Shenmue I & II (Video Game Review)

The sad truth of all things is that they exist to be surpassed. This isn't intended in quite the tall poppy syndrome sense, but in how certain works are a measuring stick to others. Alien remains a standard for sci-fi horror, Band of Brothers for television surrounding a certain wartime conflict, or the Eisenhorn trilogy for Black Library. We always hope that others will learn from them, to take their ideas an improve them, elevating the medium as a whole. Unfortunately, in doing so, it can make returning to those games very difficult. This has hit the Shenmue series especially hard as, while it's clearly a milestone achievement, it has clearly long since been surpassed.

Synopsis 

The Shenmue games follow the story of Ryo Hazuki, a young martial artist living in late 80s Japan. After his father is threatened by a mysterious Chinese man, Hazuki is tasked with uncovering the secrets of his family's history and the mysterious dragon mirror. A subject which only becomes all the stranger in the second game, with the involvement of both another mirror and a woman by the name of Shenhua Ling, who is tied to his fate.

The Good

When you look at any game praising the Shenmue series, you will often see points cited in how it pioneered certain ideas and developed them. While the core story was certainly an engaging romp, what many players often remember fondly is how the duology attempted to bring its world to life. While "realism" might be a stretch, you had to deal with real-time schedules, waiting until certain people became available and various dynamic systems. As such, players were often encouraged to make their own fun by visiting a variety of additional minigames, activities or hidden content.

To the developer's credit, a number of the side activities still hold up, and this isn't just referring to the Space Harrier arcade machine. Racing gangs in quick time events is often amusing, finding new masters to learn moves from means that you are often back-tracking over old territory, and even the repetition of forklift driving is oddly therapeutic. The cities the games are set in have a real sense of life to them because of this, and the fact you will often go over it so many times means that there's a sense of ingrained personality to them. It's akin to the famous Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil, where the mansion itself is identifiable enough to almost become a character in the ongoing events. This is what helps elevate it above other games which did the same - notably the Ultima series - as while it featured similar elements, it made good use of the then-new 3D polygons to enhance the sense of atmosphere.

Another definite plus in the games' favour is how they feature so many seemingly innocuous elements with no apparent use. Items in shops, for example, are present and might have seemingly no purpose in the game, only to play a role in possible quests. The fact that there are so many, and that they can be bought at any one time, gives a sense of life to the world and an odd engagement. It might sound pointless, but it manages to somehow work, especially compared with video games where every item has a (usually combat related) purpose for some event or serves purely to buff you. This goes hand in hand with how many objects, items and elements can be interacted with, from desk draws to cupboards or shelving units. It often reached Heavy Rain levels of interactivity, and you could often spend hours at a time wandering around just exploring what could be used. Sometimes you would even be surprised with something useful in them.

Lastly, and most pressingly, we have the soundtrack. While the graphics certainly have not held up, the musical score remains as enchanting as ever. Even when held up against modern releases, it often holds its own, and the main theme manages to hold more quiet emotion than almost anything found in the past two gaming generations. When people speak of the detail, atmosphere and dramatic surrounding the game, they speak as much of the core mechanics as the amplifying factor of the soundtrack.

Yet, it doesn't take long for you to see where things have gone wrong. For all the praise which can be heaped upon it, for all the benefits, strengths and lessons learned by following its example, time has not been kind to Shenmue.

The Bad

The key factor to keep in mind here is that the Shenmue duology are very much games from another age, with elements which cannot be forgiven today. Many of these sadly tie directly into what were seen of strengths at the time, such as the waiting mechanics. Many core elements within the games require you to wait things out between major events, often for hours at a time. These passed during in-game time, so you often had to spend three or four in-game hours wasting your time between key events. So this means that you're left trying to make your own fun, with no way to press on through the story.

The concept behind such time delays was seen as one of immersion at the, as it furthered the idea that this was a living, breathing world. Today, it all too easily resembles the sort of time-gates that plague the likes of the iOS store or free-to-play games. Were this a good two or three that might be fine, but the sheer padding that these add to the Shenmue games is utterly ridiculous. You can end up cooling your heels for a solid five hours waiting for someone to come home, visit them, only for them to tell you to go away and come back at another time. This sort of one-conversation-followed-by-further-delays style of pacing plagues much of the games, and it makes for an extremely lethargic experience.

While the other activities throughout the city help to somewhat offset the delays within the game, many simply don't feature enough variety to offset this. There are only so many times you can mash buttons on the arcade or use the forklift before you're desperately just wishing that there was a skip time button. Furthermore, if you seek a much more active way to waste time such as training your martial arts stances, you find it lacks any and all feedback. Rather than training against opponents or weighted bags you're left punching the air, and as such this just lacks any sense of satisfaction. There are just too few many tools to keep yourself busy, and this only further exposes this flaw.

Many people will rush to the defense of Shenmue citing how the Yakuza series follows a similar trend, but the key difference lies in how it staggers such content. In Yakuza, the minigames, side stories and additional elements were additional bits to the game. They were extensive to be sure, but you never needed to hunt them down simply to kill time until the next event came about. Furthermore, Sega CS1 simply did a far better job of including more toys and side stories to keep its players busy. These games might have had the benefit of someone else giving them the idea to improve on, or the decades to refine them, but that's the key problem here: Shenmue can't excuse so many of its flaws simply by citing innovation anymore, as so much of what it offered has been surpassed.

Another definite issue which cannot be overlooked is the control interface. Both during fights and just wandering around town has a laborious tedium to it, thanks to how they control. While the fights themselves play out like a semi-drunken version of Street Fighter 2, Ryo handles like a tank during his visits throughout town. The camera is so squarely fixed on his back and at such an awkward angle, that it makes navigating the tighter back-alleys or small rooms an exercise in sheer patience. If you're lucky, you can just guess which way to point and get out of there, if not you're stuck looking through the back of Ryo's skull or clipping through the environment itself. It's a product of its era to be sure, but that excuse can only go so far.

Finally, and most pressingly, there's the sound quality of the game. The music is great, that cannot be denied, and the hoaky voice acting can be somewhat amusing if approached in the right way. The rest, however, is difficult to justify. So much of this sounds as if it were recorded on a cheap backroom microphone, and needs substantial cleaning up. The constant crackling, distortions and bizarre errors constantly yanks you out of the moment, even when the voice acting doesn't. The game didn't need a re-release, it needed full-fledged remastering to truly make it worthwhile.

The Verdict

As was stressed at the start, Shenmue has an important place in history. The ground which was broken by it led to many great games, and influenced the mechanics behind so many others. Yet, the games' ideas and innovative twists do not make it enjoyable to play in this day and age. It can be interesting to experience, and to pick out where so many great concepts were spawned from, but that's really it. Perhaps the games are worth buying on a sale, but as they stand, you honestly have no reason not to buy anything from Yakuza 0 to Majora's Mask in its place.

Verdict: N/A out of 10