Game Debate #130: Shenmue

[Reed Rothchild | 9,520]

[CMR | 519]

There has never been a game I have less interest in playing.

[cj_robot | 540]

I had to laugh at myself back in the day. There I was in 2001 with my Sega Dreamcast and the newest hyped-up AAA game, and all I'm doing with it is playing Hang-On and Space Harrier.

I never did get anywhere in the actual game

[Tanooki | 4,932]

I bought it, put a few hours on it, made me angry that retailers just a few years earlier decided you can't return product because someone figured out you could scapegoat chinese copiers and then later cd burners.

I get it is an art piece, and for that alone it gets some points.  But damn is that game both clunky and boring, not the least also worth mentioning, fairly confusing.  I remember quite a few on and offline guides for it in the late 90s because it was a big fat artsy WTF moment where all the fanboys wanted to basically fellate Yu Suzuki and his masterpiece.  Sure, I guess maybe the story and visuals were, then  you know...write a comic, do a movie, make some anime... but as a game...no, it's just not good.

Shenmue and it's fanboys are on the same pillar perhaps as Earthbound.  The parallels are there.  God tier droning on how great it is, infallible, and other people just don't get it and are stupid.  Then the whining about a lost 'prequel' (Saturn game to the NES tiltes), and more bitching about something that took far too many start, stops, fails, and eventual sketcho release (Shenmue 3 to Earthbound 3) and around that a long of fanboy works, service, hacks, you name it.

Creepy, never realized how obnoxious both of them parallel that much into the rabbit hole of fanboy insanity over a mediocre as fuck game.

[TDIRunner | 2,733]

Never played it expect for 3 or 4 minutes to test out a copy I have.  I feel like I might have enjoyed something like this when it first came out and nothing else was like it.  I have a feeling that I will have a difficult time getting into it if I tired to play today.

[fcgamer | 4,723]

Always wanted to play this one, even back in the day.

[PekoponTAS | 171]

I'm not going to sugarcoat it, this game always looked incredibly dumb to me, and I have no interest in it. It's just another one of those games on the latter two Sega consoles that fans hype up with no real basis for doing so.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

I've heard of it, but it doesn't seem like I'd even be interested in playing it.

[RH | 4,903]

12 hours ago, CMR said:

There has never been hyped a game I have less interest in playing.

Fixed that for you.  Maybe it’s a great game but there’s something about this game when I see clips and people talking about where I just don’t see the appeal.

 

[Kguillemette | 1,544]

I've never played it, but it has a reputation for being one of the first true good open world RPGs ever. I'm interested in trying it for historical sake if nothing else 

[glazball | 168]

I played this game at release (and still have my original copy) and really loved it... at first.  It was a mind-blowing experience, but it staled quickly and I never quite finished it.

At the end of the story line you need to get a job to earn money for a plane ticket, iirc.  So you start moving boxes and at that point I thought "why am I playing a game about having a job??"  I do have fond memories of the majority of the game and it can't be overstated how amazing the interactive, open world concept was at the time.  It was a first step (one of many) for the gaming industry as a whole, but I don't have much desire to go back and replay or finish it.  7/10 seems right to me.

[mbd39 | 2,020]

It might be innovative and a technical feat for the time, but I've never been that interested in playing it.

 

[DefaultGen | 5,401]

Holy moly, arcade LEGEND and creator of some of the most EXCITING racing games in history YU SUZUKI made the biggest Dreamcast game ever and had an unlimited budget!?!?

 

...

Edited December 4, 2022 by DefaultGen

[MagusSmurf | 577]

1 hour ago, DefaultGen said:

Holy moly, arcade LEGEND and creator of some of the most EXCITING racing games in history YU SUZUKI made the biggest Dreamcast game ever and had an unlimited budget!?!?

 

...

look man car and motorcycle racing was old news at the turn of the century

forklift racing was the hot new thing all the cool kids were doing

Spoiler

when they weren't trying to arrange hook-ups with sailors anyways

[twiztor | 850]

honestly, i've heard OF this game, but know absolutely nothing about it. i honestly don't see a scenario that has me playing this game ever. 

[Reed Rothchild | 9,520]

Bump.  I knew this one would have a low response, which is why I kinda threw it to the wolves on a shorter week.

[phart010 | 1,707]

On 12/3/2022 at 7:42 PM, DefaultGen said:

Holy moly, arcade LEGEND and creator of some of the most EXCITING racing games in history YU SUZUKI made the biggest Dreamcast game ever and had an unlimited budget!?!?

Yea and this game of his ultimately led to Sega’s demise. I don’t know how factually  true it is, but back in the day the story people told was that Yu Suzuki always dreamed of making Shenmue. When he finally started working on it, they threw all business sense out the window due to his status in the company and allowed him to make the game with no financial constraints.
 

Since he was treating this game as his dream project (and not managing it like a typical project in the professional world) the scope of the game kept expanding, budget kept expanding, and development kept getting delayed. Initially planned as a Saturn game, it got pushed off to Dreamcast. The game weighed Sega down as it tied up developer resources. Ultimately when the game was nearing completion, it ended up being the single most expensive game ever created and simultaneously the biggest commercial failure ever.
 

Sega was pissed and this game really hurt the company. They tried cutting financial support for the game. Yu Suzuki was pressured to reduce the original number of episodes (I think 5) down to 3. Shenmue 2 basically flopped even harder than the first game and Sega abandoned the series. This game made a good case study as to why developers should allocate a budget for games and also adhere to the “sunk cost fallacy.”

The story reminds me of the Homer Simpson car

[Tanooki | 4,932]

And just to throw added gas on the fire, though it was already mentioned at least once already, look at the game time spent on this by players ok?

What gets the typical praise and comments?
- Visuals and audio
- Story
- Emulated(?) Yu Suzuki gem quality arcade games

That's it.  Everything else gets put through the wringer and rightly pounced on for not being good.  For all the love you see, commonly if gameplay comes up everyone runs to how much they utterly enjoyed finally getting out on the town so they could get to the arcade machines and play 80s classics.  That's what comes up on positive gameplay, not the actualy game itself, the games IN the game.  That speaks volumes and is pathetic.

[The Count | 526]

It's really not bad for what it is. I think people want it to be something else, but it's its own game. It had a lot of unique aspects and was really different at the time. Unfortunately, it is clunky and slow which doesn't help it hold up very well today, in my opinion. 6/10.

[phart010 | 1,707]

2 hours ago, Tanooki said:

And just to throw added gas on the fire, though it was already mentioned at least once already, look at the game time spent on this by players ok?

What gets the typical praise and comments?
- Visuals and audio
- Story
- Emulated(?) Yu Suzuki gem quality arcade games

That's it.  Everything else gets put through the wringer and rightly pounced on for not being good.  For all the love you see, commonly if gameplay comes up everyone runs to how much they utterly enjoyed finally getting out on the town so they could get to the arcade machines and play 80s classics.  That's what comes up on positive gameplay, not the actualy game itself, the games IN the game.  That speaks volumes and is pathetic.

 

[Tanooki | 4,932]

Yup, that's Shenmue in a nutshell.