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.

Platform: PlayStation 4 (Via PlayStation 5)
Date Started: July 19th, 2022
Date Finished: December 8th, 2022
Time Played: 20 Hours

"And Thus, the Saga Begins..."

Shenmue, alongside its followups, is my favourite video game of all time. As a series, this is not only unlike anything I have played, but no other game comes close to the adoration I have for it. This first entry, the first chapter, is a wonder of storytelling and exploration thanks to it's magnificent mysteries and character work, captivating cinematic presentation and cosy small town intimacy. It lays the foundation for, and is in and of itself, something truly magical, and each time playing through it is pure joy.

The world and atmosphere is one of the absolute main highlights in Shenmue (although, to me, every aspect is a highlight). What's "exploration" for us, the player, is the familiar for Ryo as we trot around his tiny home town of Yokosuka, investigating the death of his father and talking to all the locals. Being able to chat to every single one of these NPC's, who each all have their own voice, name, background story and daily schedule, exemplifies how immersive this game is, and how perfectly it transports you to this locale.

Shops, restaurants, hair salons, tattoo parlours, bars, gambling rooms, food shops, fortune tellers and more make up this tiny world, and you can see each one of the workers here open up shop at the start of the day and go to their own home at the end of it, as well as their customers visiting with shopping bags in hand. People have lunch breaks, kids play outside and washing is put out on the sun and taken down in the rain. The level of detail is astonishing, even down to the weather being accurate to the time, place and date of the real world location, all something rarely found anywhere else since. It's the single most immersive piece of media I have ever experienced.

Equally magnificent is the story of the game, which, on paper is a fairly simple tale, but it's one that gets more and more fascinating the more you dive in. The mystery of the mirrors, Ryo's father, Lan Di and the Chi You Men are all magnificently enthralling, and the memorable cast of characters you meet and spend time with along the way make your stay in this world ever more mesmerising. The myriad optional scenes and side quests also make sure that there's tons to uncover and even more depth to each character interaction, although I can't say I've ever attempted to play the game without a guide in order to see everything I can!

Combat-wise I always find things tricky in this game because I'm not really good at remembering and learning combos and the like, but I really have a great time regardless, and another of the things I love here is physically training daily in order to level up these skills. All of these small things really add to the immersion once again, as you really bring yourself into the role of Ryo - training, meditating at the alter, checking in on your friends and sparring in the dojo daily, whilst never losing track of your main goal - I will avenge you father!

It's clear that I could gush about this game forever, but I have to stop somewhere before just lose it completely - I didn't even get around to detailing how wonderful a lead Ryo is and how excellent the other lead characters and their relationships are, how untouchable the soundtrack is or how amazing it feels to plod around in the night when the lights illuminate the cosy streets - especially at Christmas when the decorations are up! Suffice it to say, this first chapter in the Shenmue saga is a masterful first entry into my favourite thing the video game medium has to offer, and I can't wait to retread into the next entry.

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.

Proof that just because something is revolutionary, doesn't mean it's good.

I'm 20 years late on this one, and maybe that's why I'm missing the appeal of the game because I don't have the nostalgia glasses on, but I really don't understand the hype that Shenmue gets.

Sure, the NPCs have routines, and sure you can talk with all of them in this immersive world. But when 99% of the NPCs regurgitate the same responses, refuse to talk to you, or just point you in the direction of the 1% you DO need to talk to, what is that adding to the game?

All of the ideas presented by Shenmue are good on paper, but executed poorly. Exploring the world to investigate a mystery? Good! Having the "investigation" be asking people the same questions ad infinitum until exposition happens? Not so good. A day night cycle with characters following a routine? Good! Locking players off from certain things until a certain time and not allowing them to advance time in hour-long loops? Not good. I mean for gods sake the whole game up until finding Charlie is a wild goose chase that leads nowhere until you get the Chinese letter!

I'll admit that Shenmue popularised a lot of really interesting mechanics, I won't say it introduced them when examples can be see elsewhere (see Mizzurna Falls doing a lot of what Shenmue did the year prior), but when they're presented like this it makes for a slog that doesn't want to show off the one feature the whole concept was based around; the fighting, which is actually really good!

I'm sure we haven't seen the last of Shenmue, and I will play the others, so I only hope that they learn to take these incredibly interesting ideas and really show what you can do with them, realism is all well and good but when you try to make a game too realistic, you end up losing what makes a video game fun.

truly one of the most impressive games of its time. in its first disk, shenmue really had me hooked with its down to earth character interactions and conversations, and while the english voice acting is a bit iffy, i think that really adds to the vibe. people dont talk perfectly all the time, sometimes conversations are a little stilted, that's just what real life is like, and i think shenmue gets that down perfectly, whether intentional or not. unfortunately, i think once the game started focusing more on the combat and action, thats when it started to lose me. nothing really compared to the atmosphere of shenmue in its first act, and as such the remainder of the game didn't really capture me as much. even so, i'm glad that i played shenmue, and i wouldn't give up my time exploring its world for anything else. even if 40% of that time was spent working a forklift.

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.

The implications of what games could be in the future, and what this game was for its own time, were among the first things to attract me to this Dreamcast gem. Living in this world with an in-game clock, NPCs with a schedule going about their lives, all whilst investigating the death of our father like an amateur sleuth trying to piece together the info was an exciting thought for me. I'm only sad that, after all of these years, I've never played the sequels and I know that the story isn't resolved in Shenmue 3. I want some closure!