Shenmue
Dreamcast
Nostalgia Factor:
Shenmue originally hit store shelves about a month before Christmas in the year 2000. At the time I was a devout but disappointed Dreamcast fan. I was a huge fan of the system itself, but there were not any games available for it that were considered killer, “must-have” properties. I had high hopes that Shenmue would become that game. I followed Shenmue’s progress closely while reading through video game magazines from the library. I thought that the game looked amazing, and I was completely in awe of the fact that they were creating a game with a living, breathing world full of characters that had jobs and daily routines. This was unprecedented stuff back in the year 2000.
I got the game for Christmas that year, and you can bet that I played the living heck out of it. In addition to the game, I got a snack basket for Christmas as well. My parents wanted me to eat healthier snacks and less junk food since my 18 year old skin was so acne riddled back then. Pistachios were included in this gift basket. I vividly remember the first night I had this game, sitting up and playing this and eating pistachios well into the early hours of the morning. Every single time I eat pistachios now, they remind me of this game. I just thought you all should know that.
From the end of the year 2000 to the end of 2001, I must have played Shenmue to completion about four or five times. In the 18 year gap since then, I have played through it twice. Once when I lived with my ex-girlfriend Colleen and once after I bought Shenmue II for the Xbox a few years later. On the whole, I’d say it has probably been a good 11 or 12 years since I last played this.
I have always been wanting to come back and play Shenmue again, though. In fact, about two years ago I tried to play it, but my Dreamcast froze up on me in the early moments of the game while I was still exploring the Hazuki household. I tried to play through it multiple times, but it froze up each time. So I gave up on the game. Fast forward to 2018. When I found out that a collection bundle containing both Shenmue I and II was going to be released for the PlayStation 4, I immediately made it a goal of mine to get this bundle. If I couldn’t play it on the Dreamcast, I could play it on the PS4. I was so excited at the chance to play Shenmue again that I even pre-ordered it, which is unprecedented for me. I will still, however, count this as a Dreamcast game for the review, since that is the version of Shenmue I am the most familiar with. They made very few changes to the PS4 port of the game.
Storyline:
Let’s get one thing straight: you don’t play Shenmue for its intense action or for its strategic battles and puzzle solving. No, no. There is none of that to be seen here. You play this game for its storyline.
Shenmue begins in the mid-1980s, in a small village in Japan. The game’s protagonist, Ryo Hazuki, comes home to find his family dojo under attack. A unknown man named Lan-Di is looking for a mysterious artifact simply referred to as “the mirror”. Lan-Di tries to beat this information out of Ryo’s father, but is unsuccessful. When Ryo walks in, Lan-Di threatens his life and uses Ryo as leverage to get his father to reveal the location of the mirror. Ryo’s father cracks under the pressure and tells him where the mirror is. Lan-Di then has Ryo’s father killed. Ryo is beaten and left behind as the bad guys collect the mirror and make their escape.
The game picks up either the next day or a few days later. Controlling Ryo, you must head out and start investigating Lan-Di and his cronies. Your journey begins as just a simple, polite, door to door search where you ask neighbors if they saw anything on “the day of the incident.” Eventually, you gain some intel on the type of car the attackers were driving and what location they were coming from. So then you head to that area of town to investigate. You walk around and you ask people stuff. They point you in a new direction. You head there and ask more people stuff. They give you a clue in a different direction. You head there and ask people stuff. You get another clue to go to another location...
The game basically has you running around and investigating a bunch of clues as you attempt to unlock the mystery of Ryo’s father, the mirror, and Lan-Di. I don’t want to spoil anything for this review, but I really like the way the story unfolds. It is very deep and there are lots of mysteries that really make you wonder. Considering that the focus of this game isn’t combat, action, or puzzle solving – it better have a good story or it is going to be really boring. Luckily, this game has a GREAT storyline. My only complaint is that it ends on a cliffhanger, but that was to be expected for me considering that Shenmue was originally supposed to be a series that was six or seven games in length.
Gameplay:
The game’s controls are a bit dated. I am sure you have heard the term “tank controls” before. Shenmue definitely has tank controls. Using the analog stick or the D-pad, you turn Ryo’s body left or right. You hold up to make him go forward, down to make him do a 180 degree spin. I am not going to lie, the controls are one of the worst things about the game. Plus you often have to be lined up 100% perfectly to enter doors or go up and down stairs. If you are not lined up perfectly, you have to make small, minute adjustments to get your body positioned to where it needs to be. This can be a pain in the neck sometimes. Don’t even get me started on when the NPCs walk into your path and get in your way. You can’t just slide by them or push them out of the way, you have to either go around them completely or wait until they move out of your way. In tight spaces, this can be very problematic.
You are often going to find that you need to enter first person mode to check things out. You can’t move in first person mode, but it is an essential tool for investigation. For example, in the beginning of the game you start out in Ryo’s room. In this room he has a dresser, a bed, a closet, a desk, all that good stuff. Let’s say you want to check out the desk. You can’t just walk up to the desk and hit a button to investigate it. What you do in Shenmue is walk up to the desk, enter first person mode, and use the camera to scan the desk. If there is anything interesting to be seen, the camera will zoom in on it. Some items simply look interesting but can’t be interacted with. Other items can be picked up, checked out, or even added to your personal inventory. If you want to open a desk drawer, simply look at the drawer in first person mode, the camera will zoom in on the drawer, and then you hit the action button to open it. Not all drawers contain items, in fact a very small portion of them do. But if you are thorough like I am, you are going to want to check each one out regardless.
A good portion of the game will be spent talking to other characters. To talk to someone, you can just stand in front of them and hit action. If you are in a crowd and need to talk to one specific person, the first-person zoom feature works very well to ensure that you are striking up a chat with the correct character.
As I mentioned before, action is not at the forefront of Shenmue. That does not mean that there is no action, however. I am sure that Shenmue did not create the Quick Time Event, but it definitely helped popularize it. Several fight and chase sequences utilize QTEs. If you don’t know what a QTE is, it is basically a button prompt that you have a short period of time to respond to. Say you are chasing someone down the alley. The person you are chasing jumps over a small crate that’s been left on the ground. The up button would start flashing on your screen, meaning you have to hit it too. If you hit it in time, Ryo jumps over the crate and the chase continues. Fail to hit it in time, and Ryo stumbles and falls and you lose the person you are chasing.
The only other action sequences you will see in this game are in its battles. The fighting mechanics in this game are similar to Virtua Fighter. If you know how that game works, you should have no trouble here. If you don’t, just treat the battles like a fighting game and you will be okay. When a fight begins, your health bar pops up in the bottom left corner of the screen. A nice feature here is that if you can manage to avoid getting hit for a certain period of time, your health will start to regenerate mid-battle. Your goal is simply to defeat everyone before they defeat you. Rarely do you ever fight just one foe. Usually there is a small group of enemies that try to gang up on you. The end of the game even throws 70 enemies at you all at the same time. I really wanted to like the combat system, but overall I found it to be a little unpredictable. Characters often teach you moves as you progress through the storyline, but I found that these moves rarely work as they are intended in the heat of battle. Some fights are absurdly easy. Some are “throw your controller through the TV” levels of difficult. All I wanted was a little consistency.
Towards the end of the game, your character gets a job driving a forklift while investigating a shady group that hangs out around the dock. You spend several in-game days going to work and moving boxes around from one warehouse to another. You even have a lunch break where you can talk to your coworkers and investigate while everyone is on lunch. Reactions to this portion of the game are definitely mixed. Some people like it and say that it helps you feel even more like a real part of the Shenmue world. Other people find it tedious. If they wanted to go to work, they would go to work and not play a video game. Personally, I liked it. It does get a bit tedious if you think about it, but if you don’t, it is kind of fun. I just look at the forklift driving as an entertaining mini-game that I got really good at.
Graphics:
This game is nearly 20 years old, but that doesn’t mean it is ugly. In fact, it holds up quite well compared to some games released in today’s age. Particularly in the scenery. Everywhere you go, the scenery looks absolutely beautiful. Parks, buildings, trees, streets, storefronts, the ocean, everything! I took full advantage of the PS4’s ability to take snapshots as you play. The amount of detail poured into the game’s environment is just staggering. Not just exteriors, but the inside of buildings as well. The game does an incredible job transporting you back to 1980s Japan. I have never been to Japan, but this game made it feel like a second home for me. After one marathon session where I played this game for hours on end on my day off, I actually felt a little disappointed that I had to “come back” to such a mundane existence here in the States. I wanted to live in the Shenmue universe!
One thing that could use a little bit of criticism is the amount of detail when it comes to characters’ faces. Everyone looks good, but a lot of characters have expressions that remain blank and unchanged, regardless of what is going on onscreen. Still, though - considering the game’s age this can be forgiven. Put this up next to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which came out two full years after Shenmue, and Shenmue looks like a Picasso while Vice City looks like something a little kid scribbled on a piece of paper. You'd think Vice City came out 10 years before Shenmue ever did. It looks REALLY good.
Sound:
Sound quality may be my biggest issue with this game. When you first start playing you are immediately going to be taken aback by Ryo’s voice. The quality of the recorded voices is terrible and does not mesh at all with the graphics, which are so good. Each character’s voice sounds poorly recorded. It is not necessarily the voices themselves that suck, I am sure the actors here did a fine job. But the audio quality… man. It just seems so fuzzy and out of place. I could easily see some Shenmue noobie giving this game a try, hearing the voices, and immediately coming to the conclusion that the game sucks before giving it a fair shake. Not cool.
One way I coped with this was to tell myself that it was done on purpose. A lot of great kung-fu flicks have really poor voice dubbing, and it can actually be charming given the right circumstances. I repeatedly told myself that Shenmue was attempting to emulate that feel on purpose. I honestly don’t think they were, but hey that is how I coped. I’d like to think that the longer you play, the more comfortable with the voice work you will become. You won’t notice how bad it is after a while. You just get used to it.
It is interesting that the voices are so bad, because the music for the game is actually quite good. The game has a fun, memorable soundtrack filled with everything from sweeping orchestral tracks to charming little Japanese jingles. Some of my favorite tunes are the song that plays when Ryo is at home, and the music you hear when Ryo is on lunch while working at the docks.
Most importantly, the music blends well with the game’s visual aesthetic. The game creates many stunning, completely engrossing environments. As nice as some of these locales are to look at, they wouldn’t feel the same without the game’s music. The music turns these things from being simply nice to look at into real, believable places. The graphics and the sound work perfectly together to create a remarkable feeling of atmosphere in this game.
Gripes:
As much as I love the game, it is not flawless.
The game operates on an internal clock system. You start out each in-game day in the morning. An ever present clock shows you that it is 8:30 AM when you wake up. As you play, time starts to pass. While there may not be many people out and about that early in the morning, if you wait until the evening and the afternoon, the streets start to fill up with people. Some people have daily routines. You will see them walking to work every morning. You will see them packing up shop, closing their stores, and heading home in the evening time. Bars are empty during the day, but fill up at night. The weather and the position of the sun change as the day goes on as well. Like I said, in the year 2000 this was basically unprecedented stuff. Heck, I still think it is cool now.
But as innovative as this clock feature may be, it has its definite drawbacks. I was totally okay with the clock for the longest time. Then all of a sudden in order to advance the story, I had to meet someone at 4 PM the next day. The problem was, it was only about 5 or 6 PM on my current day. There is no way to advance the clock or speed up time, aside from going to bed - which you can't do until after 8 PM. And even then you can't sleep in. You have to get up at 8:30 AM each morning. So I was stuck basically hanging out with nothing to do until 4 PM the next day. Each in-game hour is about four minutes in real time. I am not going to do the exact math, but that meant just chilling for about a half hour in real time.
Then when I met the person I was supposed to meet, he told me to check back in four hours. Great. I walked around and killed time, but came back too late. The store was closed. So I had to come back in the morning. What did I then have to do? I had to go to bed, come back, and kill even more time until the store opened at 11 AM. Luckily I had stuff to do around the house as I played, or I would have been REALLY bored. I just put the controller down and came back later after I'd done some dishes and taken out some trash.
Stuff like this happened to me a lot, especially in the latter half of the game. I get wanting it to be an immersive experience and all that, but an option to speed up time should have been included. Forcing your players to put down the controller and kill 40 minutes in the middle of a gaming session is NOT good game design. The game does try to remedy this by giving you lots of characters to talk to and different mini games to explore. A nice touch is the video game arcade containing playable versions of Hang-On and Space Harrier. But still. They should have let you speed up time! This is borderline an inexcusable mistake.
The only other gripes I have are minor. The voice acting, the tank controls, the combat system, the non-playable characters that are always getting in your way. Those I can deal with because the story is so good and the game is so immersive that you stop noticing these things after a while. The time thing is impossible to avoid though. It flat out stinks.
Overall:
It may sound like I have a lot of gripes about Shenmue, but I really did love the game. I loved it back in the year 2000, and even now I still found it gripping and nearly impossible to put down.
The game's story is its bread and butter. You're going to want to know more about Lan-Di. You are going to want to know all about Ryo's father and his history. You are going to want to know what this mirror is. You are going to want to know how everything is connected. You are going to want to know a lot of things. One thing this game does brilliantly is give you little clues along the way that hint at a bigger picture, but without ever bringing that bigger picture itself into focus. It's there, you just don't know what it is yet.
Not only is the game's storyline terrific, but man does it create such a believable in-game world. If you are like me, you are going to completely lose yourself in this game. Who wouldn't want to run around Japan in the 1980s? You can visit restaurants, gamble, visit a psychic, play arcade games, train in a dojo, walk around and check out all the street vendors, make phone calls, you even get a job driving a forklift around. The combination of terrific music and graphics really bring this world to life. Just playing this game for one weekend really made me long to get on a plane and visit Japan. I can't say that a video game has ever made me want to visit a real life destination before.
If this is your first time playing Shenmue, you might not "get it." I am curious, actually, to see what people think about the game who DIDN'T play it back in the early 2000s. I am sure there are some people who were like "WTF is this shit?" I will acknowledge that the game is not for everyone. If you are looking for something fast paced or full of action and suspense, Shenmue is not for you.
Whenever I give a game its final grade, I always use one criteria and one criteria alone: did I have fun playing the game? The answer to that question here is a resounding YES. I couldn't put it down. I beat the whole thing in just a few days. For someone with such a short attention span like me, that is almost a miracle. Not only is this game an absolute blast, but it is also one of those games that brings warm and fuzzy nostalgic feelings to heart. I want to give it an A+, but there are just one too many flaws for me to give it a perfect score.
Final Score:
A
If you liked my Shenmue review, check out some of my other game reviews:
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