I feel bad talking smack about this game in particular because it is clearly a vision that is loved by it's creator but sadly, the creator does not love me.

The game makes the player wait around for anything to happen without having a time skip. If an NPC tells you to come back tomorrow, you have to wait 20 or so minutes in real time.

The story features a young man by the name of Ryo that finds his father dead and will now go on a quest seeking revenge by killing the mysterious man who murdered his father.

That sounds well enough.
How does Ryo find the man who murdered his father?
By asking people who won't give him the time of day questions.
"Where are the sailors?" Ryo asks the shop owner.
The shop owner has no idea.
This is a great pausing moment to reflect upon your life choices to play this game. It does not respect your time.
The sailors are probably at the pier, running a train on your mother, Ryo.
Why doesn't he just go there instead of asking random people where sailors could be?
Because if you removed Ryo's permanent face patch, you'd find out that he is actually made out of wood.
Which makes a lot of sense if you listen to his terrible voice acting.

This game was impressive for showcasing Japan during the Dreamcast era but has nothing else going for it.
The story is still not concluded 3 games and an animated TV Show later.

This is Yakuza for people with problems.
Taping my balls on the ceiling fan and going for a spin is more fun than playing this game.

This is the only video game I've seen where nothing happens.

Shenmue is a cozy open world game whose traditions can be seen continued in titles like Yakuza, but not really much else. Instead of going for large world, it tries to make its world wide and interesting, with tons of named NPCs and quite a few interactions.

That said, I don't think it succeeds at all.

Shenmue is often described as mundane, and at first I could see what it was going for: the amount of interactivity is staggering, and unlike nothing else I've seen even today. However, this interactivity really only applies to your own house, and the rest of the game is fairly barebones when it comes to interacting with the world.

I suppose Shenmue is mostly a detective game of sorts, with you asking for hints and gathering clues trying to find the man who killed your father. What it boils down to is that through maybe 70% of the game you will leave your house at sunrise and start asking every random NPC pointless questions like "can you translate this?" "can you point me to the man who can translate this?" "do you know where this area is?"

Throughout the game you get no closer to figuring anything out except for what the artifact stolen by your father's killer might do, and that there are two of them. This is effectively the whole story of Shenmue.

There are a few ways to pass the time, and you will sometimes need to pass the time, but they're fairly basic: old emulated games, gacha machines, and a few side-quests that don't seem to lead anywhere important.

The game often resembles Majora's Mask with its time gimmick and a singlular main location, but aside from coziness of your hometown, there's really nothing to it. Every NPC including the main character could be replaced with a plank of wood to a better effect. The english localization is, at best, funny, but those instances are rare, and you're usually left with robots speaking to each other.

Ryo, the main character, is one of the biggest problems of this game. I never connected with him. His silly revenge quest is idiotic, and he can't be a badass in a game that features maybe 10 fights in total. He's a bumbling fool who never has any emotion and who is solely responsible for the most infamous part of the game.

Closer to the end of the game's story Ryo gets conned because he doesn't know what a receipt is, losing a whole lot of money. This forces him to look for a part-time job, which makes already tedious game even more boring. Every day you will do the same routine. This happens maybe half-way through actual game time, and your forklift adventures take up HOURS of gameplay, while the story barely progresses anywhere.

Do you remember opening hours of Twilight Princess? Link living in Ordon, doing mundane jobs, training, but his girlfriend (?) gets captured so he has to save her. This is the entirety of Shenmue, and it doesn't take mere few hours.

Shenmue is interesting. It's baffling that someone was given so much money to do a whole saga of games where first chapter is effectively you asking people for directions and driving a forklift. It's commendable, and hell, it's sometimes charming. And the music? Oh, the music is damn fantastic. Overall, the presentation of the game is on a whole other level. Yet it's so damn tedious.

No NPCs have any stories other than the few that just leave the game by the end. A few of them have pretty weird voices, but that's the extent of their character. It's just you, and a crowd of people through which you walk asking for sailors or whatever other breadcrumb Ryo has to look for.

I believe some of Shenmue's developers later became RGG Studio, and honestly, even at its worst Yakuza takes all the right lessons from the mistakes of this game.

I respect Shenmue, it's weird. However, don't expect me to play it ever again.

Even 25 years after its release, Shenmue still blew me away. Despite the massive influence it’s had on everything to come out since, I haven’t seen any game that quite captures the same spirit as Shenmue, even with its closest counterpart in the Yakuza series. The world of Yokosuka is the most finely detailed I’ve seen in any game to date. Sure, it’s not nearly as big as something like Grand Theft Auto, but the pure amount of things in the world to see, do, and experience more than make up for it. If I had an idea to try doing something, chances are the game allowed me to. It’s such a joy stumbling upon random things and being rewarded for your curiosity.

Shenmue’s story is also a massive landmark in the industry. There were story heavy games on the SNES and PS1, such as the Final Fantasy games, but nothing that is as cinematic as Shenmue. I don’t think that it’s an understatement to say it changed the way games tell their stories going forward. The plot is simple, but extremely effective. It keeps you guessing, and does a great job at stoking the player’s curiosity, further fueling the fun of exploration I mentioned earlier. I like that Shenmue doesn’t explain Ryo’s pre-existing relationships to the other inhabitants of Yokosuka to the player, and instead leaves it up to your imagination and allows you to infer. It makes the world feel even more believable to me.

The combat is the weakest part of the game, but it’s still pretty fun! It was difficult to learn (especially with the baffling decision to not have any in-game explanation for the controls), but once you get a feel for it it’s pretty fun. It’s slow paced and requires the player to give thought to each input, lest they be beaten to the ground. The second to last fight in the game made me really start to enjoy it. I only wish there were more opportunities to fight.

All in all, I think Shenmue is still a fantastic game. I avoided it for a while as common opinion made me imagine it’d be quite antiquated nowadays, but I’m so glad I decided to give it a shot despite that. Absolutely astonished me!

Shenmue is a quirk. What a wild little time. In 1999, Shenmue was groundbreaking. Graphics were fairly top notch, the expansive dialogue and individual character patterns and behaviors were all remarkable for a console game of the last millennia. And honestly, a lot of it still holds up today.

Even by modern standards, it's impressive that you can open every door and closet in the Hazuki household and that each one has modeled items in them that you'd expect for that room. And for no purpose other than simple interactivity. The lightly guided hints in a big expansive breathing lively world is so Morrowind-y it's funny this precedes Morrowind by 2 years. And looks better to boot.

It's seriously hard to undersell how good Shenmue is from 1999. The gameplay has a bit of jank but nothing that would've been out of place in the late nineties. The story is engaging but very threadbare. Full of mystery and little details. An extremely JJ Abrams style mystery box with mcguffins and no substance, all puzzle and no meat. But it's still quite pleasant to trek down the mystery. Asking every NPC in Dobuita and filling out your journal. Waiting for time to pass. Collecting capsule toys. Shenmue is stunningly fun to just exist in for a game that by most quantifiable measures has shockingly little content.

The forklifts are cool. They're always a bugaboo to people who play this. And yeah sure, I loved it but even I think it's probably one day too long. The whole game is just so charming. The characters have so much life to them. Such strong personalities. All of them having names and little new things to say everyday and all of them being so invested in Ryo just makes me care so much about them. I feel like each NPC at each shop in Dobuita gave me so much immersion despite being 99% useless 90% of the time.

The fights in the game have weird and inconsistent difficulty spikes, the inability to skip time, the lack of detail on several game mechanics (like training), the weird story pacing. There's lots of complaints. But honestly, Shenmue is so much better than the sum of its parts. And if it was 1999 and I was reviewing this I'm sure I'd give it a full 5/5. Just a game teeming with life and charm.