Shenmue fans have had a tough week and a half, following the release of a fake trailer online that managed to hoodwink a lot of the community into believing a potential sequel was on the way from Ys Net. But there are still some Shenmue-related things to look forward to on the horizon.
As has now become a yearly tradition, for instance, we're once again getting a brand new update to George and Joe Kitchen's excellent Shenmue PC fangame Dreams of Saturn, with the brothers dropping yet another ridiculous reference-filled trailer to whet people's appetite ahead of its full release, which is scheduled for December 19th (thanks, Shenmue Dojo!).
This video starts with Santa Maeno (Dobuita's resident Santa Claus) greeting a bunch of kids, before revealing himself to actually be the Sega Saturn advertising mascot Segata Sanshiro in disguise, and it only gets weirder from there.
For instance, we get a glimpse of Ryo fighting a horde of Doctor Eggmans (based on his model from Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams...), running around the 3D world from Sonic Jam, and battling against "Jackie" on an old Virtua Fighter stage, while the Hazuki Dojo's live-in student, Masayuki Fukuhara, can be seen elsewhere riding around a map from NIGHTS into Dreams on the back of a dragon à la Panzer Dragoon. It all looks like a bit of a fever dream, with George and Joe Kitchen cramming in a ton of nods to Sega's history.
Dreams of Saturn, in case you haven't had the opportunity to play it before, was a fangame released in December 2023 and focused on Ryo exploring Dobuita to hunt down 25 Santa-Chans to win a Sega Saturn. It featured new QTEs, fights, mini games, capsule toys, and more, and was eventually followed up in December 2024 by Dreams of Saturn 2.0, which added a bonus chapter where Ryo must race to the New Yokosuka Harbor District to save the Saturn from a group of thugs.
Speaking about this year's release, Dreams of Saturn 3.0, George Kitchen wrote on social media, "We completed the story last year. So there's no need to make it any longer. While we focused on the harbor chapter last year, Dobuita was neglected and ran poorly. I've spent a lot of time fixing and adding things. There's also new minigames!"
If this sounds like something up your street, you can watch the full trailer below: