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Shenmue 3

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Videogamedunkey turns his lens on Shenmue 3, and the eighteen-year wait gets the punchline it deserves.

Jason Gastrow, better known to millions of subscribers as videogamedunkey, has released his take on Shenmue 3, the long-delayed sequel developed by Ys Net and directed by series creator Yu Suzuki. The game finally arrived in November 2019, closing an 18-year gap since Shenmue II shipped on the Dreamcast. Dunkey’s video isn’t a glowing nostalgia trip — it’s a comedic teardown of a game that, in his framing, never left 1999.

• Dunkey’s review targets Shenmue 3’s tedious minigames, including repetitive martial arts drills like the horse stance and the one-inch punch.
• The video mocks the game’s stilted English voice acting, clunky animations, and dialogue that hasn’t been meaningfully modernized since the Dreamcast era.
• Dunkey frames the sluggish pacing, stamina management, and awkward combat as a letdown after fans waited 18 years since Shenmue II for a payoff.

The Setup for the Joke

Ryo Hazuki’s saga has always carried outsized expectations — a $47 million production in its original run, with a cast of hundreds of voice actors and a reputation as one of the most ambitious games of its generation. Shenmue 3 picks up with Ryo and Shenhua Ling in a remote Chinese village, still chasing leads on his father’s killer, Lan Di. Dunkey doesn’t dispute the pedigree; he uses it as the setup, spending the review’s opening stretch establishing just how long fans have been waiting before pulling the rug out.

That contrast — decades of anticipation against a game that reintroduces chores like wood-chopping and fishing as core progression — is where the video finds its rhythm. Dunkey treats the mundane busywork not as a callback to the franchise’s slow-life-sim roots but as evidence the design never evolved past its Dreamcast blueprint.

The Minigames Under the Microscope

The bulk of the ridicule lands on Shenmue 3’s training and minigame loop. Dunkey walks through the horse stance and one-inch punch drills, presenting them as busywork gatekeeping actual plot progress rather than meaningful skill-building. Stamina management gets similar treatment — a system that governs Ryo’s health and fighting ability but, in Dunkey’s cut, mostly just slows the player down between cutscenes.

Eighteen years between sequels, and the big reveal is a horse stance minigame.

It’s a pattern familiar to anyone who’s followed how grind-heavy design ages badly once players have other options — the kind of trap covered in breakdowns of games that punish you for stepping away. Dunkey’s argument is that Shenmue 3 leans on that grind instead of updating it.

Combat, Animation, and the Dreamcast Hangover

Dunkey doesn’t spare the combat system either, describing it as clunky and dated relative to modern action-adventure standards. Character animations and the English voice work come in for similar criticism — moments he plays for comedy by letting the awkward line deliveries and stiff movement speak for themselves rather than narrating over them. The joke isn’t that the game is broken; it’s that it plays like a museum piece that forgot to update its hardware assumptions.

That critique lines up with the wider Metacritic conversation around the release, where reviewers flagged similar concerns about pacing and presentation even as they credited the game for delivering on long-dormant lore. Dunkey’s video sits closer to the skeptical end of that spectrum, using the game’s own mechanics as the punchline rather than relying on outside commentary.

An Unresolved Story as the Final Gag

The video closes on the game’s narrative itself, which Dunkey treats as filler-heavy and ultimately unresolved — Ryo and Shenhua’s search for answers about Lan Di doesn’t land the payoff eighteen years of buildup would suggest. Rather than a triumphant conclusion, Shenmue 3 ends on more open questions, and Dunkey’s review leans into that anticlimax as the natural final beat of his teardown.

Whether the next entry ever materializes remains an open question for Ys Net and Yu Suzuki, but for now Dunkey’s video is the version of Shenmue 3 that’s actually gone viral — racking up millions of views and becoming the punchline most casual fans associate with the game, horse stance and all.