Vidya Thoughts

Shenmue does a better job of making me feel like part of a world than most games do even today.

In Shenmue, you need to talk with people, you need to manage schedules and you need to keep track of clues. The world has its own time system. You wake up at 8:30 and you need to be home by 11.

Every single character has voiced dialogue and every character has a routine they go through. You are unable to skip ahead or go back in time. So if you miss someone on a day, you have to try to run into them the next day. 

In order to complete the game, the player must become intimately familiar with the city. There is no map that you access via the pause menu (though there are maps scattered around town). Your end goal is to find the man who murdered your father and get revenge on him. At one point, the main character – Ryo Hazuki – is tasked with finding a group of sailors.

Through talking with people around town, you learn the following: sailors are usually out late, sailors hang out in bars and they also like bikes. Through exploration, you find that the city has a bar district. So, you now know to go to the bar district at night time in order to find the sailors you need. 

There are some flaws with adhering to a strict time system, though. The player is sometimes told that there is nothing to do until the next day, so you are encouraged to go explore the town and engage in other activities. The bulk of this is playing arcade games and collecting capsule toys.

The problem is that there are only two arcade games (you can also play stuff like pool and darts) and I can only play Space Harrier as a filler activity before I keep playing the game I actually want to play for so long.

Same goes for capsule toys. It’s neat getting a little figurine I don’t own, but wasting minutes pressing a button to get a new toy isn’t actually enjoyable. You’re just killing time. I guess that’s the point. A time killer in a game about managing a schedule. At some point though, I got tired of doing the same stuff and just had Ryo stare at his watch while I did something else for a few minutes.

That said, even with a lack of things to do, I would not want to change this system. Going by a schedule makes the city feel alive. Day and night actually feel like significant differences instead of just a different aesthetic. I know the sequel adds some quality of life features, but the only thing I would actually change about the time system is giving the player more things to do. More sidequests, more arcade games, more random activities. 

Typically, a revenge story like this would feature a lot of fisticuffs. Ryo would go around the city and get into random encounters with street toughs. That is not the case with Shenmue. The combat actually feels more like a minigame than a gameplay feature. I don’t think I got into my first fight until 5 or so hours into the game and I don’t believe I played more than 10 battles.

The game also sometimes uses quick time events to settle combat. QTEs are much maligned today, and it’s not like they’re great here, but I feel like they were added so the player felt like they had some control over movie scenes. You know, so it isn’t like you’re watching a movie instead of playing a game.

I like the approach of limited combat. Every encounter felt meaningful. If Ryo was squaring off, there was probably a good reason for it. I think a lot of the fun of Shenmue would be lost if it had a Yakuza-like random encounter system. It would begin to feel unrealistic, which in a game that lives or dies on immersion, is a bad thing.

Immersion has a drawback though. At one point, Ryo gets a job at the docks as a forklift operator. Just like every other aspect of the title, the game is slavish in making it seem real. You wake up in the morning, you go to work, you get a lunch break (it’s two hours, who gets breaks that long?) and then you get paid. Ryo gets this job in order to learn more about the gang who might be associated with his father’s death, so it is not an optional occurrence.

You have to do this for five straight days and it is beyond dull. It feels like padding. It feels like they knew they needed a third disc to the game and, instead of releasing a short final disc like a Playstation Final Fantasy title, they wanted something with substance. I think the dock bit would have worked better as an optional minigame, but I also can’t say it doesn’t fit in. This segment feels like it belongs in Shenmue.

I can totally understand why this game might turn people off. It requires patience, learning a world and keeping track of things. It isn’t user friendly and at times it isn’t even fun. It’s amazing that a game with so many layers was a flagship game on a major console. But if the player sticks with it, if the player can look past some of the things that aged and really dig in, they will find a world that is truly alive and unique.