Shenmue is an Arduous Experience
Shenmue is something that I find extremely strange because when they announced a crowdfunder for a game called Shenmue III during Sony’s booth at E3, everyone cheered. I felt totally alone in wondering what the fuck a Shenmue was. Everyone was suddenly a fan of this ethereal classic from the 90′s on the Dreamcast that, even as a person who is obsessed with old shit, I had never heard of.
So I bought the first two games on PSN when I found out they had been remastered (vaguely upscaled) for the PS4 out of sheer intrigue. I must’ve been missing out on something... right?
Screenshot courtesy of MobyGames
Well, I am immediately smacked by the boldness of the game for the time. A lot of what this game does, one might not think were possible for the time. The game’s opening cutscene displays some fantastic motion capture technology and crisp weather effects for 1999 which, by the way, is the same year that Rayman 2: The Great Escape, Driver and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater came out. It should also be pointed out at this point that, despite being looked back at with misty eyes, the SEGA Dreamcast was a very poor console. So in this case, the cream rises to stop.
But I frankly found the whole game nothing but arduous. The perfect adjective. It isn’t necessarily negative but it is completely and undisputedly true. I am exhausted playing this game. Everything about it feels like actual genuine work even though I’m just sitting on my bed with a controller in my hands. The closest thing I can compare it to is if you were playing a Grand Theft Auto game except there was no map, no clear idea of what to do, the open world was tiny and you explored it incredibly slowly. There was no fighting system apart from scripted QTEs and the odd freeform combat section.
Screenshot courtesy of Red Ring Circus
To avoid being glib for just a moment, I do have a lot of appreciation for the game and it what it had to offer at the time of it’s release. It was pretty ahead of it’s time in a lot of ways and not just having popularized the Quick-Time Event. The mechanic of transitioning from third to first person and picking up items to examine them is pretty revolutionary and is near enough a mainstay of modern horror games like Resident Evil and Until Dawn. Shenmue also boasts a day/night cycle of passing time and dynamic weather which is present in any open world game. It predates The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind by three years.
It’s pretty astounding to play this game in 2021 with this context and trying to get your head around all the things that are possible in this game’s engine. Everything is voice-acted (albeit poorly and cheaply) and some NPCs have schedules of where they’re going to be and move around in the world. Not too dissimilar to Bethesda Softworks’ “Radiant A.I”, you will have to wait until certain times in the day for stuff to happen. It’s a living and breathing world and you feel as immersed as you would be in Liberty City or San Andreas.
Screenshot taken from USgamer
Similarly to Yakuza, you are pretty much allowed to do it what you want in the world in your own time, whenever you feel like it. By doing so, you find little nooks and crannies about the location that adds a delectable amount of world-building. The world itself, despite being jagged and spikey on the Dreamcast, is incredibly immersive by itself with the drabness of a post-war economy in rural Japan. It’s incredibly grey and uninviting and the people are often crotchety and disinterested in speaking to Ryo Hazuki. Whilst you can’t talk to every singly person in Grand Theft Auto V, the continuous background dialogue adds that certain fragrance to flavour the city more than just some land with buildings and people.
Whilst it may or may not be realistic to what areas of Japan were like at that time, playing Shenmue makes you believe the world that you’re being presented with. This is especially true with the beautifully bleak harbour area that I found extremely relatable. That being said, you don’t really get all that much out of it. Playing Hang-On at the arcade is kind of fun though. Everything else is barely approaching novelty and it makes finding the thing you’re looking for even for annoying, frustrating and time-consuming.
Most of this game is spent looking for the thing that you are told to look for, not knowing where to go and just talking to different people over and over again until a vague clue emerges. Then, you wait for the story to happen. I’m not suggesting that the game should hold my hand at all but I wouldn’t be against Ryo Hazuki having some independent thought of his own to guide me. He knows this place better than I do after-all and I’m not supposed to be playing the role of a fish-out-of-water character.
To be diplomatic, I am playing this game in 2021 and there is no longer a culture of taking your time with finishing games like there was then. To buy a game and complete it could be a long and protracted process so you got value for your money. Yu Suzuki makes sure that this game is long by making it directionless and confusing. Back then, this wasn’t what they were thinking and they knew that the game would prove to be long by letting players exploring a new world and giving them permission to do what they liked when they felt like it.
Playing Shenmue nowadays is an interesting experience but not really a great one if you never played it back then. It’s a sign of the times that video games are faster to finish than they used to be and one of the few exceptions to this, oddly enough, is Yakuza.
Yakuza really is the end-goal of what Shenmue laid out in principle all those years ago. It’s no error that the series is referred to as a spiritual sequel by some but it is fair to say that Shenmue walked so Yakuza could run.
Sorry that the conclusion was really boring, samey and predictable, it’s just that the conclusion was boring, samey and predictable.
