It’s a good thing that SEGA just released Shenmue I & II HD, because fans still waiting for Shenmue III are going to have to wait quite a bit longer for the long-awaited sequel to see the light of day.

Now scheduled for release on 27 August 2019, it will have been more than four years since Shenmue III was crowdfunded in record numbers.* Certainly Shenmue fans are a patient lot, but 17 years is a long time to wait for answers to Shenmue II’s cliffhanger ending.

To make matters more complicated, Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki has already confirmed that Shenmue III isn’t the end of the story. With a potential Shenmue IV several more years and possibly another crowdfunding campaign away, the full Shenmue story will have taken more than an entire generation to tell.

Simply put, there are going to be a number of fans who won’t live to see the conclusion. You may think that my attitude toward this fact is flippant or that this post’s title is clickbait, which is fair enough.

One of those fans is Reuben Kee, who passed in 2007, well before Shenmue III‘s Kickstarter campaign. Among other talents, Kee was a remarkable musician, whose remixes were quite popular in the OverClocked ReMix community. Kee uploaded several musical arrangements to his YouTube channel before his passing, including this moving piano performance inspired by the Shenmue score.

You won’t regret having a listen.

So did I use a clickbait title just to grab attention? Yeah, I did. But if I managed to get one more person to share in Reuben’s enthusiasm for a game he felt so passionate about, then sorry, not sorry.

Here’s to all the Shenmue faithful who didn’t make it.

#ShenmueSaved

*Disclosure: the author of this post is a backer of the Shenmue III Kickstarter campaign

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