Peaks and Valleys: The Video Game is the most mechanically boring but conceptually interesting game I've played since the last Shenmue. Yet again, I have a lot to say about this one. If you want the short version: Shenmue II fixes several things about the first game, creating an overall better experience, but it also doesn't fix enough and I don't like it very much.

Ryo has finally arrived in Hong Kong and spends much of the game haunting the connected districts of Aberdeen and Wan Chai. And I mean that literally, later in the game you're able to listen to a news report about Ryo being responsible for a rash of violent attacks and the police want him for questioning. Hong Kong is massive and it's very easy to get turned around and lost, though it's not as much of a navigational nightmare as Kowloon, which Ryo relocates to later in the game. Shenmue II is a big game. There's a lot to do if you just want to slow down and enjoy things, be that gambling, seeking out one of the four different arcade games, getting more gacha toys, or learning about Hong Kong and its customs. However, unlike Shenmue, you're never required to interact with these side activities if you don't want to.

The biggest improvement over Shenmue is its pacing. In that game, if you needed to wait around for a story event to open up you either had to kill time around town or just stand around and like, go wash dishes or something. Thankfully, Shenmue II gives you the option to fast forward time, which is a godsend. In general, the pacing of Shenmue II feels significantly better, with story events hitting at a more rapid clip, and each beat feeling more impactful. The early parts of the game in Wan Chai are perhaps the slowest, but they're more character focused and actually provide Ryo with some much needed development. Once you meet Ren of Heavens, who is essentially a Han Solo type scoundrel who sees money in Ryo's quest, the game starts to become more action focused and provides context for the death of Ryo's father and motivation for Lan Di. In my review of Shenmue, I said the game felt more like a prologue and speculated that the story would get far more interesting from there. For the most part, I think my prediction was accurate.

This all seems positive, so what's my problem?

All of this sounds good when your point of reference is Shenmue. The bar was never set very high to begin with. Of course it feels better, you could give me just the option to skip ahead to story events instead of playing Hang On for three real world hours and I'd be like "yeah, shit, I guess that is technically better!" The core gameplay of Shenmue II is still crappy. It's still using the same janky Virtua Fighter system for its combat, it still suffers from the same camera issues, Ryo still controls like a car, and you still have to spend a significant amount of the game just walking up to NPCs and asking where to go.

Shenmue II is a game that will earn good will and then burn it immediately after. Nowhere is this felt more than Kowloon, which as I previously said is the most action-packed stretch of the game. That action is infuriatingly bookended by far too many excursions into Kowloon's many inter-connected apartments, each of which are labyrinthine and require you to make use of elevators and stairwells that only deposit you onto certain floors. You may, for example, have to take an elevator up to the sixth floor, run to the opposite end of the building and take the stairs down to the third floor, then take an elevator there to the fifth floor so you can take another stairwell up to the tenth floor, and then all of this is to, like, talk to a kid about a bird. "You should try asking around bird shops." That's great. Good advice kid. Now I get to do all of that in reverse.

I love Ren, he's my favorite character in all of Shenmue besides Tom, but I hate when the game forces you to travel with him because he has to provide color commentary every time you make an extremely minor mistake. Put the wrong key in the wrong hole? Better take 30 seconds to listen to Ren scold you and Ryo to formulate some lame excuse. Oh, it's a dead end? Are you sure? Are you telling me this wall here - which is a stationary object that cannot be scaled or passed through - has impeded our journey? Well shit, I never would have known I took a wrong turn if not for your valuable insight! Thank you, game!

These might all seem like minor things, but they just keep piling on and weighing down the experience, which already isn't anything particularly special given how dire the core gameplay is. Often Shenmue II falls back on its story, which is quite good, and as I reached the climactic fight with Don Niu high above Kowloon I actually thought, damn, this game is at least going to end strong...

Act III: Drug-- Uh I mean, Guilin.

We need to talk about Shenhua, AKA That Girl on the Cover. If you've never played a Shenmue game a day in your life, first of all let me congratulate you. Stay the path, brother. You still probably know who this is, though. She's featured prominently in key art for both games despite only showing up in Ryo's dreams and reciting an oddly prophetic poem during the first game's closing moments. Surely, she's important to the overall narrative of Shenmue given how much presence she has despite not actually appearing in the story. I have to admit, Shenhua is part of what kept me going. She's such an unknown factor and I felt like I've been teased with her grand reveal for so long that I couldn't possibly put Shenmue (as a series!) down until I had a better understanding of who she is and the role she has to play.

Anyway you meet her and spend like two hours talking to her about the drinking water in her village.

The only takes on Shenmue II I've seen have been the very broad and baseline ones. The game is good, it's better than the first. I haven't sought out anything more pointed than that, so I'm not sure what people think of the Guilin chapter. If I had to guess, Shenmue heads probably ate it up. After Kowloon, you're placed on a much more linear track, walking the mountains of Guilin with Shenhua and just spending time getting to know her. Your conversations at times go nowhere, they're about matters that are completely unimportant, and yet they give you a feel for who each character is. Ryo is able to pull back for a moment, so far from civilization, and just reflect on everything he's experienced. There's almost something therapeutic about talking to this girl, it gives him perspective about the path he's been walking and permits him a moment to feel nostalgic about his father and his friends in Japan.

It also just does not need to be in this game at all.

Much of these conversations Ryo has that recaps his quest feels better suited for the start of a game, catching players up on everything that happened before diving fully into the next chapter of Ryo's adventure. Even the more gameplay-centric parts of this chapter feel more like an introduction to Shenmue's mechanics, and the sound effect for quick time event prompts is noticeably different. At best it feels like DLC, at worst it seems like Yu had some sense that whatever work was done for a third game might not be fully realized, so he stitched it onto the end of II. Tonally, it just doesn't work. It wastes Kowloon's momentum and feels at odds with the rest of the game. Even the cliffhanger ending with the gigantic copies of the dragon and phoenix mirrors feels like a late title shot.

I don't know, maybe this is an unfair assessment. I did just play like, 30 hours of this game that I was not really into, and draining another two into this extremely slow finale just kept me thinking "shut up, I want to play Signalis" over and over again. Who gives a crap about Shenhua, Joy is my wife anyway. Just let me get to the credits already so I can see the names of those responsible and add them to my list of enemies.

The highlight of this entire experience is that someone finally said "Shenmue" in a Shenmue game, and after 60 combined hours of this crap, it's the most leo_pointing_at_tv.jpeg I've ever been about something in my entire life. I still have Shenmue III to play, but I am not touching that for at least a few months, because I've already ingested a nearly lethal amount of Shenmue and I would like to just stop thinking about these games and play something fun.