involvement in the Shenmue 3 project, and that's something that may come as a surprise to many Sega followers. What we learned in relation to Suzuki-san is pretty interesting, but all that could be confirmed was that, "since Suzuki left AM2, he is off the core Shenmue series, which remained at AM2" - and despite the fact that Shenmue.com is still linked from the website of Suzuki's would-be Sega studio, Digital Rex, it seems all that is now irrelevant and, presumably, simply out of date. Our source clarified, "the series is under the AM2 portfolio. Shenmue remains at AM2 while [Suzuki] pursues other things."

Yu Suzuki - "pursuing other things"

Interestingly, more insight into the "Suzuki era" of the Shenmue series became apparent in a Kikizo interview conducted with Yuzo Koshiro last week. Yuzo Koshiro is a god-like videogame music producer, with as much respect for his work at Sega as any other development executive at the company, having worked on the legendary beats in titles such as the Streets of Rage series, Revenge of Shinobi and of course, Shenmue. In the exclusive interview to be published very soon, Koshiro-san told us, "we had a meeting once a week, just about the music, and [Suzuki] said, 'this scene needs this kind of music and that scene needs that kind of music' - it was difficult; he was very strict, he judged everything and ruled on everything." We should point out that Koshiro-san is most certainly not the source of the rest of this report however!

So who exactly is working on Shenmue 3? Frustratingly, we have learned answers in that regard, but can't name names. We know that Hiroshi Kataoka, the highly respected development talent and president of AM2 since Suzuki-san left, is not involved in any hands-on way with Shenmue 3, and is currently concentrating on the arcade side of output on titles like Virtua Fighter 5. There are however some key, familiar AM2 faces looking after Shenmue 3, including some relatively new talent from within the studio - but unfortunately we can't be more specific, to protect the sources of this report. Knowing a bit about the backgrounds of some of the key staff however, we'll say we're both relieved and, well, intrigued. Meanwhile, a final producer has yet to be internally named, but AM2 Development Director Makoto Osaki seems a likely candidate...

"Likely candidate" for producer? Didn't we already say that Shenmue 3 is near-complete? What precisely is the status of development completion? First our source confirms what most fans already knew, "the story is entirely done", (we're pretty sure the story had been finished since before the release of Shenmue 2) before elaborating, "the texture and modelling work is ready, they know what their characters look like and there's hundreds of gigabytes of [uncompressed] textures. Game designs are done. There is no more research to be done. It's a matter of 'porting' to whatever [console]."

As we touched on earlier, a final platform, or platforms, for Shenmue 3 are yet to be finalised. Indeed, we weren't able to clarify whether the exclusivity discussions with the firstparties have actually started yet. But from a purely speculative point of view, it seems most likely to us that Xbox 360 will be the initial host for the future of Shenmue; Microsoft has been absolutely determined to sign up exclusive Japanese-developed content for its new console, yet Sega signings are largely conspicuous by absence.

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