Welcome to the third piece in this series on classic games. This time we are going one more generation further back to the Sega Dreamcast and probably the most famous first party game on it – Shenmue.
As I mentioned in the first classic games review, my early console journey was with Sega – I owned two Mega Drives in my teens and eventually moved into the 32-bit generation sticking with the Sega Saturn a couple of years after it had launched. The Saturn was a criminally mismanaged system that to the objective onlooker was doomed to failure from day one. I had my Sega coloured specs on though and didn’t see the warning signs as the number of games on local game shops’ shelves dwindled and new releases dried up.
When the penny finally dropped though, that was it for me with Sega – they were withdrawing their support for the Saturn, the machine I had supported through loyalty to the Mega Drive? OK, well in that case I was withdrawing my support for Sega! I became a PlayStation owner around 1998 and have stuck with that platform ever since.
So, I was aware of the Dreamcast and, yes it did look pretty damn cool but I was a poor student, I could not afford a second console and had no intention of selling my PlayStation and going back to Sega to risk getting burned again. In hindsight this was wise – the Dreamcast burned brightly but for an even shorter period than the Saturn. So, I heard stories about this incredible “realistic” adventure game called Shenmue but with no YouTube at the time it was just a few screenshots in magazines.
Fast forward to 2016 and I joined a new team at work and found that one of my new teammates was an avid gamer. We got chatting about games and Sega and retro stuff and it triggered a memory of the Dreamcast. One night around that time I got on eBay and found myself a second hand Dreamcast for around £30. I had no other consoles at the time so I was super excited and also ordered a few games – including of course Shenmue!
Now, imagine my disgust when the machine turns up and fails to read most of my discs! It loaded Soul Calibur absolutely fine and one or two others but just refused point blank to read most of my games – yes, you’ve guessed it, Shenmue was on the dud list… I did some research and it seemed that it was a fairly common issue – the laser just wore out after a certain amount of use. There were tips about adjusting an attenuation screw on the laser but I could see from wear in the screwhead this had already been done. Bollocks.
So, the Dreamcast got stuffed into a box of cables, controllers, power supplies, discs etc (you know, we all have them) and was forgotten about for another few years.
Fast forward again to 2020 and the first Covid lockdown. I took the decision to focus on things in my control like my job and things I gained pleasure from which were still available to me – gaming. I started to follow and interact with a number of gaming accounts on Twitter: both modern and retro. I got chatting to a guy called James who was half of a Sega podcast called the Sega Guys. He told me about the mods he had upgraded his Dreamcast with – including a GDEMU.
The GDEMU is an optical drive emulator for the Dreamcast – you basically remove the GD-ROM unit and replace it with a small board which has an SD card slot. You then load games ROMs onto the SD card and play directly from there. My Dreamcast had life again!
***Disclaimer – to legally play ROMs from a device such as the GDEMU you should own the physical disc of the game in question. But, this is a twenty plus year old system we are talking about and I’m not your mum.***
I fitted the GDEMU and a few other quality of life mods and sat down one evening in summer 2020 to finally experience Shenmue. Of course in the time that had passed I had watched videos of the game and read many articles on it and the burning question in my mind was “does it stand up today?”. It was widely acknowledged as being groundbreaking in the last year of the 20th century but what about in 2020?
Well, as you have no doubt guessed from the fact that I am writing an article on the game for a series referring to “classic” games, in my opinion it definitely does! I am caveating everything I say about Shenmue with “in my opinion” more so than I would do for many games as I understand many people do not agree with me. That’s fine, we’re all adults and can discuss games without having to agree on everything. What I think cannot be disputed though is how far ahead of the game it was when it was released in 1999. Yu Suzuki smashed it out of the park with Shenmue.
When I say it held up, for me, I am talking about from an enjoyment perspective. Clearly it doesn’t hold up technically twenty years after it launched but I still had a lot of fun playing it.
Another aspect of Shenmue also really intrigued me – from Wikipedia and subsequent reading I had discovered that Toshihro Nagoshi has been heavily involved in the project. This was a tantalising prospect to me as Nagoshi was the mastermind behind my favourite series of games ever – Yakzua / 龍が如く. Clearly Shenmue came a few years ahead of the first Yakuza game which was released in 2005 but could I see any nascent aspects of the franchise in Shenmue I wondered?
There are definite hints of what would come to be later when Toshihiro Nagoshi would go on to develop the Yakuza series. The open world setting itself and killing time in the arcade with Hang On and Space Harrier are probably the most obvious examples but feeding the kitten at the shrine and the roots of the combat are others.
The combat system in Shenmue is still clearly spawned from Virtua Fighter and by the time we see it emerge in Yakuza it will have shed these influences and become a far more visceral brawler. It would be very difficult though to argue that Yakuza did not take some major cues from Shenmue’s blend of open world adventure and hand to hand brawling.
Having said that, I think the combat system is deeply flawed in places – the most obvious example being the infamous “70 man brawl” towards the end of the game. It’s just too much combat for my tastes and too frustrating when I got to the last or second last fighter only to be defeated and have to start over. This happened multiple times and actually led to me leaving the game untouched for several months (to compound the frustration the most recent save point prior to this fight is quite far back).
Stepping back for a second, for anyone who hasn’t played the game or doesn’t know anything about it, a quick overview. You play Ryo Hazuki, a high school student in 80s Yokosuka Japan who comes home one day to find his martial arts master father getting beaten up by a mysterious stranger. Your father dies and thus starts Ryo’s odyssey for revenge. As mentioned, the game is set in an open world, albeit not a very large one. It consists of the area around Ryo’s house, a shopping area and the dockyard of the Port of Yokosuka.
Ryo has to investigate the events arounds his father’s death and runs into conflict with antagonists during his adventure which are invariably resolved by hand to hand combat. His “investigations” typically entail him walking around asking local inhabitants questions about his current lead. It’s not complicated but to me it’s quietly compelling.
This may not sound like the ingredients of a great video game to many people but it really was revolutionary for a 3D adventure game in 1999. There are not really any contemporaries of Shenmue which it can be compared to – it was quite literally ahead of its time. It is widely considered that Shenmue is the granddaddy of many of today’s open world games – coming as it did two years before Grand Theft Auto III.
The game world has a day and night cycle, evolving weather (it snows in December) and a range of NPCs who have their own daily routines. The world feels alive, even if in a rather rudimentary fashion. I remember seeing a local shopkeeper in one of the local bars at night time – after his work had finished for the day he had gone for a drink! For such an old game this blew my mind! The NPCs go about their business and have their own schedules. For the time this was truly innovative and remains an impressive immersion building mechanic.
Once you open up the port area of the game and need to get there you have only one way in which to do so – catch the bus. When I got to this stage I remember wondering if that meant I would need to respect the bus timetable – of course it did! You can view the bus times at the bus stop in the Dobuita (the shopping area) and they turn up as scheduled. This means you can, and will, miss your bus on occasion – the experience of seeing your bus at the stop as you are still some way from it, running for it only to see it pull away and leave you is every bit as frustrating in a video game as it is in real life!
In line with this approach to time, shops and businesses have accurate open close cycles. Need to speak to the guy at the tattoo parlour? Well, come back when it is actually open! For me, I enjoy being immersed in a good open world game so I didn’t mind this approach – it was mildly annoying in places but never too bad.
However, many players do not like this time mechanic in the game. You need to go see someone tomorrow. Well, that is literally tomorrow – you can’t sleep until after 7pm and it’s not even lunchtime yet – what are you going to do in the meantime? For me this wasn’t such an issue as in my view a large part of the charm of Shenmue is its slow, lazy pace. I enjoyed just exploring Yokosuka – find a spot to practise your karate, go buy some snacks in the conbini, play some arcade games, listen to music are among your options. It is a long way off the sophistication of the side content that the Yakuza games would boast in years to come but it is definitely in the same ballpark. I believe this strict adherence to chronology was divisive when the game was released in 1999 and remains so to this day. I have no problem with it, your mileage may vary.
The way the story unfolds to me is really nicely done – it revolves mainly around Ryu wandering about and asking the local inhabitants for info on whatever he is currently investigating. I can understand why for some people the pace is overly slow and this could be off putting but for me it’s the actual opposite. These days I don’t want hectic games, relentless shooters, constantly trying not to get killed etc. Shenmue is the polar opposite and for me that is a real plus point. I can sit down with the controller and just cut about the town and chill without worrying about enemies continually jumping me.
As I mentioned, while I maintain the game holds up from a gameplay and enjoyment perspective, it really doesn’t technically. It is a 1999 game and it looks it. What were impressive visuals at Shenmue’s release are a long way off what modern games are capable of. I wouldn’t recommend playing this game if you can’t get past this. Even the HD remasters don’t really do anything much to improve the visual fidelity of the game – which is one reason I chose to play it on the original hardware rather than PS4.
Having said that, the Dreamcast is capable of producing a 480p signal through its VGA out – converting this to HDMI results in a fairly respectable video display for an old machine running on a modern TV.
Playing the game twenty odd years after its release really shows the control system in a bad light. Despite the Dreamcast controller having an analogue pad, movement of the player is with the D pad and the good old “tank controls” which were prevalent in the 90s. The analogue stick is used for looking around which is fine but it would have been trivial to make it the default for movement and use e.g. a button combo for looking. It is a bit better when brawling but frequently simply navigating the world can be exasperating..
As I mentioned in my review of Sleeping Dogs, I really dislike extensive English in games where the characters wouldn’t be speaking English – and 80s suburban Yokosuka is very much such a setting. The English dub is awful. Really, truly awful. So much so that it has spawned many jokes: “I’m looking for sailors”, “I used to be Chinese” etc.
Luckily these days there are options to play with Japanese dialogue. I played my second playthrough using the Shenme Undub: Definitive Edition. This is a fan project which restored the Japanese audio to the game supported by English subtitles. To me this is a far more satisfying way to play the game – to my non native ears the Japanese dialogue, while not exactly completely natural, is a lot less cringe inducing.
Talking about audio, it has to be said that the soundtrack to Shenmue is utterly incredible. The iconic main theme is a beautiful orchestral piece which really nails the atmosphere of the game and touches a place few game soundtracks can reach. Music in the game plays in at key moments and really adds to the cinematic feel that permeates throughout. You get the sense that what is happening is important and demands your attention – and indeed have some truly beautiful melodies to enjoy.
What is particularly impressive about the Shenmue score is that it is generated entirely by the Dreamcast’s onboard audio hardware. The game spans three discs of game data so reading CD quality audio was never going to be an option. The audio chip in the DC is a Yamaha AICA – Yamaha are well known for their expertise producing synthesisers so perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Dreamcast can produce such breathtaking audio but in 1999 it wasn’t too long since video game soundtracks were a lot more primitive.
Shenmue also boasts the dubious accolade of being largely responsible for the evolution of Quick Time Events and their incorporation into gaming cinematics. At frequent points in the story events are progressed using semi interactive cutscenes. The game’s manual refers to these scenes as “Quick Timer Events” but the name became popularised as the term we know nowadays.
While being more interactive than simple cutscenes, QTEs have become a game mechanic which gets a lot of criticism. That’s too big a debate to get into here but for me, the incorporation of QTEs in Shenmue largely achieved their goal of increased interaction. There are one or two incidents which can be tricky and most likely need a few attempts to get through but for me it was never overly frustrating.
So, of course Shenmue has issues – mostly due its moment in gaming time – but for me the strength of what the game gets right outweighs these weaknesses. Again, it will not be for everyone but if you click with this game you are in for an incredible ride.
I love the setting – 80s suburban Japan. I’ve lived in Japan so games that are set there do resonate with me more than other countries which I don’t have the same experience of (a good example would be Sleeping Dogs – a game which I love but if it were set in Japan would elevate it even higher in my opinion).
Yes, the open world is small and, yes, there isn’t all that much to do in it but you have the freedom to explore as you please. The game storyline will push you along if you so please but the reality is, if you want to get up, walk about Dobuita and visit the arcade, go home and sleep til tomorrow, and only that, that’s exactly what you can do.
As noted, this review was written playing the original game on Sega Dreamcast hardware. There was an HD remaster of this and Shenmue II released together as a single title which is available on PS4, Xbox One and Windows. Very little was updated in the 2018 releases but at least it makes both the original games easily accessible on modern consoles.
Both of the games previously reviewed in this series, Sleeping Dogs and LA Noire, likewise have eighth generation remasters and this is a criteria I will strive to keep to in future reviews: classic games that are available as rereleases or remasters.
-Calum