Shenmue II
Xbox
Note: I am not exactly sure what console to file this review under. Whenever an HD re-release of a game comes out, I almost always credit the original system if the game is basically the exact same thing with the addition of graphical upgrades. For example: I counted the first Shenmue as a Dreamcast game even though I had played the re-release on the PS4. My reasoning: I own the physical copy of the Dreamcast game, I grew up playing it, and I am most familiar with that version of the game. I didn’t see enough changes in the HD re-release to consider it a PS4 game. Using that logic, I would consider this to be an Xbox review, since the Xbox copy of Shenmue II is the one I played first and still own a physical copy of. I only played through the Xbox version once, and according to my memory these games are identical. However, I hear that the Xbox port of Shenmue II is garbage, and that it suffered all kinds of problems that were fixed with the PS4 port, which is supposedly far superior. I do not remember any of those issues, which is why I am still counting this as an Xbox title. If in the future I go back and play the Xbox copy and find it significantly worse than the PS4 re-release, I may change my mind. But for now: Xbox it is.
Nostalgia Factor:
I was always an enormous fan of the original Shenmue, but its sequel was never released for the Dreamcast in the United States. For the longest time, I never thought I was going to be able to play it. Eventually it was ported to the Xbox in the year 2002. One problem: I didn’t have an Xbox. After several years had passed, however, my girlfriend at the time was given an Xbox by a friend who was moving away. It didn’t immediately dawn on me: “oh yeah, you can play Shenmue II now!” I was more focused on finally being able to play the Knights of the Old Republic games. But when I went to a local buy and sell used game store, one of the first titles I saw on the shelf was Shenmue II. Memories of the first game came flooding back to me. A rush of adrenaline ran through my body. I was finally going to be able to see what happened next! I didn’t care what the price of the game was, I was going to buy it. It was MINE!
I popped Shenmue II in and I was immediately blown away by the larger scale of the game. Everything the first game had done, the sequel managed to ramp up to a much grander scale. Looking back on my first time playing, specific memories of the game are a little hazy. This was, after all, smack dab in the middle of the perma-drunk/stoned phase of my life that I mentioned during my Snake Eater review. I remember a woman on a motorcycle. I remember catching leaves. I remember visiting the martial arts school. I remember Kowloon and all the planks. I remember having to work my way up, floor by floor, through that Yellow Head Building towards the end of the game and how tedious it was. I remember the absurdly long walking and talking segment after you meet up with Shenhua. I did not remember the game’s exact ending. I also recall not liking the game as much as I did the first.
At the very earliest, this took place around 2004. At latest, 2006. I would not play the game again until 2018 when I got the Shenmue I and II collection for the PS4. I quickly burned through the first Shenmue in five days. Part of me wanted to go right into Shenmue II, but I didn’t want to burn myself out on the series so quickly. I played a few other games first. Then, after a week or two had passed, I realized that I didn’t care about getting burned out on the series. All I could think about was jumping back into the world of Shenmue. So I did.
Storyline:
This game picks up shortly after the first Shenmue left off. Ryo arrives in Hong Kong, fresh faced and ready to track down the man who killed his father. His only clue is a letter he received in the first game. The letter was addressed to Ryo’s father, warning him that Lan-Di was going to be coming looking for the mirrors. It was sent from Hong Kong by a man named Yuanda Zhu. Ryo sets off to find Yuanda Zhu, but runs into several roadblocks along the way.
First, his bag gets stolen. Mission number one: track down the thieves to get it back. He does, only to discover that all his money was removed first. All that cash you carried over from the first game? Yup. Gone forever! Ryo is forced to get a job moving boxes (just for one shift, luckily). This gives you a little bit of cash to play with as you set out on your quest. You are going to need more money later on in the game, but how you earn it is up to you. You can take on more jobs, like the box moving. You can gamble. You can participate in arm wrestling matches. You can even sell your collectible baubles at pawn shops if you are in need of a little extra money.
Even though your goal of finding Yuanda Zhu seems pretty straightforward, it is not. Hong Kong is a big, BIG freaking city. And the game is set in the 80s, so you can’t just search for him on Google or anything. You have to go around and talk to people and gather clues to find his location. If you’ve played the first Shenmue, you should know how this works. The whole game pretty much is following one small clue to the next. Each clue you find, each path you go down brings you just a tiny step closer to Yuanda Zhu, and ultimately one step closer to Lan-Di.
Honestly, too much happens in this game for me to be able to recap it all for you for this review. Long story short: your quest eventually takes you out of Hong Kong and into the Walled City of Kowloon. In the game’s final act, you head to Guilin, where the mirrors were created. There you meet up with Shenhua, the mysterious girl you’ve been dreaming about since the first Shenmue. After a lengthy exposition sequence, the game ends on a cliffhanger when Ryo uses a mysterious glowing sword as a key to open up a cavern with a giant mural of the Phoenix and the Dragon mirrors located inside.
The end.
What? That’s it? You can see why people are so miffed that it has been almost 20 years and we still don’t have a Shenmue III yet. Thankfully, that is coming soon.
Gameplay:
The game’s controls are exactly the same as they were in the first game, so I am not going to go into great detail about them. Ryo still has his tank controls. The fighting system is still exactly the same. If you played the first game, you will be able to jump right into this one without missing a beat.
Quick time events are still aplenty, although they are more annoying this time around than they were in the first game. You don’t get a whole lot of time to react to them this time, especially in some of the game’s faster paced action scenes. As fast as I am, I failed many, many QTEs throughout the course of my playthrough. Most QTE sequences simply start back up again when you fail them, so this wasn’t a huge issue for me… for the most part. There is one particular spot in the game where you have to ascend a dilapidated building, using wooden planks to cross large chasms. As you are balancing, a QTE sequence starts up where you must hit the proper buttons to keep your balance. One slip up, ONE, and you fall to your death. You then have to start at the bottom of the building and make your way up again. Seeing as how this is a lengthy and time consuming part of the game, you absolutely do not want to have to make your way up again. I found myself saving the game after each and every wooden plank in order to save some time. I could just load up my last save again whenever I fell (which was often). I don’t remember much of my initial playthrough of Shenmue II on the original Xbox, but I do remember this segment with all the wooden planks. I don’t think that the game let you save whenever you wanted like this one does, so I had to trial and error my way through it, writing down the button prompts one at a time and memorizing them so that I would not fall. That had to be a major pain in the butt.
Conversations work a little bit differently in this game. Instead of simply talking to people with your generic pre-loaded questions and getting their generic and predictable pre-loaded responses, you are often given the option of asking specific questions. If you have multiple objectives to take care of, you can pick which objective you want to ask people about. You can ask where certain destinations are. If you are in need, you can also ask questions about where to make money. This isn’t Knights of the Old Republic, however, where you have long and detailed conversation trees to pick from. Things are much more basic than that, although this is a step in that direction. I also must note that NPCs are much more willing to help this time around. 90% of the people in the original Shenmue basically told you to screw off whenever you’d approach them. This time around, everyone is SO much more helpful. You still get a few A-holes once in a while, but they are few and far between. Some people even go so far as to walk you to your destination if you are lost. They walk at a god damn snail’s pace, but they will take you where you need to be. Eventually.
One major improvement upon the original Shenmue is how you no longer have to kill time while waiting for events to happen. Need to meet someone at a bar that opens up at 7 PM, but it is only 10 o’clock in the morning? No problem! The game gives you the option to speed up time so you no longer have to wait around for hours at a time. Yes! Thank you! That was my number one complaint about the first game, all the waiting. I am so glad they fixed it. It is a little ironic too, because there is so much more to see and do in this game. Killing time in Shenmue II would have likely been a lot less dull than it was in the first game. But still, I am very glad this addition was made.
Graphics:
The game still looks really, really good. Sure, it shows its age in a few areas, but I don’t care. You can’t hold a game from 2001 or 2002 to 2018’s graphical standards. The characters look nice. The cityscapes look nice. All the shops, stores, restaurants, and the like are all extremely and painstakingly detailed. They look like places that could have legitimately existed back in the 80s. You can go inside a great many of them. I explored a LOT, and there are still dozens and dozens of rooms I did not enter. I am willing to bet, however, that even though going into these rooms is not essential to advance the plot in any way, that they are still intricately detailed and filled with small personal touches. That is some dedication. The atmosphere this game creates is sensational. It is just so easy to get completely lost in this game. Just as the first Shenmue made me fall in love with Japan, this game does the same with China. I’ve never been to China, but I feel that I understand what life over there would be like just from playing Shenmue II.
The landscapes in the game are beautiful too. I feel as if the first Shenmue was a bit more scenic than this one, which mainly takes place in dirty, crowded cities. But the cities are still really nice to look at. Kowloon not so much, but I did enjoy gazing out over the water while in Hong Kong. Aerial shots of the city always made the city look really appealing to me, too, although I hear it is polluted and filthy and disgusting there in real life. In this game it is all sunshine and clear skies and crystal blue waters
The game's final act takes you out of the city and into a lush, green forested area in Guilin. Guilin looks pretty beautiful, and it was admittedly very nice to get out of the city and see trees and some water and some nature.
Sound:
I thought that the voice acting and the sound quality of the game's conversations was one of the weakest things about the original Shenmue. While I think it has improved perhaps a tiny little bit, it still is not the best.
The game's music is still very good though. It blends right in with the game's intricately detailed environments. The graphics and the sound go hand-in-hand to really deliver an immersive experience for the player. Put on some headphones and dedicate a few hours to this title. You will completely lose yourself in the game.
Overall:
The original Shenmue meant a lot to me, and when I reviewed it I was tempted to give it a perfect score. I didn't, however, as I only give perfect scores to games that I believe to be absolutely flawless. The first Shenmue was not flawless. The long wait times, the tank controls, the hundreds of NPCs that were always too busy to talk to me. It was an outstanding game, but not a flawless one.
Shenmue II takes everything that the first game does, and makes it even better. The cities you explore are enormous, filled with hundreds of explorable rooms and businesses. The NPCs actually talk to you and help you out on your quest. The storyline of the game moves along at a much quicker pace, and is filled with all kinds of action. There were dull moments aplenty in the first Shenmue, particularly when you had to wait around because you could not speed up time. That is not a problem here! Everything clips along at just the right pace.
But when the game needs to slow things down and step back for a moment, it can do that too. When Ryo has to catch the red leaves falling from the sky. When he duels with Xiuying, who teaches him new moves. Learning about Wude under a sky of shining stars. This game does an excellent job of balancing exploration and fast paced action, while at times toning it back and delivering a heartfelt storyline at the same time.
Not to say it is without flaws. I don't know if it is just me, but I found some of the brand new QTE combo sequences to be hard to duplicate, simply because I could not see them properly. For example, it would look like it was saying to hit down, down, then right because of the way the buttons were flashing. But it would actually just be down then right. The way the buttons flashed up on the screen were very misleading, in my opinion, and often led to a lot of frustrating deaths.
Speaking of frustration, don't get me started on the plank segment of the game again. What a chore! And when you have to scale that building at the end of the game, floor by floor? Ugh. That part of the game seemed like it would never end. Just get me to the damn roof, or the 17th floor, or wherever it was I needed to be. It was so unnecessary to have obstacles that you had to dodge or enemies you had to fight and then long conversation sequences on nearly every floor. That whole area of the game was a bit dragged out for me.
And speaking of the phrase "dragged out", need I mention how boring the Guilin segment of the game is? All you do is walk and talk with Shenhua and pick different conversation topics for her to talk about. Seriously, that is all you do is walk and talk. For two freaking hours! I shit you not. That is how they end this game, with a two hour walking and talking sequence. I fell asleep in the middle of a conversation one night when I was trying to beat this game. When I woke up, Shenhua was still freaking talking and I swear I must have been asleep for at least ten minutes. She was just babbling on the whole time.
The first three quarters of the game are stunning, A+ material. The last quarter though.... ehhh. It is a bit tedious. The planks, the Yellow Head Building, the walking and talking Guilin segment; this game ends with a whimper rather than a bang.
So by my own admission, the game is not flawless. And I only give perfect scores to flawless games. The first Shenmue was an amazing game and it got an A. This game does everything that the first game does, but several times better. I can forgive the fact that the game ends with a whimper because everything leading up to the end is so incredibly entertaining. Plus, the ending does set us up for Shenmue III, which thankfully we can now look forward to as it is coming out next year in 2019.
Anyone who knows me knows that I often let nostalgia interfere with my reviews. Going simply by nostalgia and from memories, I would have originally told you that the first Shenmue was better than the second. After playing both games in the span of just a couple of weeks, I can now safely say that nostalgia served me wrong. Shenmue II is actually the better game. It is absolutely brilliant and is filled with dozens of breathtaking and memorable moments from start to finish.
No, the game is not flawless. But simply giving it the same grade as the first game when it is SO much better seems wrong. Shenmue II is simply an amazing game, and in the years since its release, its legacy has helped to shape the face of gaming. As innovative as the game is, it is also incredibly unique as well. I have never played anything quite like Shenmue I or II before.
In the past, I have heard Shenmue II mentioned as one of the greatest games of all time. I always used to scoff at that notion, particularly because I always preferred the first. Now, I am not so sure about that. I think those people might be on to something. Once I got started with this game, I couldn't put the controller down. When I wasn't playing, I was thinking about the game. I was really hooked. I hadn't been this invested in a game in a long time. Too long. For that, Shenmue II, I award you with this blog's highest honor: the A+. This game sets the bar ridiculously high for the upcoming Shenmue III. It has been nearly an 18 year wait. I sure hope its worth it.
Overall:
A+
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