I'm about 10 or 20 minutes in, and the nostalgia kicked my head in from the moment I pressed X on the main menu; weird, for a game I never really played myself.
It's exactly as I remember - shit controls; shit script;shit, over-compressed audio; terrible, low-res textures.
I think I love it.
I never played the first game so this is an interesting experience for me, so far I've been doing the usual Shenmue things, talking to everyone and spending all my allowance on Gacha capsules, tried to spar with Fuku-san but I guess I can't yet. Having fun exploring a town I've never been to before, more cramped than Hong Kong, but cosy.
I can honestly say so far the age of the game doesn't bother me one bit. shrug
tried to spar with Fuku-san but I guess I can't yet.
My memory of sparring with Fuku-san is that it's really picky about when it'll let you.
Another hour in, and I've made it to Dobuita. I vaguely remembered some of the things I'll need later, so bought them on the way, along with some caramel and a half-dozen capsule toys. I helped an old lady find a house and named a kitten. Now I'm looking for information about Chinese people, a section of the game that seems like it might be a bit incredibly racist?
Ryo's resting expression, a furious thousand-yard stare, is nowhere near getting old yet. Every time he appears in a cutscene, I crack up.
There's also an eerie, Stepford Wives/Truman Show vibe, as everyone refers to Iwao Hazuki's murder as "that day", "the day it rained", or "the day of the incident" in borderline-sinister fashion, as though they're either all in on it, or terrified that Ryo will crack and have a full-blown mental breakdown if they mention his dad.
Making copious use of the share button, too:
https://twitter.com/Ninchilla/status/1032745497226891264
https://twitter.com/Ninchilla/status/1032750701364105222?s=09
Excited to replay this when I eventually pick it up. Going to wait till Xmas though I think.
I have never started a game and not finished it as many times as I have Shenmue 2 though. By my rough guessing I think I've started it at least 6 times, twice when on the Dreamcast, twice on the OG Xbox, then can remember another two attempts on the DC in recent years, including in January this year.
Before this, I only ever used Shenmue as a Hang-On emulator.
Have I missed something bout Hang-On or is it really all about finding the right speed to get the perfect drifts for like, the entire game in a single run? I much prefer Space Harrier, I was so into that last night when I was thinking 'they'll all fly by down here so if I fly there and keep shooting I'll kill them and all' and then I realised I can bait the Dragon's fireballs to thefar side so I can get a good shot at his head.
Neither of these are as good as Outrun (and possibly Afternurner?) in Shenmue 2 though. :<
How is it that the "sailors" bit of Shenmue became the flagship gag? The way people talk about it, you'd think it was 80% of the game, but I just went from first mention of sailors to looking for Charlie in about 15 minutes - and most of that was spent buying capsule toys waiting for the pubs to open.
I mean, yeah, it's ridiculous, but it's not exactly a core mechanic; and most of the dialogue related to Chinese people is worse/cringier.
I also saw certain people the other day moan that they had to wait ages for a certian in game event but I was either lucky timing wise or I spoke to the right people because that didn't really happen to me. Not saying I haven't had to kill some time here and there but nothing that made me just play games on my phone for anything.
Game is actually moving on from a detective/community simulator and getting into the swing of things I guess, met two characters and got a very important plot item and I'm starting to get into more fights. It can be a little slow at the start, but I liked taking everything in since I don't know this town like I did Hong Kong and it's cool that all the people I'm talking to for help all respond familiarly to Ryo, like everyone knows each other. So far, I'm certain Shenmue 2 will indeed still remain the better game in my eyes, I'd be lying if I didn't say having played that first didn't steal a little of Shenmue 1's thunder, so far the only thing Shenmue 1 has that 2 doesn't is the feeling of Japan, which Shenmue 2 seemed to have personally swapped for a place where you don't know anyone at first and the place seems huge.
I think having half an idea what to do from watching the game played a lot (like, a lot) over the years is helping me speed through things, but I don't know that's necessarily a good thing. I feel vaguely like I might be missing stuff.
Haven't had an actual fight yet - just a couple of QTEs, which I am really bad at.
You can get to the point of looking for Charlie on the first in-game day if you know where you're going, but I remember it taking a long time when I first played the game.
Finding sailors is one of the first big plot points you've got to resolve - isn't it the ending to the first disc? - and it's not necessarily the most logical direction for Ryo's investigation to take.
There's also a vaguely homophobic subtext to the memes about a guy "looking for sailors", and we all know how The Internet loves its problematic jokes.
This being my first playthrough, I have no idea where to go for a lot of parts but I found some (including Warehouse 8 -_-) all on my own, and I guess the 3 Blades I got really lucky.
You're all bloody mental.
:)
Finding sailors is one of the first big plot points you've got to resolve - isn't it the ending to the first disc?
I thought the end of disc 1 was a street chase through Dobuita?
No, that's disc 2, when Spoiler - click to showthe guy from the travel agency steals the money you paid for the boat to Hong Kong.
Disc 1 ends with Ryo heading to the harbour.
Under £20 on both PS4 and Xbox One, if anyone's still on the fence.
I think the nearest fence to me in this case is about 20 miles away. :)
It's pretty tempting, but there are other games I'm looking longingly at (DQXI, AC Odyssey) which I've not previously played to death and don't already own for a machine that's currently hooked up to my TV.
Part of my hesitation, though, is bound to be nostalgia-related - I'm not convinced that it's going to have the same magic on PS4 as the Dreamcast game still holds for me, and there is a worry that once those rose-tinted glasses are lifted then the spell will be broken for the original, too.
I've only ever played about half an hour of the first one, and I'm tempted to give it another go, if only out of curiosity.
I restarted 2 again this year (which I mentioned somewhere) and was still enjoying that so convinced it will still hold up for those concerned.
Just holding out to Xmas or post Xmas. Present list depending.
Oh god. The graphics. The controls. The compressed audio. What am I letting myself in for? I don’t remember it being quite like this.
Oh god. The graphics. The controls. The compressed audio. What am I letting myself in for? I don’t remember it being quite this terrible.
Fixed that for you. 
Thing is, it's not terrible at all, it's just OLD. And the port is pretty much just that, a straight port, there's been virtually nothing done in the way of tarting it up apart from making it run in widescreen (which looks odd, and the cut-scenes are all in the original aspect ratio anyway, so they didn't even do that very well). It's the least ambitious PS4 re-release I've ever seen, I think.
But it has a strange magic, still. Once I'd adjusted to the controls (basically don't touch the right stick at all, unless you're standing still) and set the voices to Japanese and the display to 4:3, I began to get back into it. I'm already looking for sailors like it's 1999. (Totally forgotten where the Heartbeat bar is though, my sense of direction in Shenmue is as good as it is in real life. I'll find it).
Spoiler - click to show It's down the little set of steps opposite the motorcycle shop, just round from Bob's Pizza.
I imagine coming from a recent Yakuza game to Shenmue is quite the shock.
Speaking of the audio, was it bad for the time, or am I just forgetting how dodgy audio quality was?
I don’t remember it being bad at the time, but I probably had my hands over my ears to block out the excruciating English dub. (The option to play with the original Japanese voices in this is far and away the biggest improvement they could have made).
I love the dub in Shenmue, though I realise that's 80% for nostalgia and 20% for the comedy value. It would just be weird not to have those particular line readings.
The audio was always pretty compressed, as far as I remember, though - Dreamcast discs could only hold a gigabyte or so, and there's a lot of stuff to squeeze in there; audio is probably the easiest place to save space quickly with minimal unforseen impact.
(I remember a story I heard back at RTW that, during the development of the PlayStation port of GTA, one of the coders had downsampled all of the audio to (I think?) 4 bits to help with a memory problem they were having and forgot to put the original files back in when they were done. This was only noticed the day before the game was due to go gold, so the audio engineers had to pull an all-nighter deciding which sound effects and music tracks they could afford to restore without exceeding the memory allowance.)
So, um, I just met Kuze from Yakuza Zero, casually hanging out in a yakuza hideout in Dobuita.
What on earth? It's way too close to be a coincidence. Is this an Easter egg that's been added in the remaster? Or is this something that was in the original and they liked the guy's design so much that they simply lifted it for a game made nearly twenty years later?
What on earth? It's way too close to be a coincidence. Is this an Easter egg that's been added in the remaster?
Nah, he's always been there.
I see.
So that's Shenmue completed. It's still without a doubt the oddest thing ever.
It's a game with an enormous budget, that spends most of it not on locations or action sequences but on making sure every random pensioner in the game has something different to say every time you talk to them. It's a 12-hour prologue that ends just as it's getting going. It's a game with a detailed, in-depth fighting system with almost no opportunities to use it. It's a game where your character gets a boring job, then you have to spend hours actually doing that boring job, which is obviously boring. It's a game that spends ages setting up a love interest, then ensures your character roundly ignores them and nothing actually happens.
But still. There's still something magical about the tale of Ryo Hazuki - capsule toy addict, forklift prodigy and general all-round furious idiot. It's a game that perfectly captures the atmosphere of growing up in a shithole town with nothing to do. The sheer mundanity of pretty much the whole first half of the game actually then makes the (admittedly still fairly low key) second half actually seem quite exciting. There's real character here, in a way that I've never really experienced in any other title.
Has it aged well? No. The controls are terrible, Ryo steers with all the grace of an ocean liner, the sound quality is abysmal and it's often very dull. But in retrospect the decision to give this the most functional of remakes was the right one. A full remake would in many ways make the game worse, because what this game did with the technological limitations of the time is often quite astounding. What impresses still to this day is not the environment (being able to open every drawer in your house is no longer a big deal, especially as all most of the time all you get is flat textures of shirts and pants) but the characters, who have real personality and a hell of a lot to say for themselves. Wandering around chatting to people is often pointless but strangely compulsive, and it's a game you have to take on its own terms and at its own pace - rushing through to the end is rather missing the point. I ended up playing this in 4:3, using d-pad controls, and it's absolutely the right way to play this. It's an opportunity to play an old game, that's been largely unavailable for two decades, on a current-gen machine, and you shouldn't go into this expecting anything else.
I'm going straight into the sequel. I remember enjoying that a lot more first time around, but then I enjoyed this game probably more than I did originally (I certainly appreciated what it was trying to do, and what it managed to achieve, more than when it was new) so it will be very interesting to see how the bigger, more ambitious second game holds up.
Started Shenmue II last night. I think the first hour of the game is bigger in terms of area than the whole of Shenmue 1. Even knowing what I was going into, it's quite overwhelming. And it's a much more "traditional" game in that you can pretty much follow the plot, there's much less hanging around and talking to people and generally they don't have too much to say if you do. It's lots of fun though.
It's striking how much worse it looks than the original, though. I guess something had to give, what with the vastly increased scope, but the character models are terrible compared to the original game and it takes the usual approach (which Shenmue didn't do at all) of having lower levels of detail for passing NPCs compared to the main characters. It's quite disappointing and immediately robs the game of some charm. I can understand why this was necessary but it's still jarring going from one game straight to the other. Also the larger environments have many more repeating textures which shows up the low resolution more than the intricately hand-crafted locations in Shenmue 1. A shame. In many ways it shows its age more than I expected.
Also it has the most stupid remaster I've ever seen. As with the first game, cut-scenes play in the original aspect ratio - so for Shenmue 1, even if you played the game in 16:9, the cut-scenes would play as bordered 4:3. In the end I just played the whole game in 4:3 to make the transitions less apparent, and I was happy with that. But in Shenmue 2, the cut-scenes are now bordered (so, effectively 16:9) but the game still plays them in a bordered 4:3 window! So whatever mode you're playing it, cut-scenes play out in a little box in the middle of your screen. It's just utterly stupid and I have no idea why they simply couldn't have expanded that 16:9 cutscene to play out full-screen.
I never really clicked with Shenmue II, though I have to admit that I didn't notice any massive graphical changes between the first and second games on the Dreamcast, apart from the texture tiling. I can't imagine they had to downgrade the passers-by for the remaster, though, so it must be using the original assets. Maybe it's just harder to spot that on a 480p SCART signal.
The remaster has the option to play in 480p, but I'm not THAT much of a purist.
The remaster has the option to play in 480p, but I'm not THAT much of a purist.
You're putting yourself through agony just playing it, you might as well go the whole hog. Right now, it's like asking for a dominatrix to whip you, but only gently and at widely-spaced out intervals.
Not that I'd know about that.
These games are shorter than I remembered.
20 hours was a long game back then.
A friend of mine at school finished Shenmue on Dreamcast, but assumed he'd got the bad ending because he'd never had to use the fourth disc and replayed the whole thing again; it wasn't until he was starting disc three for the second time that he noticed the fourth disc was just for extras.
Shenmue III is looking pretty Shenmue. I'm impressed.
These games are shorter than I remembered.
Downloaded this on Game Pass yesterday, and I'm looking for sailors (end of disc one?) after about 45 minutes of play time.
Yakuza Zero was still playing its opening cutscene after 45 minutes.
Based on the footage coming out from the Kickstarter backer preview demo, Shenmue III is very Shenmue indeed – and I'm not sure it's at all a good thing.
The dub is just as flat as 20 years ago, and the script is borderline nonsensical in places – surely we expect more effort in 2019? The combat system looks as clunky and frustrating as ever, that whining MIDI Chinese violin soundtrack gets real annoying, real fast. Ryo's proportions look wrong – his arms and neck just slightly too long.
I'm still glad I didn't back this one, though at the same time I would really like to give the demo a first-hand look instead of relying on youtubelol.
Yeah, I've gone from enthusiastically backing this one to really not being fussed about it at all.
I didn't even finish my replay of Shenmue II, even taking its age into account it was dull and clunky (and not in the interestingly dull and clunky way the first one was).
I think the Yakuza series has ruined Shenmue for me.
I returned to Shenmue II, having originally got a few hours in and put it aside. I'm really glad I went back to it.
It's still just about the oddest game ever, for all the reasons the first game is so odd and then some more besides. The first section in Wan Chai is the weakest of both titles - it's a big, confusing environment where you do little more than run from one place to another to talk to someone, who then tells you to run somewhere else and find someone different. There are a huge amount of places to go but no real reason to go there. Characters aren't as well developed as the first game so most of the people you pass on the street are little more than talking tour guides, telling you where to go if you get lost or (in most cases) offering to walk there with you agonisingly slowly. There are a handful of battles and some frustratingly drawn-out mini-games, including a lengthy repeated section where you carry stacks of books around and a leaf-catching game that had me shouting at the screen.
Then the action moves to Kowloon and it all suddenly makes sense. Kowloon is an incredible environment, a maze of crumbling, interconnected tower blocks, and it's at this point that the action picks up. It builds and builds throughout this whole section, culminating in an assault on a 40-storey tower block and one of the greatest "endings" in the whole of gaming.
Spoiler - click to showThe appearance of Lan Di at the end gave me chills, even though I knew it was coming this time around. It's just so well done.
And it all works precisely because everything you've done before (including virtually the whole of the first game) has been so deliberate. It's pacing like I've never seen in any medium before, thirty hours of build-up followed by a blast of ridiculous intensity. And it turns out that carrying those books actually prepared you for the QTEs that pepper the second half of the game. That the characters you met are key to the story. That the move scrolls you've been collecting are actually going to be useful, eventually. That everything's been building to this point.
Then… it slows it right down again. Right down. But it's all about Ryo's journey after all, and there's something quite majestic about only finding out (partially) what the series title means right at the end of the second game, and having time to ponder on the many mysteries that still remain unanswered.
Spoiler - click to showI also greatly enjoyed Ryo's hamfisted attempts at making small talk with Shenhua (again, someone you've seen since the cover of the first game but who only makes her appearance right at the end of this one) where he's unable to find anything to talk about apart from martial arts and the girl he left behind in Dobuita. Glorious.
It shows its age mechanically of course and it's still massively disrespectful of the player's time (you no longer need to hang around for hours doing nothing, at least, but there are a couple of unnecessary roadblocks in the story that force you to gain huge amounts of money to continue and play/save scum the terrible gambling minigames) but hey, that's Shenmue for you.
I can't believe that we've waited 18 years to find out how this story continues, and we're less than a week away from the release of Shenmue III. I have no idea at all what that game is going to be like, but I'm well and truly back on the hype train.
Is there any chance that the belated final part can actually pick up the plot and do it justice? Sounds like it would be a challenge even if the same team were working on it right after they finished part 2.
It's not the final part, it's the next part. Apparently Ryo's story will be about 40% complete after the events of Shenmue III. The fact they're not rushing it and clearly adhering to the original vision gives me hope that this will be the sequel we deserve, and from what I've seen of the preview footage (not much because I'm avoiding spoilers) it does indeed look exactly like you'd want a Shenmue sequel to look.
The main question is not whether they'll complete the saga, but whether I'll die of old age before they get there.
And, bang on cue, we've got a launch trailer.
Well Shenmue III is bloody glorious based on the first couple of hours play. Somehow it’s emerged after 18 years and it’s still totally Shenmue. I’m genuinely shocked at how much it’s stuck to the original vision.
So let me talk a bit more about Shenmue III.
It's amazing. I mean it's incredible that it even exists, it's even more of a miracle that it's emerged like this. It's completely true to the original vision. It's got the same pacing, the same voice acting, the same feeling of inhabiting and eventually knowing every inch of a place that comes to feel almost real. It picks up exactly where Shenmue II left off and feels like a direct continuation of that game despite eighteen years and multiple console generations having passed. Even going straight from the Shenmue II remaster to the new game hasn't been jarring at all. I saw this described as feeling like a meticulous Bluepoint remaster of a lost Dreamcast classic, and that's pretty much exactly right.
It's completely out of step with modern design sensibilities, and I love it for that. You spend most of your time talking to weird Chinese villagers. It's got a constantly-draining stamina meter whose sole purpose seems to be to force you to walk everywhere and appreciate all the detail. The plot unfolds incredibly slowly. It's totally Shenmue.
There's more to do this time around though. All the various systems interact a lot more: you can raise money by hunting for herbs, or chopping wood, or fishing; the money can be used to purchase gambling tokens, or food to restore that stamina meter; gambling tokens can be exchanged for prizes; sets of herbs or capsule toys, or those prizes, can be traded at the pawn shop for move scrolls; practising at the local dojo levels up your fighting skills. It quickly develops an almost Animal Crossing-like vibe as you get up each morning and go through your various tasks to achieve whatever little goal you've set yourself that day. In the evening you go back to Shenhua's house, chat about your day and head off to bed before doing it all again the morning.
It looks fantastic (especially considering the budget). The music is exceptional. It's got loads of little throwbacks to the earlier games. It is, in every way, the perfect sequel.
The first half of the game, set in a small village in rural China, is extremely close in its feel and pace to Shenmue 1; the second half apparently feels more like Shenmue 2. I'm in no hurry whatsoever to race to the conclusion. I've waited half my adult life for this game and I'm going to savour every minute.
Game of the year, no question whatsoever. Everyone who hasn't played Shenmue is going to hate it.
Game of the year, no question whatsoever.
It certainly is a game from this year, that's true. 