Reminding people again to be civil and not be rude or nasty.
I dunno, I've seen other playthroughs from people who didn't really like or know much about the game, but they experimented with the controls or knew about the zoom button from reading the manual or pressing the help button and were immediately all, "Okay let's look around his room then." GBE just opened a closet, thought that was all you could do, and then left.
Ehh, the framing of the game is that Ryo's father is killed, he has a nightmare because it's haunting him, and the first moment of gameplay has him facing towards his door. Yeah, some people might decide to examine around the room, but the setup leans on the idea of 'get out there'.
Some have brought up the tape on the desk, but it's a small and otherwise mundane item. Shenmue doesn't need important items to highlight when you approach them or to have a little quest log telling players to 'examine the tape' or anything but simply having any sort of cue to draw the player's attention to anything at all would go a long way.
Heck, all it would take is for Ine to
not hand Ryo his first allowance in the cutscene and merely have her point out where she left it, having it be a thing a player would have to manually pick up/examine. Very few players would be willing to pass up collecting free money. Put it next to another object or two and it's a natural and unobtrusive way to let people know what kind of game this is and is a design method that's been around forever. No button prompts or modern hand-holdy ideas necessary.
Maybe I'm looking at it with an unfair eye, but I think games should be able to communicate and encourage the use of their mechanics through their scenarios.
I've kinda said this before here, but the GB guys have been able to progress in the game so far while not really making use of the zoom function. Additionally, they seem to be having a rough time. However, they don't even seem to know what they're missing because there's been nothing in the game that has coaxed them to examine objects. I think the proof for this is in the fact that they have examined signs and items at the store. The game stresses the importance of finding certain locations/people at certain times, encouraging them to look at signs to confirm information. The shop had interesting items that they wanted to look at. However, going back and listening to what they said while in the store, it sounds like they just wanted to see what was on the shelves, so they tried zooming, but because that's how you can buy things [especially with the prices there], it sounds like they thought the zoom button is what they had to press to initiate shopping. For just any ol' object sitting about though, what has the game done?