Shenmue

The year was 1999, and as my monthly subscription to Official Dreamcast magazine fell through the letterbox I remember ripping open the packaging and frantically turning to the review section. "What if they think its rubbish?" my mind raced as I flicked the pages. "What if it didn't match the hype?". For over a year The Official Dreamcast Magazine has talked about this Shenmue masterpiece that was going to be released, the most expensive game ever made, the game that would push the Dreamcast to the limit. I'd seen the trailer, the screenshots and everything, but this was the first time I'd seen a review of the whole game. I liked this magazine, they didn't hand out 10/10 scores easily, only one game had gotten it before this point. Screenshots of Shenmue filled the view pages as  i turned to the end. 10/10 A Masterpiece.

Come Christmas morning  i raced down and collected the present I had been bugging my parents for for the last month, they could say the word Shenmue as easily as "Good Morning" by this point and after I booted it up post Christmas meal I was instantly drawn into the world. Amusingly the magazine had said it took them a while to get into the game, feeling it boring and dull to start with until they got into the world, but I had no such issues, immediately hooked and loving every moment.

I still regard it as my favourite game ever, (only perhaps surpassed by its sequel) the atmosphere that game was able to create always had me on the edge of my seat, it was something you can never really fully explain to someone who has never played it. "You can walk around and collect these capsule toys, and you have to do some work to get some money and you ask people stuff" is hardly the greatest sales pitch, but the feeling that you are in the world is something so few games achieve.

The story itself is the classic revenge tail, you are Ryo Hazuki an 18 year old teenager in 1986 who has just watched his Sensi father be murdered in front of his eye by a mysterious master of a deadly martial art as he demanded a mysterious artifact, From then on you try and track down the killers and unravel the mystery of why your father met his end. However the beauty of the game is that although everything you do is geared towards this main plot, the next objectives always make you feel you are so close but pad this out organically. You get closer but the main objective stays the same as you navigate your way through the underworld through talking, fighting and QTEs, bit by bit finding those responsible and looking for answers. The simplicity of the overall story while you build up a narrative and relationship with the characters around you is masterful and by the end of Shenmue 2 you actually feel like you are only getting started despite the hours you have spent in the world.

Bring on then the remasters, adapted to modern formats by D3T.  The first thing to say is it is a joy to open up the menu and start a new game and relive that feeling again on a console. And the game does hold up, the graphics look a little dated, especially the 2nd and 3rd characters, the world doesn't feel quite as big as it did at the time following new open world games and the dialog (English especially) doesn't match newer professional studio work. But these feel understandable and are not immersion breaking, the game play the interactions and the world still feel real, characters have their own daily schedules and routes. Different people can help you with the same task and send you down minor alternate routes, Ryo still has a semi normal routine in terms of bed and waking up, his martial arts moves need to be practised to ensure they stay sharp and progress. The story is still excellent and so easy to just want to carry on playing a little bit more each time.

However the remasters themselves have a whole list of issues not present in the original game, this is a sad state of the industry not limited to these ports in particular of "release now, patch later". Cut scenes occasionally get stuck behind an object meaning the characters are off screen, or the camera is pointing to the wrong layer of the game meaning you just get a blank screen. The audio in parts sounds worse than it did in 1999 running on Dreamcast hardware and many users (although i haven't had this one yet) are reporting crashes at various points in the game. These aren't bugs or glitches that wouldn't be noticed during development and are obviously a case of wanting to meet a release date no matter what. Patches are being worked on for both games and most likely in a month all these issues will be fully sorted but its a shame that they weren't fixed prior to the disks being printed.