After a heartfelt appearance at last year’s E3 event to ask fans for help in making Shenmue III a reality, series creator Yu Suzuki’s long-awaited sequel has since gone on to break Kickstarter records (where video games are concerned, at least), and is now hard at work with the the new revenue generated through crowdfunding efforts to meet the still-far-off release date of 2017.
Yes, Shenmue fans still have a painfully long time to wait until Shenmue III is sitting snugly in our disc drives, but at least we’ve got these new screenshots (above) to tide us over in the meantime. Unlike the worrying prototype screens developer Ys Net released after the successful Kickstarter campaign, these new ones will undoubtedly help to allay fears that the game wouldn’t be able to look gorgeous on a non-triple-A game budget.
Several different locations are shown off in the images, including the familiar pink of the cherry blossom tree which has significant importance in previous games.
Along with the new images, raw footage of the event in which they were shown – Monaco Anime Game International Conferences – can be seen here. There’s not really much to see though, besides some sweeping camera shots of how the game looks in-engine.
Of course, this is all still work in progress, but boy has Shenmue III already come a long way visually since last year and we can’t wait to see what Suzuki shows us next.
Shenmue III is due to release in late 2017 on PC and PlayStation 4. An Xbox One version is yet to be announced.