Review after 100%: This may not be the best port of this classic game. But Shenmue 1&2 is still enjoy and a must play for those who loved story focus game with some cringe voice acting (which is not a bad thing for me).

It's a good port of a terrible game.

This is a review of the first Shenmue, which I played for the first time in 2024. I haven't played Shenmue II.

At the time of its release in 1999, Shenmue was the most expensive video game ever made. It needed to be the killer app for the Dreamcast, but it was a commercial failure, selling less than half of what Sonic Adventure did.

It's an interesting game with interesting ideas, but I see it as a lesson in game mechanics that don't work and aren't fun.

All of your time in Shenmue is spent in a little town where businesses open and close at specific times and you have to be home in time for bed. There are so many instances in the main quest where you're forced to kill time. Maybe you need to wait 18 hours for a business to open, or a character tells you to meet them somewhere in a day, and then you just have to idle around until then. This would be an interesting idea if the world was packed full of stuff to do, but it isn't. There's an arcade with some boring games that cost in-game money, a casino with slots, and a ton of boring conversations to be had, and that's it. Most of the game is spent waiting for the next thing to happen, trying desperately not to let the game bore you.

The voice acting is terrible, especially given the budget. The main character over-enunciates everything, for starters. Most conversations have a stop-and-go quality, like the game is triggering three separate conversations in parallel when you initiate a conversation with a person who has three things to say. Sometimes the result is baffling. There's also a black character named Tom that's voiced by a white American putting on a fake Jamaican accent. It's as bad as it sounds.

There's an entire chapter of the game, maybe a third of the story, that just feels like actual work. If you know you know. This was the low point of the game. It was an exercise in willpower to push through it.

Parts of Shenmue actually have a lot of charm. In theory, I like the understated story, of a kid working his way up from nothing, being studious and diligent every day, trying to accomplish a goal and avenge his father. But it just doesn't work in practice, not at all.

There's a combat system that's janky even by 1999 standards, and in the end, you just beat up everyone who opposes you, just like in any other game. The climax of the game doesn't lean on the game's unique mechanics at all. There's a final boss fight, and it's over. It doesn't use its unique systems and structure to create a satisfying arc. The main quest consists of "talk to person A who tells you to talk to person B" quests, the boring job, and combat. It could have been so much more.

I remember seeing an interview with Gabe Newell where someone on the Half-Life team at Valve was pushing back on a decision because it wasn't "realistic" and Gabe was like, "Yeah, it shouldn't be realistic. It should be fun." Playing Shenmue teaches you that lesson the hard way. Not that it's anything close to realistic, but that's clearly what it's striving for, and it clearly isn't fun.

Originally played on dreamcast back in the day, I remember this game being amazing, but I didn't find it great on PC. Felt a bit clunky, could be my controller though. My view is, in simple terms, if never played before, definitely worth playing, it made the dreamcast worth the purchase.

Looking for a nostalgia play through, I dunno, wasn't for me, but I think that is personal to me as oppose to anyone else playing.

But like I say, if you missed these as you didn't have a dreamcast (can't imagine why haha) it was the best game for that console. If I were to say the best thing about this game, the trivial aspects, time keeping, working mundane jobs, somehow, they actually worked in this game unlike other games where it feels like an out of place mini-game. The story, the fighting, the building of characters, all amazing.