The Dreamcast is on the list of things that I need to buy when I have the money, time, and stability to start spending money on things that will make me happy (you know, after I make my first $1 million). It was a fast console that had a library games with gorgeous graphics and unique gameplay. In the summer of 1999, while I was visiting my late grandfather’s place in Florida, I played a demo of “Sonic Adventure” that was on display for 90 minutes—a full 85 minutes longer than anyone was supposed to use it. I got death glares as I walked away.
The game that got the most praise from the press (not the fake gaming press, who only come around when video games become really popular or when a video game fanatic commits a massacre) was “Shenmue”, which I never got to play because I was stuck with a Nintendo 64 and a PlayStation 2. (Poor me, I know.) The game was advertised as having a wide variety of gameplay, stunning visuals even when compared to other Dreamcast games, and an absurd level of detail. On a system that housed two 3D Sonic games worth a damn, the definitive version of arguably the greatest skateboarding game of all time, and fucking “Soul Caliber”, “Shenmue” was considered to be the Dreamcast’s killer app.
The Dreamcast failed, but that was Sega’s fault; after the 32x, Sega CD, and the Saturn, they had lost the trust of their audience, who were more than willing to wait for the PS2 and skip the Dreamcast. “Shenmue”’s sequel, “Shenmue 2”, was eventually ported to Microsoft’s Xbox console, with better graphics and fewer discs. It was initially hailed as being a better game than “Shenmue”. “Shenmue 2”’s praise, then, could be considered most of the reason why I don’t listen to many video game critics.
The story of “Shenmue” is a simple revenge story, so leave it to Sega’s crack team of crackheads to tell it in extremely confusing fashion. To be fair, “Shenmue 2” comes packaged with a 90-minute DVD of cutscenes from the first game detailing the plot, as well as a 20-minute summary of the first game on “Shenmue 2”’s actual game disc, so it can’t be said that there isn’t an attempt to get you caught up on the events of the first game. The story going into “2” is that Ryo (you) witness the murder of your father at the hands of Lan Di, who believed that your father screwed him over many years ago. Even worse, he took your father’s mirror (yes, this is placed on the same pedestal as your father’s murder). You drop out of school in order to pursue revenge. In your investigation, you find another mirror that looks significant (I imagine that there was something long-term planned here). Also, you learn that Lan Di has left Japan and has traveled to China. When “2” begins, you are under instructions to seek out Master Lishao Tao, who apparently has connections to both your father and Lan Di.
While there wasn’t a North American Dreamcast version of “2” produced, it’s not hard to say that the Xbox version looks better. Unlike Dreamcast ports of other games (“Grandia 2” to the PS2 springs to mind), the Xbox doesn’t suffer from any stuttering or blocky characters; it runs the game at the speed on the original console, with the visuals actually cleaned up a bit. Unfortunately, the game’s artistic end of the visuals doesn’t take advantage of those technical capabilities. Most of your time will be spent in or in-between gray buildings, which lend a sort of depressed feeling to the game. The game looks best when it is rendering nature, but it is dead-set on having you stick to marketplaces and industrial areas—in effect, it is doing the exact opposite of what it is best at, which could be considered the real story of the game. Character models are about what you’d expect from a game made ten years ago—the more important the character, the better they look.
The sound of the game is underwhelming, to be generous. The soundtrack is repetitive, but individual tracks set the mood well, making you feel as though you’re immersed in Chinese culture. The audio for the voice acting, to be generous again, is fucking atrocious. There is a distinct hiss that begins and ends with each line, as though their lines were put on tape and then fed through a trial version of low-end mixing software. I’ve played adventure games from 1993 that had better fidelity than “2”. To make matter worse, the actual acting is terrible. Every line sounds as though it was done in one take and the actor was given his/her script only a minute before it was recorded. It made me wish for an option to play the game in its original Japanese with English subtitles, but unfortunately, there was no such option available. This doesn’t even include the major disconnect with having obviously-Caucasian actors voicing obviously-Asian characters, but all things considered, that might be the least of the game’s problems.
You control Ryo from a third-person perspective behind him most of the time, but controlling him is a chore. Ryo can seemingly only turn when he is already in motion, as if he were a rusty grocery cart. If you are trying to go down a path that is directly to one of your sides, good luck reaching it without walking into a wall. Though you are often required to travel long distances to reach objectives, there isn’t a convenient map system in place (you have to buy maps that you can access when you pause the game), and it is often easier to just walk up to a pedestrian and ask them to lead the way to your destination. It is slow and insulting, but at least you’ll get there, which is a remote possibility when trying to get there by yourself. It isn’t helped by everything holding distinctly Chinese names. As long as you are localizing everything else, you might as well change the names to something that I can pronounce without having to hear the names said out loud first.
Making progress in the game is flawed. Ryo does not have a source of income for himself, so he takes odd jobs in order to make enough money to get to the next area of the game. In most games, doing jobs for money lets you use that money for powerups or equipment to better your character. Here, it is used to open up new areas. You are specifically told that you can only enter “that place” when you get $1,000. This wouldn’t be a problem if the games were interesting and engaging, but the games featuring you moving boxes around controls worse than when Ryo is just walking across town, with the other option having you host games of luck, which are advertised as games of skill for some reason. Seeing as how the games of luck will get you more money, you’ll likely spend a lot of time standing by a stupid Lucky Hit board, hoping that somebody stops and plays your game, and then hoping that nobody visits your booth after you’ve made something close to resembling a healthy profit. On top of all of this money grinding, you are given an ongoing timer. “Shenmue 2” only supports a set amount of time for you to complete the game, and if you take too long, you won’t be able to complete it. Granted, you are given so much time that you’ll likely never actually run out unless you make a concentrated effort to fail (making me wonder why there’s even a timer in the first place), but with the story’s built-in urgency, the games feel like a waste of time that happen to be mandatory. Sure, this is likely the best way for a person in real life with limited resources to travel from country to country, but I don’t play video games to do boring stuff that I could be doing in real life.
The real gameplay draw is the combat and the QuickTime Events. QuickTime Events, or “QTE” as they are called by nerds, are sequences in which the game tells you to press specific buttons quickly in order to make progress in a scene. These scenes are handled well, but the variety of the QTEs is ill-explained or hinted at. At one point, the QTE flashes a set of instructions in a matter differently than had been laid out before—making the sound of a sharp sword being unsheathed, followed by a flash of instructions—and it took me ten tries to figure out that I wasn’t supposed to wait for the instructions to finish flashing before pressing buttons. The combat is similar to that found in “Virtua Fighter”—quick encounters, focusing strictly on hand-to-hand, with minimal button presses. The game’s pacing kills these sequences, though. I actually counted two whole hours of gameplay between fights, and after a great chase scene near the beginning, QTEs didn’t make an appearance for almost as long. The time in between having fun was spent on explaining the plot, which consisted of a character saying “I think DudewhosenamebeginswiththeletterT is hiding at Genericwarehouse2!”, and Ryo responding “Then I should probably go find DudewhosenamebeginswiththeletterT. He is at Genericwarehouse2.” Granted, this kind of writing was par for course in 2001, but considering how some people refer to this game as the greatest of all time, I’m left spellbound at how boring 37.5 of my 40 hours spent on the game were.
But, oh, those last 2.5 hours. Eventually, the game gets its shit together and pits you in one awesome sequence after another. You can barely catch your breath before the next scene starts, which offers new challenges. Fights can be avoided through sneaking, but at this point, that doesn’t sound like a punishment. A boss fight occurs, and it is actually difficult. Then, when the game should be rolling its credits, you are treated to a beautiful epilogue set in nature, allowing the game the chance to look good for more than two seconds for a change (fields of grass and everything). Sure, it ends on an unnecessary cliffhanger, but it was a fun ride until then.
Honestly, if the last 2.5 hours weren’t as good as they were, I wouldn’t feel bad in referring to this game as one of the worst games I’ve ever played. As it is, I feel bad calling it a disappointment. The game’s presentation is faulty, the game’s story is overly simplistic (though you’ll likely get confused due to the lack of localization for the names and the nicknames that each character has), and you’ll spend more time hoping to progress than actually making progress. It is at its best when it remembers that it is a video game, which are rare moments sprinkled throughout until the last 2.5 hours. The entire “Shenmue” concept is strange, too. It is a story of revenge, so you know how the ongoing story is going to end before you’ve even finished the first game, but the “Shenmue” series was planned to span several video games and comic books. That the planned “Shenmue 3” has never seen the light of day is little surprise, but in case it ever actually gets made, I’m going to spoil it for you: Ryo is going to kick Lan Di’s head in. Shocker, I know.
Score (out of 100): 43
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