Shenmue 1&2 HD (PC/PS4/Xbox One)

[killthenet]

Shenmue II might fare better in the audio department because the source audio might have been a higher bitrate, but unfortunately they can't really improve the audio quality without re-recording all of the dialogue which would obviously be an enormous undertaking. I can imagine it will be jarring at first but I'll get used to it eventually, I ordered from Argos and in my experience with them they generally don't deliver before release so i'll probably be waiting until Tuesday to play it. Not bad though as it gives me a chance to play through Minit and finish reading the book I'm reading so I can completely devote myself to Shenmue once it arrives.

[Hero-of-Time]

Man, the voice acting for Tom is hilarious. Is he supposed to be American, Jamaican or Indian?  

I've one again fell down the rabbit hole of spending Ryo's money on capsule toys.

[Hero-of-Time]

I forgot just how much waiting around there is in the game. Like, you do one thing that needed to be done at night but you can't do the next step until a shop opens in the morning. You go home, rest, get up in the morning and head to said shop and now you have to wait until evening for the next scene to trigger.

I'm just sat grinding on Chrono Trigger until the event I need to happen actually starts.  

[Dcubed]

2 hours ago, Hero-of-Time said:

I forgot just how much waiting around there is in the game. Like, you do one thing that needed to be done at night but you can't do the next step until a shop opens in the morning. You go home, rest, get up in the morning and head to said shop and now you have to wait until evening for the next scene to trigger.

I'm just sat grinding on Chrono Trigger until the event I need to happen actually starts.  

I actually really love that aspect of the game myself; taps into the same sense of immersion that Majora's Mask did so well (even on the 3DS version I never did skip through time the cheaty way!).  You find ways of filling the time by doing all the little side activities, like playing in the arcade, or feeding the cat, or getting the capsule toys etc; it's great! Really encourages you to stop and smell the roses!

[Hero-of-Time]

5 minutes ago, Dcubed said:

I actually really love that aspect of the game myself; taps into the same sense of immersion that Majora's Mask did so well (even on the 3DS version I never did skip through time the cheaty way!).  You find ways of filling the time by doing all the little side activities, like playing in the arcade, or feeding the cat, or getting the capsule toys etc; it's great! Really encourages you to stop and smell the roses!

Problem is, unlike Majoras Mask, there really isn't a lot to do. You're just kinda left wandering around waiting for the time to go by.

Yeah, @Julius Caesar ive started to get that cutscene issue you were speaking about. Every other cutscene that happens now I'm just met with a random bit of scenery or a black screen. Very shoddy.

[Julius]

I’ve really enjoyed my time with the game so far, and I think I’m about to move on from Dobuita. I’ve just placed an important phone call. 

Admittedly, the controls, specifically to traverse the world, are quite archaic, and the voice acting (as well as the audio quality of it, as HoT mentioned earlier) leaves much to be desired. I’m finding that QTEs in particular give too short a time to react — literally a blink and you’ll miss it sort of situation, which can be a bit annoying. I also changed the on-screen presentation to “Shenmue Mode”, which is subtitle-free unless I choose to skip dialogue, and it seems far more enjoyable than the default mode so far. I think the font was giving me a headache...

But, for a 3D game on this scale that is nearly twenty years old, it still does so much right. The attention to detail in this game is something that is still brushed aside in many modern games. I recall reading that Suzuki and his team even went back and looked at weather reports for the various locations presented in the game to give players a true sense for what it would have been like to be there on a specific day. The music is, as I expected, superb, and the various composers of the game’s score did a splendid job of marrying music to whatever Ryo was going through at a given time. I’m loving going around and talking to everyone, playing arcade games (quick question: are they supposed to be silent?), managing to quadruple the darts high score, and training inbetween appointments. I’m finding it difficult to fund Ryo’s gacha addiction with all of these other fun things to do, though...  

@Hero-of-Time, I had it happen to me for two cutscenes in a row yesterday when I initially started playing the game, and it seems that just closing the application and restarting it did the trick. 

Edited August 19, 2018 by Julius Caesar

[martinist]

Been playing this since yesterday, kind of getting obsessed with completing the capsule toy collections, spending most of my money on them.

So far it's pretty good. Getting tired of waiting around for shops to open and things to happen though. Would have been nice if they implamented the time skipping mechanic in Shenmue 1 like they had in Shenmue 2. Would make things go a lot faster.

[Hero-of-Time]

The forklift trophy is such garbage. You have to race perfectly otherwise you may as well quit. One hit and it's back to the dashboard I go.

Edited August 19, 2018 by Hero-of-Time

[martinist]

So I'm looking for the Phoenix mirror and my cutscenes are screwing up. The cutscene where you talk to Fuku next to the tree after talking to Ine about the mirror. The camera just showed an image of what looked like floor boards. The cutscene immediatly after that just gave me a shot of a sky box and the cutscene in the antiques shop where you get the hand guard for the sword just showed a black screen.

The subtitles were still going and the voices where clear, but the camera didn't want to co-oporate for some reason. Let me know if it happens to you too if you can. Atleast then I know it can be patched out.

Edited August 19, 2018 by martinist

[Julius]

22 minutes ago, martinist said:

So I'm looking for the Phoenix mirror and my cutscenes are screwing up. The cutscene where you talk to Fuku next to the tree after talking to Ine about the mirror. The camera just showed an image of what looked like floor boards. The cutscene immediatly after that just gave me a shot of a sky box and the cutscene in the antiques shop where you get the hand guard for the sword just showed a black screen.

The subtitles were still going and the voices where clear, but the camera didn't want to co-oporate for some reason. Let me know if it happens to you too if you can. Atleast then I know it can be patched out.

Yeah, I mentioned this yesterday. I encountered it literally twenty minutes into the game, and so saved and put it down. @Hero-of-Time didn’t have any troubles with it until later on, so I figured it might be fine, so I went back in after closing it and it was fine for the rest of the day. However, I just encountered it again after getting the Phoenix Mirror, so I’m going to save and boot it up again. It’s a bit of a pain just because it’s so sporadic, and clearly isn’t tarnishing only one particular cutscene.

It’s a real shame.

[Hero-of-Time]

Shenmue complete and platinum obtained.

The game just doesn't hold up at all, IMO. The amount of standing around and waiting that needs to be done is insane and the final third of the game is horrendous.

Spoiler

Once you get your job the game gets caught in a very boring loop of you waking up, racing the forklift, using the forklift to carry boxes, lunchtime hits, you stand around for 2 in game hours, you continue your work, get into a single fight, finish your shift and then go home. You do this for 5 days in a row. It's nuts.

The 70 man brawl is pretty rough as well. For some reason I remember it being like a school yard fight, where everyone is surrounding the fighters. Nope. It's just two fighters who come at you from around a corner. You have to knock 70 of these guys out and they only arrive two at a time and get decked after a couple of hits. Even in this fight you are left standing and waiting. Granted, there are two bosses added into the mix but it's really not enough.

Looking at the game, nothing really happens in it. It's pretty bland and pretty boring. Yeah, this was supposed to be the first of many chapters of an epic saga but  it could have been a little more exciting. 

Also, I remember the game being a large open world but playing it now it's actually quite small, with very little to do. 

The start of the game has always been weird to me. You don't really get an introduction to the characters and before you know it Ryo has lost his dad. It's a bit hard to care about what happens right at the start of the game because the player hasn't had the time to build up a relationship with anyone on screen.

I've never been that huge on Shenmue ( never really played the sequel ) and playing though it again solidified why I don't hold it in that high regard. I can appreciate what it was trying to do but I think the execution is poor, at least from a fun gameplay perspective.

Hopefully Shenmue 2 will be more to my liking but if it's more of the same then I may struggle. Probably best to take a little break before starting it.

[Ashley]

I think its important to remember it in context as it was trying something (pretty) new/different and it was the fore-bearer for some things which became more standard (QTEs) and some things that didn't (getting players to wait around).

Just start Shenmue II now.  Knowing you it'll be done before the evening is out  

[Hero-of-Time]

What's with these games wanting players to move crates? I'm only a couple of hours into the second game and already I'm having to move crates again but this time with my bare hands!  

The guy helping me is clearly drunk. Dude keeps telling me to go left and right when all we need to do is go straight ahead.  

[Ashley]

You weren't lying when you said "little" break.

[Hero-of-Time]

6 minutes ago, Ashley said:

You weren't lying when you said "little" break.

Hey, I stopped for at least 3 hours.  That's a hefty amount of gaming time lost right there.  

That's all for today though. Time for bed as I gotta be up for work in the morning.  

[Julius]

Just broke the game a little. Completed the quota with hours to spare at the hour, so I thought I’d take the forklift for a spin around the Harbour, and tried to exit the harbour — which, of course, you can’t do. But Ryo decided to glide through walls and drive over the road, and is now in an ocean of black...

It’s funny, but I’ve lost half an hour and a half of progress thanks to this 

Edited August 20, 2018 by Julius Caesar

[Will]

I don't think I've touched these games since they originally came out and I'm really enjoying the updates. The sound is ridiculously bad, it can't have been like that in the originals can it? I'm playing the Asian version of the game on a Japanese PS4 and there is a really weird bug whereby the buttons get swapped around during some of the QTEs so you have to press X instead of circle and vice-versa. I guess it's set up based on the PS4 system settings but the game is coded to show a particular button only, very weird.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to playing through both of these. Can't quite believe they finally made these.

[Hero-of-Time]

I'm still slowly making my way through the second game. No word of a lie, I have fell asleep every time I have played it. It's so boring.  I had a quick look at where about I am in the game and it appears i'm on what would have been the 3rd disc. I'm still hoping to get it finished before Yakuza Kiwami 2 arrives and then I can crack straight on with that.

[Hero-of-Time]

 

I played an awful section earlier that had me going in and out of elevators for what seemed like an eternity. You would go up one, get out, use the one next to it, then go back down and use another one....it just kept going. To top things off, once that was done I then had to play through a time consuming section that has you following a person who goes all over the place and walks very slowly. Ren summed up my feelings perfectly.

Shenmue 2 has a lot to answer for if this was the game that started the craze of having missions where you have to stealthy follow someone around an area for a large portion of time.

 

 

[Hero-of-Time]

And that's Shenmue 2 done and dusted.

Its been a long time since I have hated playing a game so much, never mind two in a row. Both are stupidly boring and have serious issues with padding and blocking off progress.

The Yellow building in the second game was an absolute joke. Having to make your way through 17 floors where elevators didn't work and stairs were constantly blocked off was infuriating. You also had paths being blocked off later on in the game, which meant you had to go all the way back and then walk aimlessly on crossroads in the hope that you would find your way to your destination. It's like the developers wanted to make a longer game but didn't have any good ideas to actually stretch it out.

I realise that these games are old but that's no excuse for shoddy and boring game design. I would say that the games haven't aged well but thinking about it, the core gameplay has remained unchanged which means it was really never fun to play even back on the Dreamcast.

A friend of mine has a very strong hate towards these games and has done for years. It's taken me a while but I'm starting to see exactly why he's felt like that all of this time.

I see Jim Sterling has released a quick video that is pretty much exactly what I want ranting about the other day while I was playing the first game.

 

Edited August 24, 2018 by Hero-of-Time

[drahkon]

Something for me to avoid then. Never played these games and never will  

[Ashley]

15 hours ago, Hero-of-Time said:

And that's Shenmue 2 done and dusted.

Its been a long time since I have hated playing a game so much, never mind two in a row. Both are stupidly boring and have serious issues with padding and blocking off progress.

The Yellow building in the second game was an absolute joke. Having to make your way through 17 floors where elevators didn't work and stairs were constantly blocked off was infuriating. You also had paths being blocked off later on in the game, which meant you had to go all the way back and then walk aimlessly on crossroads in the hope that you would find your way to your destination. It's like the developers wanted to make a longer game but didn't have any good ideas to actually stretch it out.

I realise that these games are old but that's no excuse for shoddy and boring game design. I would say that the games haven't aged well but thinking about it, the core gameplay has remained unchanged which means it was really never fun to play even back on the Dreamcast.

A friend of mine has a very strong hate towards these games and has done for years. It's taken me a while but I'm starting to see exactly why he's felt like that all of this time.

I see Jim Sterling has released a quick video that is pretty much exactly what I want ranting about the other day while I was playing the first game.

I wonder if part of the problem is context.  When Shenmue was released it was pretty unique (or 'revolutionary' if you want) in several ways, from the story to some of the gameplay elements that made it stand out and caused it to be so beloved.  It was also a different time, both in terms of the gaming landscape (less games to distract your attention from so you'd be happy to spend more time on a leisurely game) and age (at least for us, we would have been younger and thus likely had more free time).  I wonder (as I have no answer) if the game design/gameplay simply wasn't boring then, much in the same way a film from the 40s wasn't contemporaneously considered languid but may be now.

I've not played the re-releases.  I am kind of tempted because the games had a big impact on my 'gaming history' as it was probably the strongest and deepest story I had witnessed until that point.  Sega has of course gone on to refine a lot of what they did with these games in things like the Yakuza series, meaning these 20-year old games are going to feel more weathered so maybe the games aren't ones to revist, particularly if you have no prior experience with the franchise, but ones worth celebrating for what they begat.

[Goafer]

45 minutes ago, Ashley said:

I wonder if part of the problem is context.  When Shenmue was released it was pretty unique (or 'revolutionary' if you want) in several ways, from the story to some of the gameplay elements that made it stand out and caused it to be so beloved.  It was also a different time, both in terms of the gaming landscape (less games to distract your attention from so you'd be happy to spend more time on a leisurely game) and age (at least for us, we would have been younger and thus likely had more free time).  I wonder (as I have no answer) if the game design/gameplay simply wasn't boring then, much in the same way a film from the 40s wasn't contemporaneously considered languid but may be now.

I've not played the re-releases.  I am kind of tempted because the games had a big impact on my 'gaming history' as it was probably the strongest and deepest story I had witnessed until that point.  Sega has of course gone on to refine a lot of what they did with these games in things like the Yakuza series, meaning these 20-year old games are going to feel more weathered so maybe the games aren't ones to revist, particularly if you have no prior experience with the franchise, but ones worth celebrating for what they begat.

You also have to bear in mind that when Shenmue came out, most RPGs looked like this:

FF8 - 1999

Fallout 2 - 1998

Skies of Arcadia - 2000 (one year after Shenmue)

Shenmue - 1999

 

Compared to what was around at the time, Shenmue was huge. Real world setting (including actual weather from the records of the time), a realistic story, full voice acting, a day and night cycle with time sensitive events, a living, breathing world where NPCs went about daily routines and loads of mini games/details to flesh out the locations. The location wasn't just where the story took place, it was part of the story.

It hasn't aged well, especially now that pretty much everything that made it unique has been done better, but for the time it was mind blowing. I do think that the long wait and the "will they/won't they" release of the 3rd game has hyped the series up a bit too much, but I still consider the original Shenmue a significant benchmark in gaming and one of the most immersive (if not the most immersive) experience for the time.

Even the things that modern gamers would find boring add to the immersion. No fast travel, no time skip, no minimap/pointer. You walk where you need to, you wait/find something to pass the time when you have to and you ask directions/follow signs/search. Just like in real life. 

[Hero-of-Time]

1 hour ago, Ashley said:

I wonder if part of the problem is context.  When Shenmue was released it was pretty unique (or 'revolutionary' if you want) in several ways, from the story to some of the gameplay elements that made it stand out and caused it to be so beloved.  It was also a different time, both in terms of the gaming landscape (less games to distract your attention from so you'd be happy to spend more time on a leisurely game) and age (at least for us, we would have been younger and thus likely had more free time).  I wonder (as I have no answer) if the game design/gameplay simply wasn't boring then, much in the same way a film from the 40s wasn't contemporaneously considered languid but may be now.

I've not played the re-releases.  I am kind of tempted because the games had a big impact on my 'gaming history' as it was probably the strongest and deepest story I had witnessed until that point.  Sega has of course gone on to refine a lot of what they did with these games in things like the Yakuza series, meaning these 20-year old games are going to feel more weathered so maybe the games aren't ones to revist, particularly if you have no prior experience with the franchise, but ones worth celebrating for what they begat.

I dunno, I mean back then I thought it was just an alright game and nothing really special ( hence why I never played the sequel) and, as I mentioned earlier, my mate hated it when it was originally released on the Dreamcast.

The amount of free time I had when I originally played it on the Dreamcast is pretty much the same amount of free time I have now. I was working then and I'm working now, so that hasn't had any bearing on my thoughts on the game.

I think it was originally released in a very specific time bubble. If it was released just a little bit later then I don't think it would have recieved the praise it did at the time. 

Im sure those who hold the game very close to their hearts are able to look past the design flaws but I couldn't. There was nothing really fun about it and it's been interesting reading comments from those who are also revisiting the games realizing the same thing, that Shenmue actually a really boring game back then but we simply didn't know any better. 

It's going to be interesting to see just what kind of damage this release has done for the future release of Shenmue 3. I imagine it may put a lot of people off picking it up if the gameplay is going to remain the same. Not to mention the bugs that these games have released with. There's a list of them over on Shenmue Dojo. For some reason it seems the game was rushed for the release. You even have Sega of Europe tweeting out asking early adopters of the game to report any bugs that they find. Great! I guess we'll do the quality inspection for you. This isn't an early access game, it's supposed to be a finished retail title.

[Fierce_LiNk]

I never played Shenmue back in the day, but I used to see footage or screenshots of it and it looked absolutely fantastic at the time. I was excited to play it because it looked like it could be a contender for one of the best games ever made. When I get around to playing it, I am going to go into it with my 1999 goggles on.  

Technology has, unfortunately, moved on very quickly. I say unfortunately, because maybe this game doesn't look so great anymore. But, times change. I'm interesting to see what similarities there are in Shenmue 1 and 2 compared with what's out there today.