I've never understood why the premiere fighting game developers did not go out and produce action-RPGs that made the encounters play out just like a one-on-one fight. Shenmue could've been 100x better if they had just allowed you to fight anywhere in the environments, VF control and all. Sure, they might have to scale back the environments a bit to suit the more fight-happy design, but it would've done wonders. No safe zones, per se...just encounters that could happen anywhere. If it's a matter of having too many characters on-screen for the engine to handle, well...that shouldn't be a real issue anymore on next-gen hardware. Someone needs to make this fucking happen. If done well, I would buy 100 copies of this game.