Classic gaming: Shenmue, a love hate relationship

I would like to extend my thanks to Yu Suzuki for making this awesome game. I would also like to extend a massive FUCK YOU to Yu Suzuki for making this game.

Here’s why.

Yu Suzuki, creator of Virtua Fighter, decided one day he wanted to make an RPG based on Virtua Fighter. Not only would this game be an RPG, but it would be almost a simulation of life itself, and thus he created the term FREE or Full-Reactive Eyes Entertainment, a term which really doesn’t make any sense.

In 2000, Sega released this game as a killer-app for the now defunct Dreamcast system. At the time, the game was revolutionary; it had cutting edge graphics, a very detailed fictional depiction of the Japanese town of Yokosuka, full voice overs for every NPC in the game, changing weather effects and day/night cycles.

The plot was a simple revenge story. Ryo Hazuki, returns home one day to find his father murdered before him. The main part of the game is Ryo trying to find of the location of the murderer so he can exact his revenge. As a RPG type game based on Virtua Fighter, there is fighting involved, and Ryo himself is based on Akira from Virtua Fighter. Ryo himself has a very generic personality, much like Ryu from Street Fighter, he speaks little, fights alot, and would rather much go looking for sailors than bang his very hot lady friends who would all like a piece of him.

The actual game itself involved walking around the town of Yokosuka trying to find clues as to where he can find the killer. But of course, this being a life simulator, there’s several ways for you to get distracted, and not do important stuff, say finding clues pertaining the murder of your father. Like feeding the local stranded kitten milk, playing arcade games, stalking people and buying gashapon. The game also gave birth to the legendary term ‘Quick Time Event’ which made you have to press a button during some random cutscene without warning.

And like real life, you also get badgered by family for going home too late, and you also have to work for your money later by driving a forklift and delivering boxes. At one point I felt kind of retarded, because I feel that this part of the game was added for the sake of making the game ‘realistic’. Who the hell wants to play a game to do menial shit for the sake of it? At least slaying mobs in RPGs can be kind of fun in a leveling up perspective.

And here’s the problem with Shenmue. It was just way too ambitious. Is it a life simulator? Is it an RPG? Is it a fighting game? The plot is very focused, but everything about the game encourages you to mess around until the last minute. For a game that started off as a Virtua Fighter RPG, I wouldn’t say there is enough fighting in the game for it to be called that.

Suzuki envisioned some kind of epic story spanning 6 games or so. The story of the first game itself wasn’t that great, but it was good enough to make me eagerly anticipate the sequel. In fact, when I found out that the sequel was almost not going to get an English release, I freaked out, even going as far as playing the JP version without knowing what the hell was going on.

This epic game came at an epic cost too, with the game costing around $70 million USD to make, and in order for SEGA to make any kind of profit, every Dreamcast owner would have to buy two copies of the game. Only recently GTA4 has eclipsed this record ($100 million USD), but 70 million was probably alot more in 1999. Surely there were alarm bells ringing back then?

SEGA were crazy enough to release a sequel a year later in 2001. The game continued Ryo’s story as he traveled to Hong Kong in pursuit of his father’s murderer. The game added more ways to amuse yourself, for now you could earn money in different ways such as button mashing for armwrestling to earn money, fight for money, and then gamble it all away at pachinko, but the core gameplay remained the same.

But even after the second game ended, more questions on the plot were raised and none were answered at all. Does Ryo end up getting laid? How does he murderize Lan-Di at the end?
With the Dreamcast on the way out at that time, and re-release of Shenmue II on Xbox at the time, I bought one, hoping one day I could play Shenmue III and at least finish the story. Today I am still waiting. And hope has all but faded with Yu Suzuki ‘stepping down’ from his role at SEGA, and in the current financial crisis I don’t see SEGA taking huge financial risks like Shenmue up again soon. And we’re left with the cliff hanger ending from Shenmue II that we’ll never know the end to. Fuck Yu.

All I can say is this. Be vary of games which claim they are going to be some kind of epic saga before they start out. Xenosaga is also guilty of this, but at least they managed to finish the story before they called it quits. But shit happens over time, consoles die, production costs blow out etc, and it never happens in the end.