I Hate That I Love Shenmue

We all have something from our past that we have fond memories of. For me personally, it was playing games with my family growing up, rather it be playing Soul Calibur with my mom or watching my dad play Batman as a kid. Back then, you don’t think about the in’s and out’s of a game, you just played them because it was handed to you and you more than likely thought it was a good, fun game. Down the line though, you may come back to revisit those games, and find out that things may not have been all that you thought they were.

Recently, in the wake of Shenmue 3 coming out next year, Sega re-released the first two games remastered for the current-gen consoles. I remembered watching my dad play them as a child. I remember really enjoying watching him beat up the baddies and solving the mysteries. So when I heard that I could play them on my pc an not have to look at the now not so good graphics of the Dreamcast, I was all over it. When I booted up the game and saw the classic Sega logo, I started grinning from ear to ear. I couldn’t wait to relive one of the joys I used to share with my dad. But oh boy, I was not ready for what I was getting myself into.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that when studios remaster games, it’s not going to be perfect. I expected a decent looking game and clunky controls, but I wasn’t ready for the audio to still sound like it came from 1999. That I could and did get used to though. What I couldn’t get used to though was the main part of the game, the time management mechanic. Yes, it was a brand new thing at the time. Yes, the game is critically acclaimed by most people. Yes, this game paved the way for games to use the same time mechanic but in a much better way. But let’s talk about how the game actually plays and not what it did.

Do you know what the majority of the game consists of? Waiting. Waiting for nightfall to find where the sailors hang out. Waiting until 8:00 p.m. to go to sleep and progress to the next day. Waiting until noon to go to an apartment, only to be told come back tomorrow at three. Do you catch my drift? “But surely they put things in the game for you to do while you wait” you might say, and you’re not wrong. They put in an arcade in the main town, but there are only four games in it, Sega’s own Hang On and Space Harrier, a dart board, and a quick time event game. The QTE game is only worth playing once, just to see how long you can last before you get bored of it because the long time it gives you to react. The dart game has no skill in it, it’s just a timing game that requires you to know how long to wait before Ryo, the main character, will hit anything worth more than five points. The only game worth playing more than once is Hang On, and even that gets old.

And once you get about 75% through the game, it makes you get a job, as a forklift driver. As boring as that sounds, they make it worse with making you do this rave every morning before you can get to work. Both are boring, bot went on for too long, both should have been omitted from the game.

Do you want to know the worst part of this? The part about this game that gets me the most upset about it? I still enjoyed playing it. If any of the things I just described were to be in any recent game, I would say that game is bad for being too restrictive, having a boring plot, and generally nothing to do. But not Shenmue. Despite all of the bad in the game, I still enjoyed playing it in all of its dumb glory.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Shenmue is fun, in a not actually fun kind of way, and you should play it, no matter how contradictory that is.