The Complete Shenmue Trilogy Retrospective: My Dreamcast Memoir
In 1996, Sega AM2 released Virtua Fighter 3 in arcades. While production was wrapping on that title, Yu Suzuki began exploring the idea of developing an RPG for the Sega Saturn. In a 2014 article from Polygon covering the Shenmue postmortem from GDC, they said:
“Suzuki researched RPGs and began building a prototype game on the Sega Saturn called The Old Man and the Peach Tree. Suzuki and his team tested camera and character controls, a conversation system and combat for the console using this prototype. In the prototype, players approach an old man asking if he knows a Kung Fu grandmaster named Ryu. The old man responds that he wants to eat a peach and will tell the player — a controlled character named Taro — where Ryu is if he brings him a peach. At the end of the game prototype, Taro witnesses the old man skip stones across the water that kill a fish each time they hit the surface. This leads him to believe the old man is grandmaster Ryu.”
From there, this prototype shifted into production, initially as Virtua Fighter RPG: Akira’s Story. It was to be an 11 chapter story detailing the story of one of the central characters in the Virtua Fighter series. The story is one that is familiar to people who ultimately played Shenmue; Akira witnesses his father’s murder and sets out on a trip for revenge that leads him to China. Over the course of the next year, production would shift from being a Saturn title to being a planned flagship title for Sega’s next console. It also shifted away from the Virtua Fighter property, with its name internally changing from “Virtua Fighter RPG” to “Project Berkley.”
Chapter 1
Moving ahead to 1998, the video game market was dominated by the Sony PlayStation. Since its release earlier in the decade, it was able to quickly establish a majority of the market share across the industry, with it holding about 70% of the market share in Japan at that time. Sega, once one of the premiere platform developers in the industry, was trying to play catch up so in November of 1998 they released the Sega Dreamcast, the next generation in video game hardware and the most powerful console on the market at the time.
The next month following the console’s launch, an event was held hosted by Yu Suzuki. It was here that he unveiled Project Berkley, now known as Shenmue, to the public. At the event, the game was received well. In addition to the in-person crowd, the show was actually streamed online in video format, something that wasn’t exactly commonplace at the time.
A report from IGN at the time states: “Held in the Yokohama National Exhibition Hall on the waterfront at Yokohama Bay Town, the opening to Sega’s Shenmue exposition on Sunday, December 20 matched the serenity of the beautiful, calm weather outside the hall.”
Suzuki had made many different kinds of games up until this point, primarily driving and fighting games. Suzuki said during this event that making arcade games was very different from making home console games. He said that in the arcade, you focus on an intense experience that lasts about three minutes, but at home you aren’t putting any money into a slot and audiences are expecting something more lengthy and substantial.
The big focus of the event were two things: quality and freedom. Again, from the IGN article: “In the past, there has always been a very obvious leap in quality between in-game action and the CG scenes — in Shenmue, says Suzuki-san, the quality is exactly the same. Secondly, the extensive 3D modeling means that there are no limitations to camera angles, nor to character movements, meaning that the game looks great all the time, heightening the sense of freedom and interactivity with your surroundings.”
According to Suzuki, the game is not just a 3D game, but a 4D one. He is referring to the fourth dimension of time, which is dynamic in the game and changes just like the weather, having its own effects. As a result, Suzuki refuses to use an existing genre label to describe Shenmue, instead creating a new category he calls “FREE” (Free Reactive Eyes Entertainment).
In addition to the main quest being such a strong focus for the game, Suzuki also took the time to unveil one of the biggest features of the game, and something that would become a staple in the industry moving forward, the QTE, quick time event. The IGN report said “Second up is what Yu Suzuki calls “Q.T.E.”, and its off-shoot “Q.T.B.” Q.T.E. means “Quick Time Event” and it basically means that at certain junctures in the game, you’ll be in a situation where a split-second decision is required. It could be while you’re running, and the floor opens up beneath you, necessitating a jump, or when an enemy throws an object at you and you must duck. That kind of thing, where if you delay, you’re in big trouble. When a Quick Time Event occurs, a flashing white arrow points to the relevant area of the screen, and you have to make your decision. This usually means tapping the “A” button, for a context-sensitive action, or pushing the direction pad in the right direction, not unlike the input in the Laser Disc game, Dragon’s Lair”
Later during development, he said that with Shenmue he wanted to reflect on what he had done prior to this game and build something new around what he had previously accomplished. One of the main goals of the development team with this title was to strive for a very realistic environment. So not only did they try to do that by making the combat and world itself grounded in reality, but they also did some things that were unheard of at the time. Things that have since become industry standards across the triple A game landscape. The game has changing weather cycles, an internal night and day clock, businesses that open and close at certain times.
The game’s world features hundreds of NPCs, most of which are characters with actual names and daily schedules. Some of them leave their homes and go to work, others go to school. You can follow them as they leave their homes and workplaces and go about their daily lives. Of course, there had been games with NPCs before, but typically they would either be stationed in a certain spot or walk for eternity in a loop from point A to point B. In Shenmue, however, there are multiple NPCs that leave their homes at certain times, go to work, and go back home at certain times throughout the day because that’s what they do in their lives. Sometimes you don’t see any kids around because it’s time for them to be in school. Sometimes to catch someone you may need to wait around until later in the day because they work at a bar and don’t go into work until nighttime. Sometimes you need to meet up with an elderly person who spends their mornings at the park. There may be times where you need to meet a certain person at their workplace, but instead you run into them on the street and you can have the conversation you needed to have right there.
At some point during my childhood, my siblings and I convinced our parents to give us our Christmas gifts on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas morning. We would go to bed and after “Santa” delivered the gifts, our parents would wake us up. Over time, the Santa preparation time was phased out, but we still ended up getting our gifts on Christmas Eve. Although it’s not the norm for most families, it worked for us.
In 2000, Christmas Eve was no different from previous years. After arriving home from my grandparent’s house, my younger siblings and I waited in our rooms as usual. Eventually, our mother stormed into the hallway and announced that Santa had arrived. We jumped out of bed and rushed to the living room to see what was waiting for us.
This year’s big gift for me was something I had little experience with but had kept my eye on: the Sega Dreamcast. It had been released a little over a year earlier, and my only experience with one prior to this was at a friend’s house where I played WWF Attitude and Sonic Adventure. Along with the Dreamcast console, I was gifted a game called Shenmue. I had never heard of it before. My father, aware of my fondness for RPG-style games, thought I would enjoy it. I had no idea what to expect when I started playing it. However, it quickly became one of my favorite games.
My dad was right, I did love role playing games. I have loved them since I first played Final Fantasy VII in late 1997. It changed how I look at video games forever and it helped formulate the taste in games that I have now. I want to use Overlevel as a platform for me to write about the kinds of games that I love.I started changing my sleep patterns just to play a video game. Depending on the day I would either stay up past my bedtime or wake up around 4 or 5 AM just to get some time with the game before school. I was emotionally invested in these characters and the problems they were facing. I cried when Aerith died. I had never done this before when playing a video game. What I connected to in that drafty bedroom at the time was the heart in the game, its setting, the characters existing in that world.
This review will be my first time playing it through to completion since I played it on that Sega Dreamcast I received as a gift almost 24 years ago. It will also be my first time fully completing Shenmue II and my first time playing Shenmue III at all. Costing an estimated $47 million dollars, with a team of more than 200 people working on it, it was believed that Shenmue I was the most expensive video game ever made up until that point. Let’s start by exploring Shenmue, its history, and see how it holds up today.
Shenmue follows Ryo Hazuki, who witnesses his father’s murder by Lan Di in 1986 in persuit of something called the Dragon Mirror. Ryo seeks revenge and begins investigating in his community of Yokosuka about Lan Di’s Chinese connections. He ignores warnings from loved ones and goes deeper into the criminal underworld. Along the way, he meets bar patrons, sailors, and gang members. His quest intensifies when he meets Master Chen and learns about the power of the Dragon and Phoenix mirrors. Ryo keeps his pursuit of his father’s killer hidden from his family’s live-in maid but eventually gains her support. Ryo finds a secret room in his home where the Phoenix Mirror is kept. He faces attempts by the Mad Angels to steal the Phoenix Mirror. He learns of a gang called the Mad Angels that are connected to Lan Di’s mission in trying to obtain the other mirror. Ryo is determined to confront Lan Di in Hong Kong but he can’t afford the trip to get there. He finds work as a forklift operator at the harbor. While working, he uncovers the illegal activities of the Mad Angels and deals with his feelings for his friend Nozomi. Nozomi calls Ryo in distress, so he rushes to the Warehouse district of the harbor. There, Terry is holding Nozomi captive. Ryo agrees to cripple Guizang for Terry’s revenge in exchange for Nozomi’s release. However, Ryo sets a condition — Terry must lead him to Lan Di. After saving Nozomi, Ryo loses his job because of the trouble that follows him. He almost confesses his feelings to Nozomi but decides not to. Ryo and Guizang fight to meet Terry’s demands but are ambushed. They battle 70 men before defeating Terry. Guizang helps Ryo arrange his journey to Hong Kong but gets injured in a final confrontation with Chai. With Guizang staying behind, Ryo boards the ship to Hong Kong and says goodbye to Guizang, Master Chen, and the Yokosuka itself as Shenmue I concludes.
When examining the combat scenarios in Shenmue, Yu Suzuki’s history with fighting games is clear. When you enter a fight, the game’s controls and movement change completely, going from a 3D third person game to a 3D arena fighting game. Considering the game’s origins as a Virtua Fighter RPG, it makes total sense. The sudden shift between the normal controls and the rigid 3D fighter controls doesn’t feel very natural, especially when you are taking on multiple opponents, but over time you do adjust to it. There are a number of combos that Ryo already knows, but throughout your time in the game, you come across people who will teach you combos, you earn the ability to purchase some, and then others you can just find in the environment. Also similar to many console fighting games, when you pause the game in combat you are presented with a menu of all of the available combos to you in the event that memorizing them is a struggle for you. This comes in handy as you do come across quite a few as the game moves along. Another thing that goes against the game’s combat is that, for the most part, you are able to get by in almost any encounter by just mashing buttons.
Regarding the game’s core loop, it works like this. Ryo wakes up with a certain goal to achieve for the day in his quest to avenge his father’s death. You head to the front door, pick up your daily allowance of 500 yen, and head out into the community. As I said, your main goal is to progress the main story and learn more about the situation involving Lan Di and your father, but because the game operates on its own internal clock, there is also room for downtime. You will go shopping for snacks, cassette tapes, and batteries. You will hit up some of the toy capsule machines outside of various businesses to build up your collection of figures. You can go to the local arcade and play the QTE boxing game, Hang On, or Space Harrier. There are ways to win home console versions of these games at the local convenience store ticket drawings. If you have one, you can play it on the Sega Saturn located at Ryo’s home, despite the fact that the Sega Saturn did not exist in 1986 and would not exist for another 8 years. Maybe Ryo’s uncle worked for Sega.
Ryo will also spend his time helping elderly people out around town, spotting people in your neighborhood some cash when they are out and need a drink, and beat up on bullies when he catches them in the act. Later in the game, you have to travel to the harbor and get a job, so you need to be cognizant of the bus schedule so that you can effectively get to and from the harbor. When you get your job as a forklift operator, you are brought into the fold in your co-worker’s underground forklift racing circuit, where the winners are given little toy forklifts. You will visit businesses, talk with people on the street, and make sure that you get everything wrapped up for the day before 11 PM, because you’ve got another full day tomorrow. Rinse and repeat and there you have the core gameplay loop for Shenmue. Don’t get too caught up having fun, though, because you have a time-sensitive case to solve involving Lan Di, and if you take multiple months to get through the story and take too long, you will encounter the game’s “bad ending” where Ryu goes to the dojo at his home and finds Lan Di, who promptly murders him, giving you a “Game Over” screen that you can’t come back from. Oops.
One of the things that the game is known for is its dialogue, which is almost universally regarded as bad. The vocal performances are campy, their infliction is all over the place, and conversations overall just flow very strangely. A character will make a statement, and then forget what they said two sentences later. Nearly every conversation in the game is awkward, stilted, and silly, even when it isn’t trying to be. By all accounts, this should be something that is derided, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Even with the option to play it with the Japanese dub I don’t think I’d take it. It’s likely the same reason that people love David Hayter’s campiness in Metal Gear Solid or why people enjoy watching bad kaiju dubs; the camp is part of the charm.
One of the more distracting elements regarding the game’s audio is the compression on the dialogue recordings. They sound like they were ripped from a low bitrate MP3 from Napster. It sounds really bad. I’m not sure if they’ve lost the original recordings or what, but the ugly sounding audio stands out in the modern re-release.
On the whole, there are a couple of weird technical issues with the game’s re-release. In addition to the compressed dialogue recordings, the presentation itself is inconsistent. The game can be played in widescreen for the first time, but the game reverts back to 4:3 when a cutscene occurs, which is often. This is at least true for the Playstation 4 version I played. It is for this reason I played it in its native resolution, not only for the more “authentic” experience, but because the constant change in aspect ratio was pretty jarring.
That’s not to say that the audio presentation is entirely bad. I think, on the whole, the environmental sound effects are done particularly well, from the bustling sounds of the town itself, to the sounds of vending machines as they operate, things generally sound pretty good in Yokosuka. Also, the game’s soundtrack is strong and is very much listenable on its own. Even though I haven’t fully played through the game in quite some time, I still felt a very strong connection to the environment itself. The game’s map is incredibly memorable, and I found myself running around each area like I had never stopped playing. There are times that would have Ryo waiting around for some time before an activity opens. An example of this would be that at 1 PM you decide that you need to talk to some sailors at a neighborhood bar, but that bar doesn’t open until 7 PM, so you have to kill some time before that. Time skipping or waiting has become a fairly standard practice in open world games today, and there were moments where I definitely would’ve taken advantage of the feature if it was available. Ultimately, though, I am okay with it not being there. It allows you plenty of time to chew on the environment itself, to get to know each back alley and barber shop in town as well as someone who played this game two decades ago.
Shenmue is a special video game to me. Despite its many warts, so much of it is endlessly endearing. It was forward thinking in so many ways that it seems like many of its features are industry norms now. Give me all the bad dialogue and clunky combat you want to throw my way if it means I get a world like this to soak in.
Chapter 2
At the outset, Shenmue I and II were originally designed to be one huge game, but ultimately the decision was made to split the game into two. The development of the games occurred back to back. Prior to the release of Shenmue in Japan, a television special aired where the crew was presented with the opportunity to chronicle part of the game’s development. The special focuses on the build up to the release of Shenmue 1, however when the crew captures footage artists working and the teams in meetings, the assets that they are all working on are things for Shenmue II. Besides the absurd scope that a combination Shenmue 1 and 2 would’ve had for its time, the game likely would’ve faced logistical issues in publishing something so large. Shenmue 1 and 2 shipped on seven discs, which I don’t think had ever happened with a console release before.
Despite its solid sales in Japan, with Shenmue being the 4th best selling game in the country on the platform, I have wondered if it was ever going to be possible for this game to make a significant amount of money and be what Sega needed it to be. Considering the game’s scope, development costs, in addition to Sega already playing catch up to Sony at the time, was it even possible for this game to succeed? After the success of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, Sega seemed to spend much of the 1990s not knowing how to reign themselves in, especially in a post-PlayStation landscape. Their hardware strategy was oftentimes confusing, from the multitude of add-ons to the Genesis, to the Nomad, to the Pico, and the struggle for success for the Saturn outside of Japan, Sega had lost a lot of its footing and its focus. Was funding the most expensive video game ever made up until that point, for a new piece of hardware, the best financial decision at the time? I am a huge fan of the software that Sega makes and the Sega Dreamcast was a special platform for me personally, but was this the time to throw a Hail Mary? Near the end of the Dreamcast’s short life, at Tokyo Game Show in 2001, one month after the game’s release in Japan, Sega announced that the Xbox will be the exclusive home to the US release for Shenmue II, confirming that the game would not be getting a Dreamcast release in the United States. In the same announcement they revealed that Phantasy Star Online would be getting a release on the Xbox platform.
In a Gamespot article published at the time, Peter Moore, at that COO of Sega of America, said: “This agreement with Microsoft will give Shenmue II and Phantasy Star Online the marketing prominence and increased awareness that the titles deserve, while giving Sega access to significant incremental revenue as we work toward profitability goals for this fiscal year and onward. We expect that both titles will be killer apps on the Xbox and that the technical capabilities of the platform will surely bring both games to new levels in terms of graphics and experience.”
“Sega is known for making some of the best games in the business, and Shenmue and Phantasy Star Online are truly some of the best titles the industry has to offer,” said Robbie Bach, chief Xbox officer for Microsoft. “We are fully committed to working with Sega and Yu Suzuki’s team to ensure that Shenmue II takes advantage of all that the Xbox has to offer, to deliver gamers an even more revolutionary game than the first.”
On the whole, I had kind of fallen off the wagon regarding Sega’s output in general in the late 1990s. I had completely missed out on the Saturn and opted out of buying things like the 32x and the Sega CD. The hype surrounding the Sony PlayStation was unavoidable and somewhere in the middle of the decade my Sega fandom got lost.
That wasn’t always the case, though. During the peak of the great 16 bit console wars between the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo, you couldn’t have found a more passionate Sega fan than me. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Nintendo’s output well enough, but I would have defended Sega to the grave. The marketing about blast processing totally worked on my gullible young self. I never played games like Super Metroid, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, or Earthbound until years after the SNES had been phased out. Give me Streets of Rage 2, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Gunstar Heroes or Wonder Boy in Monster World and I was in heaven. Even today, I will argue that the Genesis versions of many multiplatform titles such as Animaniacs and Aladdin are significantly better than their Super NES counterparts.
My love for Sega, however, came back strong when I was given the Dreamcast. Even though I had a PC at the time, playing games like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena on the Dreamcast were my first real forays into playing video games online. My first MMO, Phantasy Star Online, was played on that platform. It was a platform that had a passionate community around it. In the early 2000s I discovered a web forum called that focused exclusively on the Dreamcast and classic console emulation.
Most people who were active on the internet during this period that were frequent users of forums would likely tell you that they had a “home forum” that they spent most of their time at. This certain forum for the Sega Dreamcast was that for me. It was where I got the bulk of the information I came across on the internet, it was the first place that I made friends that I hadn’t actually met in person before. It was where I learned about video game emulation on the Dreamcast, which ultimately led me down a path that really fostered my love of classic video games that’s strong to this day.
Eventually, I became known as “The Dreamcast guy” among my group of friends. Because of this, I would be the person that someone would contact if they needed to know how to, ahem, “acquire” Dreamcast games or how to set up emulator discs. This association led a friend to introduce me to another person who was a Dreamcast owner that wanted help with this. That person and I would eventually become college roommates, I would be in his wedding, and we are still close friends more than twenty years later.
One of the more nebulous elements of Shenmue lore was just how expansive the story is and the idea of “chapters.” In a November 2000 interview published in the official US Dreamcast magazine, Suzuki stated that the game’s original vision was a massive game with sixteen chapters covering this one massive story. In the interview, Suzuki says: “These 16 chapters were divided into three parts, with sections 1–5, 5–10, and 11–16 incorporated into Shenmue 1, 2, and 3 respectively. At its grandest scale, Shenmue 1 was supposed to contain all 16 chapters. The game we’ve released has only one-so now it’s a sixteenth of the original planned size.”
At the time of release, Shenmue II was composed of what was believed to be chapters 3, 4, and 5 of the overarching story. Things were immediately made confusing because now it appeared as if they’ve overlooked what was planned to be “chapter 2” of the story. The overarching idea of each of these chapters is that a new chapter is focused around a new central location for the story. For example, chapter 1 was centered around Yokosuka, with Chapter 3 focused on Hong Kong, Chapter 4 on Kowloon, etc. Chapter 2 was believed to be centered around what happened on the boat from Yokosuka to Hong Kong. This was apparently a canceled section of the game that ultimately never saw the light of day. The closest that we have come to a “Chapter 2” is a brief comic series called Shenmue Side Story that was available as an unlockable in the Xbox release of Shenmue II. Volume 4 of this comic series chronicles a story from the aforementioned boat ride. In it, Ryo discovers that Chai had boarded the ship and was holding a young girl hostage. In the brief comic, Ryo fights Chai and ultimately knocks him off of the ship and into the surrounding ocean. The young girl is reunited with her mother and the story ends. We see the mother and daughter at the very beginning of Shenmue II when they are exiting the ship. The mother points Ryo in the direction of a place to stay and then thanks him for helping her when she was scared on the ship. Not sure if this was all that was planned initially for “Chapter 2,” but if so, then it’s not hard to see why it was sidelined.
Despite the narrative that the series was planned to be sixteen chapters initially, there appears to have been some further consolidation in the overarching plans for the series as time went on. At GDC 2014, prior to the announcement of Shenmue III, Suzuki stated that the story was originally planned to be 11 chapters. The following year, in a Reddit AMA after the game’s announcement, Suzuki stated:
“There are a total of 11 chapters that make up the whole story. Over the past 14 years I originally planned for there to be 4 or five games to the series. If at all possible, I would still like to realize the full story of 11 chapters.”
There has been nothing official that locks in just what these 11 chapters are, which has led to it primarily being built up by fan theories and speculation based primarily on some images that Suzuki showed in the previously mentioned GDC talk.
Not long after I received my Sega Dreamcast that Christmas, I discovered something that completely changed my experience with the console — the fact that it was incredibly easy to pirate games on. Being perfectly transparent, this was not my first foray into video game piracy as I had dabbled in NES, SNES and Genesis emulation up until that point and I had obtained illicit copies of PC games in the past, but this was my first experience in playing bootleg copies of video games on a home console. Home console piracy wasn’t a completely new concept, as it was possible to play pirated Sony Playstation games for example, but it required additional items and some physical modifications to the console itself. With the Dreamcast, however, all you needed was a CD burner, a .CDI image file of the game you wanted, and a copy of Padus Diskjuggler installed on your computer and you were good to go. I don’t remember the first Dreamcast game that I pirated, but it is likely that my foray into emulating classic games on the Dreamcast was what opened the door to me further experimenting with pirated games. Over time, I amassed a large number of downloaded video games for the Sega Dreamcast. If you ever bought large quantities of blank CDRs in the early 2000s, you will remember that they would often come in packages of 25 to 50 discs in a spindle case. Between the legitimate Dreamcast discs that I had, the collections of ROMs for any platform I could get my hands on, and almost any North American Dreamcast release acquired through unethical means, I had dozens of discs laying around my bedroom.
I didn’t have an Xbox during this console generation, so I was unable to spend much time playing Shenmue 2 on the platform outside of some time with it at a friend’s house. I tried on a couple of occasions to get the European release to work on my Dreamcast through illegal copies, but for whatever reason it was a game that I had great difficulty in getting to work. On top of that, it was 4 discs, so it was easy to run into issues. Because of these issues, I never genuinely was able to put time into Shenmue II until its modern platform re-release in the late 2010s.
For better or worse, piracy was a part of the culture of the Sega Dreamcast. Even though the Dreamcast forum I frequented tried to keep things straight laced on the outside so they didn’t risk their website being taken down due to copyright issues it was, in part, still held up by the idea of accessing mountains of ROMs on a single disc. You just had to go talk about acquiring the pirated games elsewhere or do so with thinly veiled codewords. Most games at the time were acquired through one of three methods, an FTP server, an IRC server, or through a P2P service such as Kazaa or Morpheus.
Because broadband internet was still relatively new at the time and hadn’t found its way into the number of homes it later would, dial up was still very much a common way of accessing the internet. Because of this, a lot of the groups who released Dreamcast games onto the internet would create versions of games that would often remove things that took up a lot of data, such as music, to make the file sizes smaller. It wasn’t until 2002 that my town would start getting broadband access, so many of my experiences with games on the platform would be through these watered-down versions.
Through Shenmue, I was able to establish my connection to role playing games and experience ideas that I never would’ve come across otherwise in terms of design. It was a seminal experience for me in terms of developing my tastes. Even though the rampant piracy likely contributed to the Dreamcast’s short lifespan, it was the access to virtually everything that continued to expand my horizons and establish the taste in games that I still have today. Because of the piracy culture around the Dreamcast, I was able to play games I never would’ve laid eyes on otherwise. I was able, for the first time in my life, to play imported titles from places such as Japan and Europe. The access to any title I could think of, the community of people I was ingrained in that was beginning to seep into my real-world interactions, continued to be impacted by my first encounter with the Dreamcast and Shenmue itself. I was beginning to interact with my online friends outside of the forums we posted on. We talked regularly on instant messaging services, followed each other on our Livejournals, and began to know each other outside of drive-by comments on message boards. Even as the popularity in the Dreamcast waned, and by extension, the community around it, I still kept in touch with many of these people over the years, in many cases being in the know during their highest of highs, and unfortunately, the lowest of lows.
Shenmue II continues where the previous game left off. Ryo is in Hong Kong, looking for Master Lishao Tao and Yuanda Zhu, the person who tried to warn his father prior to his death. He also has trouble finding a place to stay and struggles with money. His new friend Joy helps him get a job. He meets Lishao Tao, who goes by Xiuying Hong. Xiuying trains Ryo, but she criticizes his vengeful motives. Ryo works at the temple for Xiuying while investigating the disappearance of Zhu. Ryo looks for Ren of Heavens and pays a lot of money to meet him. He discovers Zhu’s location in Kowloon. Ryo says goodbye to his allies in Hong Kong, confronts Xiuying, and goes to Kowloon. In Kowloon, Ren and Ryo discover that Zhu’s associate is being held captive by a group led by Don Niu. They ultimately find Yuanda Zhu, However, Don and associates interrupt him when he is saved by Xiuying.. When Ryo wakes up, Xiuying warns him that Zhu has been captured and tries again to convince him to not seek revenge.. Ryo ignores her advice and continues his pursuit. Ryo and Ren head towards Don’s headquarters. After overcoming many challenges, Ryo confronts Don Niu and stops Lan Di from capturing Zh. Back at the hideout, Zhu explains Lan Di’s grudge against Iwao and reveals that the mirrors are important for finding Qing dynasty treasures. The chapter ends with Ryo going to Guilin to uncover more mysteries about the mirrors. In Guilin, Ryo goes toward Bailu Village during a rainstorm. He meets Shenhua, a woman who looks like someone from his dreams. They become friends while talking about their lives on their trip to Bailu Village. Shenhua suggests that fate brought them together. When they arrive at Shenhua’s home near Bailu Village, she shows Ryo the Shenmue tree. They share stories about their parents and where they come from. Ryo finds a diagram of the mirrors in Shenhua’s father’s belongings and heads towards the mines to find him. There they find a letter from her father and discover a Sword of the Seven Stars and a cryptic message about destiny. When they put the sword in a statue it levitates and reveals two large images of the mirrors. This concludes Shenmue 2.
From a mechanics standpoint, Shenmue 1 and 2 are virtually identical as they were made alongside each other and originally intended to be a single game. There are a couple of small differences, however. One is the availability of having a minimap in the corner. This can come in handy considering the jump in scale. It took some adjustment for me to get used to the environment of this game. Regarding the first game, I could navigate Dobouita with my eyes closed, but the environments of this game are not ingrained in my brain, so having the map there was helpful. One of the neat things that this game does is sometimes when you ask an NPC for directions they will offer to take you to wherever it is you need to go and you can actually follow them there. Honestly, I think the idea of feeling kind of lost is the point, so I’m down with it. The vibe of Hong Kong itself is pretty great overall. There are lots of businesses to poke around in, people to talk to. Most of the neighborhoods were well thought out and had their own identity. In particular, I enjoyed being able to explore a mall, albeit a small one. Sure, you can’t really interact with a lot of the stuff within the environment, but it still feels like a lived-in environment. In terms of things to do around town, the options have increased pretty significantly. You can still go shopping, play arcade games, and buy capsule toys, but now you have many more things to choose from. You can get one of multiple part time jobs, from working at a gambling stand to carrying crates down at the pier. You can hit up the sketchy gambling dens around town. You can enter local arm wrestling contests. You can enter some street fighting contests. You can check out the street performers inside the local mall. There are a lot of things to keep you entertained while you wait to do the next story objective. However, you aren’t really faced with this scenario as many times as you were in the first game because now there are times where you can skip ahead in time instead of keeping yourself busy with something else.
There are moments in this one where Ryo is actually looking into multiple things at once. For example you are looking around for a specific street performer, but you are also trying to find information about martial artists in the area, so you are given some periods where you have multiple dialogue options to choose from. This is something that wasn’t in the first game. When the story progresses, you move on to Kowloon, which, like the real-world Kowloon Walled City this section was based on, was a dense, dark, claustrophobic place to find yourself. This is in stark contrast with Guilin, which, for the first time, places the game in a rural area that is almost nothing but nature. I think this is a good point to bring up one of my chief complaints about the game. Even though this game takes you to three detailed, continent-spanning landscapes, somehow Shenmue 2 feels way more narrow and linear than the first game did. When in Hong Kong you have the ability to choose from all sorts of different means to earn money and entertain yourself, but in reality the world itself is much less of a character than before.
If you’ll remember, in Shenmue 1, each character in town had a name, routine, places they needed to be, etc. Shenmue 2 takes the series into a much grander scale, but in that transition I feel like much of that intimacy with the environment is completely lost. It’s clear that, in most cases now, these NPCs are just NPCs that stay where they need to. Because Ryo knows so many people in Dobuita, where they live, etc. it’s easier to see these patterns in the characters. In Shenmue 2, Ryo is a stranger in a strange land, and is completely disconnected from what’s around him. I know that this is intentional, but I just feel that much of the player’s relationship with the environment is weakened in the natural progression to broaden the game’s scope.
This doesn’t change when the game transitions to Kowloon. At its peak around the time this game was set in, the walled city of Kowloon once had approximately 35,000 people crammed into a six acre space, making it one of the most densely populated places on planet Earth. You don’t really get that sense when you make it to the game’s Kowloon. Of course, I’m not expecting them to just dump that many NPCs into a town, but so much of your time in Kowloon is just spent inside dark buildings. Going off of the media I have found about Kowloon itself, this likely wasn’t too far off, but I don’t feel like there’s much here to connect to. This section is when the game begins to feel even more linear as you mostly spend your time navigating these buildings now. By the end of this section of the game, it is almost a non stop barrage of combat and life-or-death QTEs, all contained in dark corridors, that it loses a lot about what I love about the game and the series, which is being a kind of dumb detective who gets distracted by fun things around him. Thankfully, by the time the game makes it to Guilin, the pace has calmed down several notches. Now that they’ve come up, I think it’s time now to talk about the evolution of the QTEs between the first two games. In Shenmue 1, we are introduced to the idea of QTEs, something that has become a staple of game design that has lasted up until the modern day almost 25 years later. In that game, they pop up in cutscenes and act as a mini-game of sorts that comes up here and there. In Shenmue 2, I think they felt the need to expand it, and expand it they did. The QTE events in this game are plentiful, with the stakes often being that there is no margin of error. If Ryo messes up even one of these QTEs, it often results in his death. What is worse than this, though, is the introduction of what the game calls “Command QTEs,” which are sections where instead of flashing a single button for you to press, it shows the 4 face buttons and the D-pad and gives you a rapid selection of buttons to press to make it through the next section. There is absolutely no margin of error for this, you have such a tiny window in which you have to replicate these buttons, and failing almost always ends in death or being forced to replay the whole section again. The post-fight scene after fighting what is essentially the final boss in Don Niu has one of these, so if you screw up that you have to re-do the entire encounter. It is just stressful and absolutely no fun and I hate them. This isn’t to say that I am against the idea of QTEs, I think they can be a fine way to keep the player engaged when done properly (a recent example of them being done well would be Final Fantasy XVI), but the stakes are so high with them in Shenmue 2 in their quest to “evolve” them that it just takes things too far.
The one thing about both of these games that is getting stuck with me more than anything else is how easily Ryo is casting aside virtually everyone who loves and cares about him in pursuit of “revenge.” I know it is a story trope as old as time, but one of the things that a lengthy video game is able to do, unlike, say, a 90 minute film, is it gives you time to see how what you are doing is impacting the world around you. In the first game, there are countless moments where Fuku-san, Ine-san, and Nozomi primarily beg him to stop what he’s doing, think about what he has going on in his life, and assess what’s important. There isn’t a single person in either game that believes that Ryo is doing what he is supposed to be doing. In one scene, Nozomi finds Ryo after school and reminds him that he is missing out on important exams and such to be able to study in college. He spends part of the game hiding what he’s doing from Ine-san because he knows that she will be upset. He knows that what he’s doing is going to put the safety of those he loves in jeopardy and goes through with it. Ultimately, his investigation leads to Nozomi being kidnapped and he has to wheel and deal to get her released. There isn’t a single person in his life that wants him to be doing this, but ultimately they decide to just cave and realize they aren’t going to stop him.
Now, for the first game you could chalk this up to him being young, it being a classic story trope, etc. but Ryo’s line of thought just continues to get more bewildering as the story progresses. When he meets Xiuying, a master of martial arts who literally takes him under her wing and allows him to stay at her home because of the promise she sees in him, he constantly pushes her willingness to help him away. She tries multiple times over the course of the game to teach him that using kung fu for anything other than defense is something that is going to lead you down a dark path. A path of eventually becoming evil. She guides him to learning patience, other tenets of kung fu that he otherwise wouldn’t know, and he still brushes her aside, telling her to leave him alone at one point. As the story progresses, she confides in him the story of losing her brother, who decided to seek revenge. He further learns that Lan Di himself is a product of revenge, finding out that killing Ryo’s father was an act of revenge for his very own. Ryo, over the course of his journey in China, makes a whole new set of friends. People that go out of their way to make sure that he is safe, has a place to sleep for the night, who are willing to take him under their wing and help him learn. He has the chance to learn under one of China’s premiere martial artists, perhaps enabling him to become even greater than Lan Di, but he forgoes all of that. Ultimately, his friends in China continue to almost chase him around and save him from himself. They risk their lives to try to keep him from doing something stupid and he never once stops to acknowledge it. He just barrels ahead, leaving everyone he’s connected with, behind him. This, more than anything else about Shenmue, drives me bonkers.
I guess the reason that this bothers me as much as it does is that I cannot fathom going through such great lengths to isolate yourself from the people who care about you. Not long after I received Shenmue as a gift, I began to enter my formative years as a teenager. It was then that I began seeing signs of what I would ultimately learn was depression. What I initially believed was tied to whether I was in a romantic relationship or not, was something that I ultimately realized was something much greater. Thanks to the luck of the draw, depression is something that runs in my family and has severely impacted both sides of my family tree. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that was ever treated for me until my late 20s. I suffered through my teenage years by the skin of my teeth at times, leaning entirely on my friendships to keep me afloat, to my late teens and early 20s, periods of time which were often filled with copious amounts of alcohol. I found something that I wrote on the previously mentioned Dreamcast forums, back in the early 2000s:
“I myself feel like I serve no purpose in life. I’ve been a depressed, heartbroken little boy over the past 7 months and I’m fine. Sure, sometimes I feel horrible. Other times I felt that my friends didn’t give a shit about me, but they do. I love my friends more than I love anyone else in this world. I love them more than I love my own family. My friends are my only reason to live.” In the years that followed this post, I would eventually meet the woman who would become my wife and together we have had two beautiful girls. Before, I was of the mindset that my friends were what kept me grounded. Today, I would say that it is the three of them that do that for me. I can’t imagine, regardless of whatever was going on in my life, a situation where I’d just drop everyone around me to pursue an individual goal. It’s through that lens that I can get so frustrated with the story of Shenmue.
Chapter 3
At the 2014 Game Developers Conference, the conference in which Yu Suzuki delivered the postmortem on the original game, he was approached by Sony about the possibility of forming a partnership to help get Shenmue III off the ground. In the years prior, Suzuki had left Sega to focus efforts at his new development studio Ys Net, and was publicly open to the idea of licensing the Shenmue property from Sega and making Shenmue III on his own. Prior to the game being unveiled, Suzuki posted a picture of a forklift to his Twitter with the caption “E3,” which made people believe that we would probably see a re-release of the first two games to test the waters for a third game’s release. While those re-releases would eventually come before, the public wasn’t prepared for what would ultimately come later that year at E3 2015. Just minutes after unveiling Final Fantasy VII Remake, Adam Boyes of Sony Computer Entertainment begins talking about the rise of Kickstarter being used to fund new games. He transitions to talking about a developer that had told them of their intentions to revive an older series via Kickstarter, but since PlayStation fans have clamored for it for so long they wanted to share the announcement on their stage. It transitions to a video of Yu Sukuki announcing his intentions to build Shenmue III using Kickstarter to fund the game. After the game’s announcement, there was some confusion as to if its $2 million goal was enough to fund a large scale, open world 3D game. We learned some information about the partnerships that Suzuki had forged to fully fund the game’s development. Sony was one of these partners: “Sony and PlayStation is definitely a partner in this game and it’s going to be run through third-party production. We’re going to help Ys Net get the game done, we’re going to be partners on it the whole way, and really excited to see this thing come out in a couple of years.”
It was later revealed that Deep Silver would be publishing the game and providing additional funding for it. Through crowdfunding measures, the game ultimately raised more than $7 million dollars, with Suzuki eventually saying that the game’s budget came close to around $20 million. With a scaled down budget compared to the massive $40–70 million budget for the first two games, Shenmue 3 had a scaled down team as well. The original game had a team of around 300 people working on it, however Shenmue III had a team of about 70 full time people working on it. Suzuki initially had some difficulty in building a team that had the skillset and interest in working on an open world game as mobile games were the dominating the Japanese gaming market: “Smartphones have become the mainstream in the Japanese gaming market today, creating an environment where the technology developed for consoles is often underused. Also, it is becoming difficult to secure the talent necessary to make such games, but thankfully, we have managed to gather a very promising team for Shenmue III.”
While Shenmue II was much larger in scale than the first game, Suzuki announced that he was planning on making Shenmue III smaller in scale, focusing on a deeper, more detailed world instead of one that is just larger. He talked about how this would be a direct sequel to the second game, starting immediately after the end of Shenmue II, with Ryo and Shenhua leaving the cave they went into at that game’s conclusion.
Though the game was originally expected to release in 2017, over the course of the next few years it would be delayed until November 2019, where, after almost two decades of waiting, it would finally see the light of day.
In that period of time between the release of Shenmue II and III, a lot changed in my life. The Dreamcast community that I was once a very active part of had also grown up and drifted apart. Despite this, I still maintained contact with a few people from the forums and thanks to blogs and eventually their social media, I was able to stay in contact with them.
One of the people that I would keep in contact with was someone whose name I’m not going to share. He had a bit of a reputation on the forum for being a bit of a troll and stirring the pot whenever possible, but when you talked to him outside of the forums he was actually a pretty pleasant person to talk to. Over time we would instant message each other and keep one another abreast of what was going on in our lives. The conversations would become infrequent, but again after some time we would reach back out to one another and have a nice chat before drifting away again. This happened on and off from the mid 2000s to the early 2010s, with the last conversation happening less than a year before I would learn the news that he had passed away. I had not been fortunate enough to never know someone to have died, but this was the first instance of losing someone I would have considered a friend at one point in my life. In the years that have followed, and as I approach my 40s, coming across death in my life is becoming a more frequent thing. We’re getting older, as are those around us, and it’s something that is going to happen regardless. What continues to hurt, though, is the frequency by which people who are around my age have died. It’s painful when you lose a loved one, even when they’ve lived a long, full life, but it hits differently when you see someone’s life end when there should still be a lot more that they get to experience. Things that I have been able to experience. Things that I have still yet to experience. Why do I get to experience these things while their lives are cut short?
I know that these are some heavy questions to be asking in a video about Shenmue, of all things, but when I think about Shenmue, I think about the Dreamcast. When I think about the Dreamcast, I think about all sorts of things, one of which is that friend and his life that ended far too soon. Shenmue III starts where Shenmue II left off. Ryo and Shenhua leave the cave and investigate attacks on the town’s stonemasons. Ryo discovers that his father and Lan Di’s father were once friends. They learn about an imperial envoy who came to Bailu Village in search of a stone mason to make a mirror. The Red Snakes, a group of thugs, take over part of the town to find the mirrors. Ryo gets in a fight with them but loses. He trains with an old man named Sun, who knew his father. Ryo eventually defeats the thugs. Chai returns and tries to harm Ryo but flees when captured by Ryo and the townsfolk. They find out that Chai plans to target a woman named Elder Yeh. They find a hidden scroll in the town bell tower that directs them to the city of Niaowu. In Niaowu, they encounter the same group of thugs from Bailu Village. Ryo teams up with Ren to enter the Red Snakes’ hideout. They learn that Shenhua has been kidnapped and taken to an old castle. Ryo, Ren, and their allies go to the castle to rescue her. Ryo exchanges the real Phoenix Mirror for Shenhua’s release. They fight off thugs and find Lan Di waiting for them. The castle is set on fire, and Ryo fights Lan Di but is defeated. Shenhua, her father, Ryo, and Ren leave by boat. Ryo learns that Lan Di’s father was originally entrusted with the mirrors. The game ends with Ryo, Ren, and Shenhua walking along the Great Wall of China, and text on the screen reads “The story goes on…” as Shenmue III concludes.
The first thing that comes to mind after spending some time playing this game is that so much of its design decisions feel very dated for a 2019 video game. While it doesn’t necessarily feel like a Dreamcast game exactly, it feels very close to that. In all actuality, it feels like a launch Xbox 360 title and I don’t necessarily mean that as a compliment. That’s not to say that there are all negatives about the game because there are things that I liked about it.
One of the things that I actually enjoyed about this game, and in particular the section Bailu Village, is that things are scaled way down. I know this was primarily because of a much leaner budget that they had to work with, but I actually prefer the smaller scale. I enjoyed Bailu Village in much the same way that I enjoyed Dobouita. It’s smaller, so you get a sense that the people you’re interacting with are actually characters living in this world. They aren’t just a sea of NPCs who permanently live in storefronts. When the scale is smaller, you can actually identify the routines of the NPCs. If you are more into the larger city-style of map that made up the bulk of Shenmue II, then the move to Niaowu will be more up your alley as the scale is much larger and there are more things to do around town.
The game adds a couple of mechanics that are more in line with what you’d expect in other titles. In this game, Ryo has to actually eat. Running around slowly uses up his health so periodically you will need to buy some food and eat it to make sure he doesn’t pass out. There are also other RPG-like elements that are added that aren’t done nearly as well, such as two points in the game where you are walled off from making progress unless you grind. It feels like they did this solely to extend the game’s playtime and honestly, without these two sections in the game, the game would’ve been way more enjoyable to play through. I get that you want to create a situation in the story where Ryo needs to improve or learn something before advancing, but you literally have to grind like a mediocre JRPG to advance. It’s really bad.
The script, dialogue, and voice acting are every bit as weird and stilted as they were in 1999. It honestly feels like this game’s script and voice acting was done way back then and just re-used in 2019. I understand that there’s nostalgia in the original game’s vocal performances, because I feel the same way towards them, but it feels like this game, a series that pioneered so many standards for the industry, is actively trying to ignore other standards that have come up over time. Still, though, there are some solid moments throughout. There are some nice character moments that can come up, particularly in the end-of-day conversations that Ryo has with Shenhua throughout the game. Sometimes Ryo actually expresses emotions like anger about the lack of progress they are making or they use the time to flesh out these two characters and their place in this world. So among the janky, bizarre dialogue and delivery you can see some genuinely nice moments.
Now, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the combat in the first two games, but after playing the third one, I would do anything to go back to the Virtua Fighter-esque combat system that was there. The combat is simplified, but it is dramatically worse. Even on easy, encounters are aggravating and ultimately just lead to me mashing buttons. Again, those RPG elements rear their head again and you have to build up your stats to be able to keep up with the encounters. There were some light elements of these ideas in the first two games, but if you just primarily cared about the story you could get through the encounters. Not here, though, unfortunately. Despite me not loving combat in the first two games, I could tolerate it and appreciate what it was going for. I just flat out dislike it here, though.
One thing that bothered me while playing the game was the game slowly moving away from the couple of more mystical elements of the series. In the first game, it is believed that the mirrors possess an ancient power that can’t fall into the hands of evil. In the second game we sit a literal floating dagger. In this game, though, all of those elements are gone. The floating dagger is now just nonchalantly used as a tool to get through a puzzle and the mystery of the mirrors is that they are a secret tool to find treasure. I don’t know about you, but taking 20 years to tell a story about secret treasure doesn’t feel very grand in scale.
Considering the shaky grounds that Shenmue III was made on, I am in awe of the balls on Yu Suzuki to end this game on a cliffhanger. He had to know that this would be a controversial decision, but went ahead with it anyway. I know he has long had this grand vision for where the story is supposed to go, but I can’t believe that he just continued with the original plan, not knowing if there would even be a sequel to it. The love and care he has for this story is evident, even in Shenmue III itself, which has many issues. Despite all the problems I had with the game, I still can’t help but admire his almost 3 decade endeavor to tell this story the way he wants to tell it.
In one of the scenes at the end of a day where Ryo and Shenhua go over any developments that have been made, Ryo makes the observation that there aren’t a lot of men in the town, and Shenhua explains that many of the men go and work in the city to earn money to send back to their homes in Bailu Village. She says that there are some that get used to living in the city and just decide to stay there. Shenhua asks if Ryo prefers the city and he said the city is more convenient, but it isn’t an either-or situation and that, to him, “Home is wherever my family, friends, and loved ones are.” Shenhua says that it’s people who matter most and Ryo awkwardly responds with “Yeah” and the scene ends. I know that this is supposed to be a completely throwaway, filler scene but it has made me look again at some of the issues I was having earlier with Ryo and his decision making. I was looking at things from the perspective that Ryo should be listening to those around him and that his efforts shouldn’t be focused on revenge, but maybe I’ve been looking at things a bit too rigidly. It’s possible to still love those around you and follow your own path. It’s possible to do the things you need to do in life, things that sometimes pull us apart from one another, and reconnect when things are in a better place. This isn’t different from how I’ve treated some of my friendships over the years. As my friends and I have gotten older, our responsibilities and priorities have changed. We went to college, we started careers, we started families. At this point in his life, Ryo is still 18 years old and trying to figure out what his place in this story is. Even though this story was told in three chapters released over the course of 20 years, it still takes place only in the span of a couple of months in 1986 and 1987. He just watched his dad die. Maybe I should cut the kid some slack.
The Shenmue games are weird. They are full of bizarre, clunky mechanics, antiquated dialogue, poor voice acting, and oftentimes can be unpleasant to play. But in the midst of all of that is so much earnestness. It is clear that each of these games is an absolute labor of love. It is evident in almost every element of the game that a lot of planning, care, and heart was put into building out the world that these characters inhabit. For every mechanic that feels dated is another that adds genuine value not only to these games in particular, but to the industry as a whole by influencing design choices that would go on to become industry standards such as open world environments, day/night cycles, world building, slice of life mechanics, QTEs, NPC detail, etc. I love this series. It helped to open me up to even more games that I would fall in love with. It was the first game to kindle my love for one of the best consoles ever made. It was the starting point for what would lead to me making life-long friends.
Each year when the birthday of the friend that I brought up earlier comes around, I see several posts made by his close friends and family about him on his Facebook page. They wish him a happy birthday. They tell him that they miss him. They bring up in-jokes and make references to things that happened to them while together. It makes me think about what will happen when I die. Will Facebook still exist then? Will people visit a digitized avatar of myself in whatever virtual hellscape awaits us in the future? If Facebook does exist, will people continue to wish me a happy birthday after I’ve left this place? Regardless, as of this writing, my time here isn’t finished. I am surrounded by people who care about me, and I am going to do everything I can to enjoy that for as long as I’m able.