I open this thread to speak about one of the greatest game of all time, Shenmue.

A game that didn' t gain success because of many factors.
Shenmue is a game where you can look whereever you want, you can look people have their life, go to work, come back from work, go to a bar and return home at night, maybe in the rain or snow.

A game full of atmosphere, given by the tranquility of Yokosuka, by the winter, by the greatest music of all time (composed also by Yuzo Koshiro ).

And Shenmue II with the caotic Hong Kong, where you have to earn money to continue your search for the guilty of the murder of Iwao hazuki, father of Ryo Hazuki.

A game where Ryo Hazuki, the hero, is not a super human with super powers, fireballs etc. but it' s a normal young man like us.

The first game that had bring us real freedom (freedom not only to go around without do anything, but freedom to dream).

What do you think about this game?

I give Shenmue a score of 1


OUT OF 3!! :)

I agree, Shenmue 1 and 2 are great games. People with short attention spans might get bored, but Shenmue is a game I played through again immediately after beatin it, and Shenmue 2 I played through two more times after beating it. It' s that good.

Shenmue is a role playing game in the strictest sense of the word. It makes " RPGs" like Suikoden III and Final Fantasy look like board games. You literally play the role of Ryo. I' m surprised you don' t have to make him take a dump every day. With games like Final Fantasy, you just choose " buy" and " equip" from menus, as well as " fight" and " magic" . You also control where they run around to. Shenmue is WAAAY more involved, thus it earns the label of an " RPG" much more than the other mentioned games. But I don' t blame Sega for not labeling Shenmue as an RPG, especially since they wouldn' t want people to confuse it with games like Final Fantasy which are a dime a dozen.

The only thing that could really be improved in Shenmue is the Engrish voice acting. Nearly every character in the game pronounces Ryo' s name differently. Some characters seem to think it' s spelled with a " D" . But the UK import for the Dreamcast has Japanese voice and Engrish subtitles, and it works tremendously well.

A score of 1 out of 3 tranlates to 33 out of 100, or 33%. That is horribly low. I' d rate it WAY higher than that.

I Suck at math, lol.. When I said 1 out of 3 I intended it to mean something like 8/10.. :)

Shenmue 2 was significantly better and deserves a 9.3 out of 10.. Disc 3 alone deserves a 9.6 out of 10.
Disc 4 kinda brings the overall score down after the tremendous high experienced after Disc 3.

I loved disc 4. It definitely took on a different feel, but I don' t think it brought it down. It was a whole new chapter.

Shenmue was a very innovative game upon its initial release, and Shenmue 2 continued that trend.

But too much Shenmue is indeed a bad thing...the concept and gameplay kept things exciting, but the english dialogue exchange su**ed so bad that anyone born to speak the language should be insulted. If my kids kept a conversation like that, I would send them off to a school that specializes in English manner-isms as a major.

Shenmue I & II are wonderfully enjoyable games in themselves, but they bore those of us expecting a top-notch game from Japan..top notch all the way across the board, that is.

Any other game that gets 2 out of 3 things right usually gets a lesser score...Shenmue I & II is no exception.

I remember after completing the game how I wished Disc 4 of Shenmue 2 had been made into Disc 1 of Shenmue 3 if there ever was one.

I liked the content of disc 4, I just felt it would have served quite nicely as a prelude in Shenmue 3 - keeping the absolutely delicious cliffhanger ending of Shenmue 2' s 3rd disc as the final moments of Shenmue 2! :D

Shenmue 2 got it right DarOosh, cuz it was in Japanese with English subtitles. The experience was much better as a result.

Wow, you guys have really made me want to play this game. I bought a dreamcast the day it came out, and bought about 10 games within a couple weeks only to sell it afterwards

I wish I still had it, b/c there are so many games i missed out on from the system. This is one of them that I still desperately want to play

I think I have the longest attention span of all you twitch gamers, and I found Shenmue to be dreadfully boring.

I felt the same way about Shenmue II...I just couldn' t get into it, and I REALLY tried to like them both. It wanted to be both an action game and an RPG, but there wasn' t nearly enough action for it qualify for the action genre, and not even half the depth required to call it an RPG.

I know a lot of people who love the series, though.

It was a nice change of pace from other games. You didn' t have to run around doing all these crazy things to save the world; you actually had to just live in it for a while. I loved that about the game and spent ages just wondering around, talking to people, following people, knocking on people' s doors to see what they say. I really got immersed into this world and enjoyed myself a great deal. Shenmue II didn' t manage to capture me in the same way somehow but I still enjoyed it.

Fathoms, please explain how Final Fantasy 7 has more depth. Hell in Shenmue you can drink your favorite fake-brand of cola just for fun!

Fathoms, please explain how Final Fantasy 7 has more depth. Hell in Shenmue you can drink your favorite fake-brand of cola just for fun!

...this is so inane, I don' t even know where to begin. Try not to confuse open-endedness for depth. Anything in Shenmue is mostly cosmetic and has zero impact on the gameplay itself, anyway.

But but when Ryo drinks sodas it gives him gas and causes him to run slower. Surely that' s an effect on gameplay especially when you' re fighting against a boss character and getting your butt whipped because Ryo' s too busy burping all over the place to put up much of a fight!

Just the fact that you can do inane and useless things in the game gives it depth in my opinion (which carries more weight than anyone' s, obviously). It' s like you almost ARE Ryo. In typical RPG' s, you' re not really playing the " role" of the hero any more than you are playing the role of Arthur from Ghouls N Ghosts... OK not MUCH more than Arthur. In Shenmue you have to be careful how many times you wipe your ass or you will run out of toilet paer... and if you run out of toilet paper you' re screwed and must find something else to wipe with.... either that or you just " don' t go" and then Ryo (pronounced " Dee-Yo" by some morons in the game) will occasionally fall to constipation cramps and won' t be able to complete the 40 man battle!

I loved the first Shenmue but I just could never get interesed in the second. I' ve been trying ever since I bought it to finish the game but I still haven' t made it to the halfway point. This may sound crazy but I just hate how I have to earn money in Shenmue 2. I didn' t mind the whole forklift thing from the first because...well I don' t know why but I found it oddly enjoyable. I think maybe the reason I hate lifting crates and playing those damn chance games is the people I have to work with.

Joe: Sorry, all that is still cosmetic. It has no effect on how you play the game, because none of it is necessary to the advancement of the plot. Depth in gameplay is a million times more important, and the materia system and strategy found in FF VII FAR outstrips any gameplay mechanism found in Shenmue. In all fairness, though, Shenmue is a very, very different game. It' s not really right to compare the two.

I agree. Why compare a good game to a dreadfully boring game? I almost fell asleep during disc one of Final Fantasy 7. It wasn' t hard, it was just... completely uninteresting and uninspired. For some reason, Shenmue manages to keep my interest.

Also, in response to the first post: Yuzo Koshiro did very little of the music in Shenmue. Some of the music that he did was not in the game, so they used what was left over from him for a couple spots in Shenmue 2.

Yuzo Koshiro has made many music also in Shenmue 1.

He appears also in the credits screen.

Yes, he appears in the credits screen. But overall I think his contribution to Shenmue 1 and 2 combined was less than 5 songs. And he didn' t do any of the overtures.