Fans have been waiting forever for Yu Suzuki's Shenmue to come to a conclusion. Shenmue City is not that finale, but it is instead a side-story by Yahoo! Japan and a host of partners (for more on that, click here), including Yu Suzuki himself.

Suzuki's Ys Net is developing the world – which sounds like it'll be less of an actual online game and more of a social space with minigames – and Sega is also overseeing the project, according to Andriasang. The game will be free to play, but will feature pay items, and it will contain a storyline in Ryu's hometown of Yokosuka that players can follow. It is unknown at this time what kind of gameplay Shenmue City will feature or where the story will fit into the overall Shenmue timeline, but the new website promises more info sometime this winter.

As exciting as all this sounds for fans, given that this is a Japanese online site through a Japanese network provider (likely needing Japanese credit card info), unfortunately we're not sure how many Western fans will be able to get into this.