Shenmue I & II (2018)

It's best to approach these games as if they were point and click adventures without the pointing and clicking or a JRPG story where you to talk to everyone to find out your next objective but without the RPG battles. A lot of the game is running around and talking to people. The gameplay is not the highlight of this game. There's mainly fighting, which is awkward and stiff but also some other little racing segments. There are also quick time events, the bane of many video game players.

In the first game, there's a sneaking segment. Then there are forklift races and general forklift work that you have to repeat day after day. Near the end there's that motorcycle riding segment that comes out of nowhere and that I found quite hard to actually finish in the allotted time limit. One of the final fights of the first game is a fight against 30 men. It's ok but not as fun as it could've been. The fighting controls really dampen the experience. But fighting a guy who looks like Golem before the Lord of the Rings movies came out was a surprise. There's no time speed up function so if you have to be somewhere at a certain time then you have to wait all that time.

There are Interesting and ambitious ideas in the game design. Probably the strongest aspect is giving NPCs their own routines independent of Ryo's main quest. The problem is you'll probably never experience a lot of it. I first realized this in the first game when for some reason I decided to start the game from an earlier save, I went along a different path to get to an objective only to discover an encounter I didn't experience the first time through. There was also a time I randomly talked to an NPC and found out she broke up with her boyfriend and then I realized that an earlier character I had talked to had alluded to something similar. I hadn't realized they were dating. I also didn't realize there were phone conversations you could have with Nozomi. There's also taking care of the cat where I apparently didn't see all the events that could happen related to it. Much of this has little to no bearing on the main story but it's amazing how many little missable details and little events there are in the town.

Not much happens in the first game story-wise and the game doesn't give a very good first impression as it drip feeds you tiny bits of info as you run around town asking people if they've seen a black car and then those infamous sailors. The small town has quite a few different areas but you don't need to visit a lot of them. While its everyday blandness has its charm, it's a bit disappointing that the only areas are the town and a shipping dock. Very boring and drab looking locations. It really could've been trimmed a fair bit without affecting the story at all. The characters aren't interesting and the "sorta" relationship between Ryo and Nozomi is just there. There's no development to it although there is that nice scene where Nozomi talks to Ryo on a bench in the park that was touching but it could've been more effective if there was some actual development leading up to it.

The game is not unplayable by today's standards. But it took me some time before the game sort of clicked with me, or at least enough that I wanted to finish it but I had actually been quite close to giving it up.

The second game has more major story events and more interesting characters. Hong XiuYing being a standout. Ren also adds a counter personality to play off Ryo, which can lead to amusing interactions. The story also goes into the kung fu philosophy more and whether taking revenge is something Ryo should do. There's definitely more motivation to progress through the story than the first game although there is one part that practically stopped me completely. It's where you're stuck wiping off the dusty walls of a temple without any goal in mind but you're suppose to wipe off a very specific part of the temple to progress the story. Extremely boring and frustrating. I looked up a walkthrough to get past this point.

The move to Hong Kong has many more locations, which are larger and visually more impressive. However, being much larger does mean it loses the intimacy of the smaller locations in the first game. There's even less reason to talk to NPCs outside of the main story.

You're still running around and talking to people a lot but some improvements help streamline the process in the much larger locations. The most immediate impactful improvement is being able to speed up time with a wait function at certain points in the story. Also you can ask an NPC to lead you to whichever key location that you've been told to go to.

Fighting is still awkward in this game and there's way more quick time events this time around like walking over what feels like a million planks on so many floors of an old building and the running sequences with Ren can get extremely annoying. There's the final fight in Kowloon that has to be repeated from the beginning if you mess up the final quick time event sequence. Instead of forklifts you get to carry books out of a library to place on benches outside to air them out or move boxes at a dock (migi, migi! hidari da!, migi, migi, migi, migi! then Ryo drops the box). There's also that part where you have to catch falling leaves from a tree...annoying.

So far this has been a whole lot of complaining so after all this, why do I actually want to play Shenmue 3?

I don't quite know but it's certainly not because of the gameplay, which is merely tolerable to me and to some inexcusably bad. I played the games with Japanese voices so maybe that helped. The story is nothing special so far but there are some noteworthy characters in the second game and the frustrating catching leaves part I mentioned actually has a purpose behind it which was kind of poetic and showed how Hong is trying to influence Ryo by means other than just scolding him with words. It's these little details that enhance what is a very typical revenge plot. The world building and little interactions with NPCs makes its locations feel more alive like they exist without Ryo. It's not always effective but there's a purpose to these details even if I've probably forgotten a lot of them.

I guess what might've finally pushed me into liking Shenmue is surprisingly the Guilin segment at the end of game 2. It feels tacked on at first after Kowloon when one would normally expect the game to end. In Guilin, you meet Shenhua for the first time and all you do is talk to her and get to know her with some running quick time events. It's very relaxing with beautiful scenery and music. You'd think just talking to a single character would be so boring but it wasn't, it was probably the most compelling part to me and I was simply flabbergasted that this would be the case. It ends so abruptly that I can see why Shenmue fans have been clamoring for a sequel for so many years.

I am hesitant to recommend these games to others. I still don't know why I ended up caring and thinking so much about these two games. I think it's hard to predict with whom these games will resonate with. I understand both the fans and haters of this game. I can't even recommend the games solely on the story. Shenmue is a mystery to me but one I want to see to its end.

Been on a real "revisiting Dreamcast favorites on PC" kick lately! It's been years since I finished the first Shenmue and I'm having a blast.

I originally planned to mod the heck out of this, but I didn't really like the way the HD texture packs made it look. It felt like maybe too many artistic liberties had been taken? So I just restored the audio, patched the cutscene aspect ratio and called it good.

This could be an unpopular opinion, but boy do Shenmue 1 and 2 not stand up to the test of time. I will finish 2 as I've already finished one and have gotten pretty far in 2, but it is a slog.

I appreciate how ambitious this game was back when it was originally released and I liked the first game very much back in the day, however playing it today there are glaring issues, especially with pacing. I will say Shenmue 2 helps with that by allowing you to skip scenes and skip waiting hours in game for things to happen so that's something. I never played Shenmue 2 originally so I don't know if this was an addition for the PS4 version.