"Don't you know that Blackmail is way uncool?" - Ryo Hazuki

I played Shenmue through the Shenmue 1 and 2 compilation on Steam, I think its pretty much the same version as the original minus disc swapping but if there are any major differences I wouldnt know. I was mainly interested in Playing Shenmue after really enjoying The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa a couple of months ago, which is a game that takes some inspiration from Shenmue in some aspects. And, since I think Shenmue has already been talked about from a myriad different angles on this site I think a nice compare and contrast will be good to do, especially to explain my personal experience with Shenmue and Ringo.

I was genuinely surprised when I started Shenmue and found myself enjoying the game, which underscores the benefits of playing things you might not think you'll like on the off chance you will. Its reputation for being slow and obtuse had my "filter-dar" screaming at me. Fortunately this reputation turned out to be mostly undeserved, especially the first 2/3rds of the game. It was honestly smooth sailing for most of the game, following a routine of exploring the various areas of the town interacting with locals and practicing combos at the local park. Shenmue is basically a point and click adventure game, you talk to people, follow leads, write down what you know in your notepad etc. At first the rather odd control scheme (not just the tank controls in a non horror game but the RT + joystick to shift Ryo's gaze until the camera locks on into something interactable was certainly not what Im used to) threw me off but its not too hard to get used to it.

At first there is a nice balance of progressing the main story and also doing side activities like the arcade, a couple of sidequests that flesh out the lives of the inhabitants of the town. The pacing is slow but its nice how much of it is dictated by the player, letting you take it all in, hell even the decision to not have fast travel (well, kinda) at first seemingly encourages going back and forth and running into scripted events. The problem however, and here's where the comparison to Ringo becomes more relevant, is that as you progress the pacing becomes a lot worse, the activities you have to do to kill time are really not all that compelling after a while, you get told to come back tomorrow or in a few hours and time just moves way too slowly. See, in Ringo the activities arent great either but times moves a lot quicker and the decisions you make are so much more rooted in roleplaying and just being able to squeeze as much as you can onto a day that until the very end of the game you are basically never bored. In Shenmue however by the time Dobuita started putting up christmas decorations I was just spending most of my time pressing forward + x to strengthen my pit blow combo.

Its funny, Ringo is a game about an aimless youth with no future where you're constantly trying to do it all but Shenmue is a game about a singleminded youth driven by revenge constantly fucking around doing nothing of note. If the mechanic is the message, Shenmue's time system could honestly work well for a reverse of Outer Wilds message. I find Ryo Hazuki to be not particularly compelling, mainly cause he's constantly alienating everyone who's ever loved him and who's telling him that his quest for revenge is stupid and dangerous, which they are right to do so. Now, I know that that is the point, its the whole martial arts drama schtick where a tragic quest for revenge means the MC must give it all up to pursue it, and Im sure if we ever get Shenmue 30 or whatever there will be some ironic twist to make Ryo doubt his own resolve and all that stuff. But I just dont find him or that arc compelling. Ringo is also a tragic figure who pushes away his friends and is seemingly doomed to waste his life away or even have it cut short, but he's much more human and relatable to me. Ringo is a game to me, about having too little time, but Shenmue is a game about having too much.

Its hard to sympathise much with Ryo when his Dad had no appearance beyond his inmediate murder when the game starts and incidentally, whilst the lack of certain modern conveniences enhance this game, if it were made today there would definitely be a playable prologue before the events of the game with Ryo doing some errands or something for his dad, tutorialising the various mechanics and such. A lot of this might also be the legendarily wooden acting of the english dub which I admit I picked due to its infamy but honestly there is just too little of Ryo himself being anything other than stoic angry man for me to really care. This isnt even a matter of Ryo being pretty distinct from the player because again in Ringo you are even more disconnected, not even privy to most of the conversations Ringo has with his gang members.

The kind of character and structure of the game with its slow humanism, feeding cats, helping the bullied etc makes the main quest jarring to me, Ringo should be collecting signatures to save the local school or something, not plotting murder. Perhaps this is just a personal thing, but then again if you were expecting anything else from this review then you were mistaken.

The game definitely takes a dip when the harbour is introduced, which is even more barren and boring than the main town, though thankfully most of your time is spent with forklift races and box moving, which are unironic highlights of the game. By this point though, Shenmue was really starting to wear thin, even the fights started to become more of an annoyance than a nice change of pace. There are a couple of scenes where Ringo shows some interesting side to him with Mark and Gui Zhang and Tom, but after a slightly annoying battle (I am also fairly shit at fighting games, so whilst I did well for 90% of the game I struggled with the final bout) the game just sort of ends. Its kind of ballsy just how much of a sequel hook the game ends on, seemingly treating Shenmue 1 as the first season of a drama series, fitting, I suppose but from what I have gathered the story of the series is far from over 20+ years later.

So why did I love Ringo but not so much Shenmue? Other than the points mentioned above, Ringo's character moments are so much more memorable to me, I will remember some lines in Shenmue for their delivery and silliness, but moments like Ringo not sharing his literature essay in class or his exchange with his teacher about wasted talent stick to me a lot more. I still enjoyed Shenmue and I'm glad I played it, but whatever it is that the people who love this game (and a lot of them being people who's writing I admire and respect on this very site) saw in it I just didnt quite find. Perhaps the nature of the "right place, right time" events meant I missed a bunch of things, and apparently Ryo's love interest Nozomi has most of her lines relegated to phone conversations? Of which I saw none and was wondering why she's such a flat line for most of the game despite her importance to Ryo and parts of the plot.

I'm not rushing to Play Shenmue 2 any time soon but who knows, maybe Ill play it at some point and come back to revise my thoughts on the first entry.