"Let's get sweaty."

Shenmue is a game about revenge, about losing yourself to grief and shutting out those around you who care about you most. It's also a game about Fantasy Zone and Hang On and feeding cats. A bizarre mix of heavy themes counterbalanced by pissing your time playing darts. I think the perfect example of this dichotomy during my playthrough was towards the end of Ryo's adventure. I finished up one of my last shifts as a forklift operator and had a few hours to kill, so I took my earnings and spent hours collecting Sonic the Hedgehog gacha toys. By the time I got home my girlfriend was kidnapped by a biker gang. Sorry, Nozomi. I guess I was just a little too busy...

Shenmue's gameplay loop revolves around a calendar system, where each hour in the day takes about four real-time minutes to elapse. You'll spend much of your time asking questions around town, gathering clues about your father's murder, and tracking the whereabouts of his killer, Lan Di. When not actively working the investigation, Ryo has to pass time by engaging in small side activities or staring at his watch in the middle of the rain for several hours until it's finally time to go to bed.

The first half of the game balances story beats and free time pretty well, allowing you to move through the game at your own pace. However, by about the point you need to get a ticket to Hong Kong, story progression slows to a crawl. You'll start hitting events where you get only a small amount of story content, often being told to come back the next day for more. Guess you have 12 hours to kill (48 real world minutes for those that don't want to do the math), so you're gonna have to fill some time. Unfortunately, a lot of Shenmue's side activities just don't hold up, and there's not enough of it to make what is otherwise a 20 hour long game feel any less interminable than simply waiting out the clock. I could go play a very bad video game approximation of darts or, like, I can go into the other room and watch videos of cats eating corn. Which do you think I'm going to do? If anything, Shenmue is a great game to play if you need to catch up on some reading.

Occasionally you'll be thrown into an action sequence, which usually plays out through a quick time event (which was novel for 1999) or free combat, which feels like it was designed by someone who played about an hour of Virtua Fighter once while drunk and had to code it from memory. Most fights involve multiple opponents, and the way Ryo prioritizes who to swing at feels at odds with your inputs. Enemies also love to position themselves in front of the camera, which makes it difficult to keep track of Ryo, and I found some of the combo inputs to be very finicky to pull off when you're actually in a fight.

By the time you hit the third act, the game seems almost self-aware about how monotonous it is and tells you to get a damn job. Ryo is a forklift operator now, and when you're not moving boxes around between warehouses in a minigame that seems designed to test basic neurological function, you get to RACE FORKLIFTS! Forklift races, guys! Hey girls and gamers, do you like racing forklifts? I don't!! The only reason people remember this as fondly as they do is because it's the one shining ray of absurdity cutting through this boringass game. The whole rest of this third act not spent on doing menial work and racing forklifts keeps you trapped on the docks, limiting the amount of activities you can engage in to pass time. Shenmue depressingly transitions from a game that lets you freely explore the story and Ryo's personal life at your own pace to one that rigidly locks you in to set activities at set times.

And then it just... kinda ends. See, Shenmue is just a prologue. An extremely long prologue, but a prologue nonetheless. You don't fight Lan Di at the end, there's no real resolution, just a lot of setup for what's to come. Shenmue closes with Ryo saying goodbye to his family and friends, setting out to China determined to see revenge through to its ugly conclusion. Despite a few moments of regret and introspection, he doesn't really grow because his adventure is just beginning. The game explicitly tells you as much right before the credits role, making it all the more apparent that - at least in theory - you just played the first part of a very long story that will probably get exciting later. Maybe. If you all buy Shemue II it might happen! Oh... oh wait, no... oh crap. Those are the sales figures, huh? Well shiiiiit.

Despite all my criticisms, I feel that every part of this review ought to come with the biggest, fattest asterisk: this was all impressive as hell in 1999. There was nothing else out there like Shenmue, and you could tell Yu Suzuki and his team at AM2 had total confidence in the Dreamcast hardware and their engine. Being able to open every single dresser drawer in your house or hold up a (at that time) highly detailed render of an orange and just look at it was unprecedented. In a lot of ways Shenmue was a proof of concept for extremely minor gameplay elements that we take for granted today. What's even more wild is that Shenmue was originally envisioned as a Sega Saturn game, and there's even footage of an early Saturn build. This game is nothing if not ambitious, and though Yu Suzuki was ultimately unable to fully realize his vision for Shenmue, its legacy is carried on today by the extremely successful Yakuza series, though I'd personally argue its most accurate imitator is Deadly Premonition given how well (intentionally or otherwise) that game manages to capture some of Shenmue's more archaic elements.

However, all that ambition and influence doesn't change the fact that Shenmue does not hold up. It is perhaps the most "of its time" game, whose most brilliant qualities can only be appreciated by considering the time and place that it came out. I expect I'll get raked over the coals for this one given how passionate Shenmue fans are, but I want to stress that I understand how important this game is and what it means to people, and finding it wholly unenjoyable in 2022 shouldn't take away from that. Clearly. If you still want to come after me then I will be forced to botch a Swallow Flip, allowing you to mercilessly beat me until I cry.

I don't want to end this review without mentioning Giant Bomb's Endurance Run for Shenmue, which is an excellent alternative to actually playing this game. In all honesty, watching three grown men become absolutely broken by the experience is way more enjoyable than picking up a controller and trying to play it for yourself.