| Product: |
Shenmue (DC) |
| Date: |
04/12/00 (122 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Beautifullt produced, compelling story
Disadvantages: Ending, fails to gel perfectly.
The first title of what Sega hopes to become an ongoing series, Shenmue is a hugely lavish, expensive and frankly beautiful gaming production. Claiming to break new ground in the synthesis of a ‘real world’ and hyped up more than any game in recent years, Shenmue proves to be both the biggest surprise and the biggest disappointment in recent gaming history.
The games begins with you, playing as Ryo Hazuki- high school student and heir to the Hazuki school of karate – having your day interrupted by the arrival of a powerful Chinese martial artist. Tossing his student Fuku-san aside with ease, the stranger approaches Ryo’s father, the infamous karate master Iwao, demanding to know the whereabouts of a legendary mirror known to be in Iwao’s hands. When Iwao refuses to tell him, he proceeds to manhandle Iwao is a way that Ryo previously thought to be impossible, and ultimately uses Ryo as a hostage to force Iwao to tell him. The stranger leaves, leaving Iwao near death. With his final breath, Iwao utters the name of his assailant - Lan Di. Ryo vows to avenge his fathers’ death, and sets out to find Lan Di, his only clue being that he arrived and left in a black car.
Shenmue has been touted by Sega as being a new genre – FREE ( that’s Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment). To be honest, that’s just a fancy way of saying it’s a very graphically rich RPG game. The game starts with you having a notepad containing your only clues to the death of your father. Plonked straight into the town of Yokosuka, Japan, circa December 1986, you have to run around the town in an attempt to gain clues that will help you progress.
The actual game is split into a number of gaming styles. By far the bulk of the game is what Sega have termed ‘Free Quest’ mode. Basically, this means you are given a large amount of freedom to walk around selected areas of Yokosuka. The main point in this is that it al
lows you to talk to the individuals who inhabit the areas. As you question various people on the subject of your fathers’ death, you will gradually reveal clues that will uncover what you need to do next and change your line of questioning to something new.
Free Quest mode plays very much like any other RPG. You walk around the area talking to people, examining objects and shopping. This play mode controls very much like a Resident Evil game to a certain level – the controls use the digital pad to rotate your character left and right, whilst up moves you forward and back will rotate you 180 degrees around. In addition to this, the analogue stick allows you to look in any direction, whilst the right trigger button zooms in and allows you to focus on objects. The other controls are your basic examine, run and inventory controls. Finally, you can look at your notebook at any time if you happen to forget any clues.
Sega’s big boast with Free Quest environments is that they were creating what was in fact a ‘real world’, something which they do to varying degrees of success. In visual terms, the world does indeed look very real. By this, I don’t just mean the quality of the (frankly superb) graphics, but the way in which buildings and their contents look exactly as you’d imagine. Go into an office block and you can see pens and pieces of paper lying around just as you’d expect, go outside a shop and you’ll see vending machines and toy-capsule devices. My main problem with this is that many of the items which you can interact with (like the toy capsule machines) feels very forced – rather than being their to create a real world it’s a case of someone thinking it would be cool if you could buy toys. Ultimately, I feel that this ruins some of the excellent work they did with crafting the world in which they exist.
At first glance, the actions of people who inhabit this world are noth
ing short of stunning – they walk around performing their everyday tasks, opening up shops, working and walking home. You could actually follow someone around the day and they would return home to exactly where they live. The big problem with this is that the illusion will crumble shortly after you start trying to interact with it. Characters fairly frequently repeat dialogue (not just if you talk to them repeatedly at the same point, but if you talk to them on successive days). In fact, at some points different characters will say the same things! Once you get over the fact that the game is in some respects on too far removed from other RPGs these problems will quickly disappear.
One interesting (if not new, just underused) aspect of the game is that the game world has a sense of real time. That is, as you play time in the game world will progress (admittedly at a rate faster than the real world). You have to be in bed by 2330, and you wake up at 8.30. Shops are only open between certain hours, and you often have to wait for certain times before an event will occur. Whilst neat, this can occasionally prove a little annoying as you find yourself having to waste a large number of hours (for example, you might need to meet someone at 2100 but you find out at 1300, or you may want to advance to the next day but can’t due to the fact that you can’t go to bed until after 2100). The game does provide some distractions to help you with this – the best being a Space Harrier coin-op – but sometimes you just want to save your money or can’t really be bothered. The fact that no-one in the streets will have anything new to say to you makes this even more of a problem, although I am certainly making this out to be a bigger issue than it really is.
Like most RPG’s, the world wandering is interspersed with cut-sequences which are used to advance the games plot. The direction of these sequences – not to mention the
quality of the music – is frankly superb throughout. What is perhaps more interesting is what this game calls QTE events. These are basically interactive cut scenes in the style of ‘classic’ coin-op Dragons Lair. That is, the screen flashes certain directional movements or button presses on screen, which you then have to quickly react to. Far from being the dreadful affairs many expected, the QTE events prove to be great fun and spice up what could have become dull, overblown cut scenes. The fact that these can have different conclusions depending on performance is an excellent additional bonus.
Other events in the game are fight scenes. On paper, these appear to resemble those from the Virtua Fighter series (indeed, Shenmue producer Yu Suzuki is famous for his work on that series) this proves not to be entirely the case. The controls appear to be the fairly basic Virtua Fighter affair – punch, kick and dodge buttons are provided. They also include an additional throw command as well as a run button. The direction pad will move you in the way you press – rather than jumping or ducking you move in or out of the screen. You also have ‘special moves’ activated by complex joy pad and button combinations (you also learn more from characters during the game). The problem is that it doesn’t really play like Virtua Fighters well considered combat – it feels more like a free for all game like Final Fight or Streets of Rage. The special moves are often relegated to use a few that you use, and even just hitting buttons will prove effective. This is really a side effect of Suzuki wishing to produce a game which is fun no matter what your gaming skill, and they are still good fun especially when you go up against up to 100(!) opponents, but those like myself you expected something deeper will be disappointed.
Also included in the game are a number of mini-games. These are very hit-and-miss in quality. The be
st of these are tremendous fun (you could make a full game out of some of them, not to mention Space Harrier), but some are a little iffy. Thankfully none are truly dreadful, and they don’t really last too long.
Presentation wise the game really shines. The quality of the visuals surpasses anything currently available. It don’t just mean this in terms of the number of polygons thrown around, but in the overall look and feel of the game. Everything looks solid, and there is nothing which falls down in terms of quality in such a way it feels out of place. The speech is lip-synched in a most impressible manner, and the detail of the characters is stunning. Some of the animation seems a little wooden when you are talking to characters, but strangely this seems to disappear the further you get into the game. In aural terms the game is a strange mix. The music is superb throughout, the voice acting is dreadful. Really dreadful for the most part. Your character Ryo is thankfully one of the few that are good, but some of the acting in this game is horrid. Making matters worse is that the sample rate of the speech seems fairly low – in layman’s terms this means that the recording quality seems low and grainy.
The story is perhaps the biggest shock – far from being fairly weak as the summary may lead you to believe it proves to be the games strongest aspect. Outside the minor characters, all the major characters are put across superbly in terms of their character and motivations. The story proved to be compelling throughout, driving me to devote more and more of my free time to playing it throughout. I really don’t want to spoil anything for anyone here (especially since I’m going to recommend this game), but ultimately the conclusion proves to be the weak point – this is intended to be part of a series and leaves you with your current objective completed but with a sense that your journey has just begun. This
is basically my feeling on Shenmue – it is quite possibly part of what will become the greatest game ever produced, but it is not until when (or, indeed, if) we see the eventual sequels that the full beauty of the title will be realised.
Ultimately, if the review above seems largely negative it’s because I’m purposely trying to be very picky. Shenmue is a superb game, but in it’s current state of being a single chapter of a series it is far from perfect. Even if the sequels are never produced, buying this game is like buying a piece of gaming history, it breaks new ground in so many areas, and is a must play for anyone who claims to hold video gaming as a hobby. Whilst I may not consider this the finest game of all time, Shenmue 2 is the single title I look forward to playing the most in the future.
Very highly, if cautiously, recommended.
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ronniec - 13/01/01 Brilliant review, but for me the game is even more dull in parts than the FF series... and that is Dull. |
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