I can’t even remember when I began to seriously become interested in playing Shenmue, a divisive and unusual game from Sega. It must have been close to a decade ago, though. I learned that it was a game that combined martial arts, narrative, roleplaying elements, a serious but not too gritty tone, and a real world setting – a perfect premise for my tastes.
The problem, as it so often is with videogames, is that it wasn’t exactly convenient to obtain and play. It had only ever been released on the Dreamcast, an old console from an old (but wonderful) era for the medium. I had yet to understand that nothing was a given, so I decided to wait for the game to come to a modern console. While the years passed, I watched the fans and their communities, and was struck by the passion they had for the series – it was intensely special to them. Years after the rest of the gaming community had given up on Shenmue, these fans continued to hope for and speculate about an announcement of a new game in the series. Their wish came true in 2015, with the creator of the series Yu Suzuki announcing a Kickstarter for the third entry. Meanwhile, my own wish was fulfilled in 2018 – remasters of the original games, released for modern systems.
I played the first game for a short while – maybe a couple of hours – and was startled at how my interest plummeted. The movement was horribly awkward, with the protagonist Ryo moving like a badly made automaton, and I kept getting completely lost. Everything just felt dry and cumbersome. After another try or two, I simply stopped playing the game. I didn’t start it up for months; my excitement to play it had evaporated. What inspired me to go back to it, then? I think it may have been my recollection of Martin Robinson’s intriguing article that mentioned the way the game approached loss, along with Dia Lacina’s eloquent review of Shenmue 3. Fine, I decided one dull day, after I’d only been using the console for Lost Odyssey. I’d give it another try.
I managed to get through the opening stages this time, with the help of Ryo’s diary to refresh my memory. I spent more time talking to the other characters, and forced myself to endure the frustration of not knowing where I was going – the discovery of a few maps on certain streets helped. I had to track down a man at a specific bar, but I had no clue where the bar was, and it didn’t seem to be labelled on the formerly helpful maps either, so I ran around the busy Dobuita Street, stopping to ask a woman who was trying to cajole customers into her own bar. No one I asked could give me exact directions, and night arrived. It got later and later, until it was close to the time where Ryo would head home regardless of my input.