Yeah, Shenmue is janky as fuck (and badly translated, as evidenced by the fortune teller bit in the last episode). Of course it can be done better, and was in part 2. All I'm saying is that the easiest "solution" would be quest markers and a minimap, but that would ruin the very thing Shenmue is trying to go for.
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Giant Bomb are bringing back the Endurance Run... and it's Shenmue.
- Thread starter MassiveNights
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Yeah, Shenmue is janky as fuck (and badly translated, as evidenced by the fortune teller bit in the last episode). Of course it can be done better, and was in part 2. All I'm saying is that the easiest "solution" would be quest markers and a minimap, but that would ruin the very thing Shenmue is trying to go for.
I speel my dreenk
Member
There are certainly some games that I love from my childhood that get shit on for being clunky or archaically designed, but more often than not I have to agree with that, because they usually are that way. It doesn't mean I can't still have a fondness for those games (even if mostly nostalgic) while acknowledging that they may well have have been put together mostly with twigs and bubblegum.
The maps are definitely one of the aspects of the game that seem well-done, and I enjoy them. They're sensibly located - placed at various intervals around town, just as one would expect. The map not being completely filled out doesn't make much sense, but does serve a gameplay purpose: forcing you to sometimes have to search for your next target location by asking around.
This is not a bad idea, but what kills me about it is that almost everyone who lives in the area know nothing about their own neighborhoods. Clearly another gameplay limitation, since how can they know who you'll talk to about it, but it effectively renders most of the community into brainless idiots who can't comprehend the world outside of a 3 ft radius away from themselves. Not to mention Ryo himself being a complete dolt.
To tie this back around to the fortune teller prompt from earlier: it's not that there is or isn't a message telling you what to do next, or that there is or isn't a big blinking icon on the map to mark your next destination - it's that the message they did put there is vague and misleading, and the way to locate an unmarked map location is annoying and tedious. The intention is great, but the execution is flawed.
These are probably disc space or memory or dev time limitations, which is of course understandable. It nevertheless helps to shove the game further down the sliding scale towards 'archaic bullshit', because as much as I appreciate the forward thinking ideas and innovations, most of them still seem implemented in clunky and annoying ways.
I hope that makes sense and I'm not just sounding like a bumbling Ryo. "Um.. I see.."
That all sounds well reasoned to me.
I think it bears repeating that it's not like the developers didn't learn from the first game. The feedback and focus afforded by positive and negative reaction to the first game helped form what I believe is a much refined sequel.
Shenmue is a game with a lot of "firsts" in many areas, and a lot of 'common sense' game design we take for granted now may not have been 'common sense' 17 years ago on a sprawling project of unprecedented scale and resources.
Fantastapotamus
Wrong about commas, wrong about everything
What a pro tipp. You must be a real hardcore gamer.
I speel my dreenk
Member
Definitely. I'll also say this: as much as I'm not impressed by this game, I'm still enjoying watching them play it, and am looking forward to them playing Shentwo. I'm also more motivated than ever to finally check out the Yakuza games.
You totally should, they're great. I just started up part 5 and it's blowing my mind. You should start as early in the time line as possible, since part of the fun of those games is interacting with the recurring characters. (Ideally the PS2 games, but if that's not an option I guess part 3.)
This actually ties back into our Shenmue discussion. As an example of giving direction, a guy I interacted with in a side mission in the previous game just told me to meet him at "that place." And I immediately knew he was talking about the batting cages, since that's where we went last time. That built up wealth of knowledge makes the experience way more rewarding. The objective was also marked on the minimap, but I felt super smart about knowing that beforehand.
You can have a design that encourages exploration with hidden stories without a minimap that is better at nodging you in that direction.
The problem on Shenmue seems to be that the game gives you little contextual indication that these stories are there. Expecting a player to show a magic mirror to everyone to get some dialogue is obtuse. Or having a scroll written in Chinese and then when the player goes to the Chinese person with it there's no response from the game. It's uneven how interactions work and sometimes the game doesn't make its own internal logic more apparent to the player.
Saying this things doesn't mean the solution is putting waypoints everywhere and saying that is just a way to not discuss the design of the game in more interesting ways.
I think nobody here is saying Shenmue should be a Ubisoft open world game.
The problem on Shenmue seems to be that the game gives you little contextual indication that these stories are there. Expecting a player to show a magic mirror to everyone to get some dialogue is obtuse. Or having a scroll written in Chinese and then when the player goes to the Chinese person with it there's no response from the game. It's uneven how interactions work and sometimes the game doesn't make its own internal logic more apparent to the player.
Saying this things doesn't mean the solution is putting waypoints everywhere and saying that is just a way to not discuss the design of the game in more interesting ways.
I think nobody here is saying Shenmue should be a Ubisoft open world game.
Cindi Mayweather
Member
Shenmue II does it a lot better. but even that has esoteric secret stuff. A part of the appeal of Shenmue games is replaying them and finding new stuff. A lot of fans will tell you "I've played this game so many times and keep finding new stuff!" I think that's a part of the appeal for a lot of its fans and while I understand the growing pains of "it's not hinting it", sometimes it's just a matter of taking the game slow and just exploring. I can see both sides, but I definitely prefer the route of "this is something that's possible if you explore the game" rather than flat out telling me. This is also why I prefer New Vegas to Fallout 3. I'm just a sucker for games that let me create my own fun without hand holding. Is it not friendly for all players? Sure. But I think it serves its purpose pretty well.
For example, you wouldn't find this scene in Shenmue 1 at all unless you actually bothered talking to NPCs. It's just a organic sense of discovery. Would you really want the game to point out that this is possible and not something you just randomly bumped into? It's amazing. Look at it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G9wLwcq8Bg
Haha. Come on.
Shenmue II has a lot of stuff to do. I think the main problem here is most have only played 1 and not its superior sequel. So then they bring up Yakuza or whatever and not 2.
I found GTAV ten times more fun with waypoint/gps off.. It was better than in IV in that regard. I couldn't memorize Liberty City's map for shit and I have all previous GTA maps memorized in my skull. Maybe it's because I'm older and less interested in scouring around an entire game map? I love exploring games but find it tedious these days. New Vegas, Deadly Premonition, and Saints Row 2 are the latest games I can remember where I actually enjoy exploring the game world because it has something to offer to me.
Didn't see so many replies to what I had said. Yeah, I heard the performance. As much as I think it was entertaining for a minute or so, I didn't think it was the 'greatest thing ever' in an ironic way like some people did.
I guess I was just disappointed cause I really wanted to see if they had been ripped off yet again.
My most recent replays of II has proven this very much true. I didn't even find out a few alternative methods of triggering the next part of quests until the past two-three years (fyi people, no these didn't involve just speaking only to a different NPC).
And even though the number of NPCs jumped quite a bit higher in II than the original, you're more likely to find kooky, quirky nameless NPCs that help bring more texture to the world, as well as the more fleshed out side-characters that you meet in the main story. There's more there for people who want to explore the nooks and crannies of the game world.
Part of me wishes Shenmue III might embrace a more traditional approach to side quests, as while there's plenty of optional content, there's not much in the way of actual side quests (although the ones that we did get are really quite cool and introduce new gameplay mechanics). Maybe it might be better if they took advantage of the strong ability to flesh out a world in detail and expanded some of that into actual side quests, but that might be... un-Shenmue.
Cindi Mayweather
Member
I think fishing is confirmed as a job in III and I'm hoping your take care of Shenhua's cows.
Yu did say something about nodding back to taking care of the cat, but that it'd probably be an animal more fitting of rural China. A cow would make sense.
Obligatory ShenMOO joke.
I'm hype as hell for the fishing job in III. I'm a sucker for a fishing mini-game, I spent far too fucking long playing the ones in Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess. Plus, some of the developers might have worked on SEGA Bass/Marine Fishing in the past, so there's pedigree there!
Spiral Insanity
Banned
I don't get it. I don't get how you can say this about Shenmue.
Oh I dunno, maybe because the GB staff had to resort to singing and playing guitar because the game is so nighmarishly badly designed and boring.
Cindi Mayweather
Member
That's a poor argument. It just means GB doesn't like the game. And that's okay. If you want to watch let's play where they don't sing and play guitar, Game Informer's is a good place to start. It's not that GB not liking the game doesn't have merit. But basing it entirely off their play through that "this game is awful" when they clearly aren't into it isn't really being fair.
I base it on the evidence of my own eyes and ears.
Especially my ears, the hell is with that voice work?
| Praxis |
Banned
I tried to play it at the time and found it dull and badly written, but there was something there. The ability to play games in the arcade, the collectibles and the interactivity of the world. There was always a slight interest deep inside me. I just couldn't bring myself to get through it. Same with the second game, but at least I played it for longer before I gave up. I think if it just had an interesting main character, one I could take even the slightest bit seriously I could have persevered.
broncobuster
Banned
It was 1999.
Count of Monte Sawed-Off
un33dab@dpu$$y
I watched the first bit of the game informer Shenmue run last night. The Giantbomb guys are definitely more entertaining, but the guy playing it for game informer is giving it more of a fair chance and so far has encountered things the GB crew completely passed over. It definitely seems like it's a better representation of the game than the ED. It does help that the other guy doing the game informer videos has played the game before and has a much better memory of it than Dan.
How long did you play II for?
partyphone
Banned
yeah. good voice acting didn't exist until 2006.
Glitchesarecool
Member
Alright, then we can make a list of the shitty design decisions that other games of the time did better. You don't have to watch a GB video to see how awful some of this really is.
Metal Gear Solid came out in 1998.
broncobuster
Banned
You joke but Japanese games often had bad translations, bad voice direction, and novice voice actors.
Although even back then Tom was something special.
And it was an exceptional example of its time. Again, not saying Shenmue has good VO. But there weren't exactly VO standards back then.
To lend context-
Shenmue's translation was a rushed hodgepodge of good and bad translators working over each other for an inconsistent result.
It was all recorded in Japan with a Japanese voice over director, so there was a language barrier.
Shenmue was one of the first video games with fully voiced NPCs, resulting in a lot of dialogue that needed recording and (I believe I read this somewhere in an interview) it was most likely a 'one take and move on' situation.
Ambition, time constraints, and the relative newness of voice acting in video games created the perfect storm for Shenmue's English dub.
But that still hasn't stopped people getting engaged in the characters/story playing it back when it released, and right now either. It is what it is. Like a lot of Shenmue, you either get over it, or you don't. ¯\_(ツ
_/¯
_/¯It had a more consistent translation and localisation, a native English-speaking voice director, and was recorded in LA rather than the haven for bad English-speaking actors, Japan.
Either way, MGS was the exception and not the rule back then. If only all Japanese games back then were as well localised and dubbed as MGS back then, oof.
Cindi Mayweather
Member
MGS is an exception that changed the standards of localization that forced every other company to play catch up. Expecting MGS standards seems pretty unrealistic. Even FFX didn't touch MGS. MGS was in a league of its own the better half of the decade and things didn't start to regularly become well translated or acted by any set of standards until 2005/2006.
stump sock
Member
localized Snatcher came out in 1994. Jeremy Blaustein worked on localizations for all three and he's talked about how the Shenmue localization was a disaster. you can directly blame Yu Suzuki for the crappy english version.
"The reason we did it in Japan by the way, was because Mr. Suzuki wanted access to it while it was being done. He probably thought that if he could go and quality control it himself it would be better. Or I dunno, maybe he just wanted to leave his desk and go see how things were going. It was done around his schedule. It wasn't done because it was the best thing to have done. It wasn't done because we didn't have the money to do it in New York. It was simply done because that was his decision. Nobody that was doing that thought it was a good decision. And clearly it wasn't. Add that to my regrets, that we could have done a great job. It's like, if we had gone to New York or LA and did it, they'd all have been great actors. We could have had a great script and... Let me ask you and the readers, would Shenmue have done better if it'd had better actors, or wouldn't it have made a difference?"
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/jb/jb2.htm#shenmue
boyshine
Member
I haven't followed this thread, but they have no focus, no interest in playing and discovering the game. It's just immature guys feeling a need to be funny every second, completely unable to sit down to play the game at its own pace.. it took them how many hours to even learn the controls? I'm not even sure they still (at ep.16) understand what the zoom/look-feature can do. And subplots? Fuck that. If it isn't linear wall-to-wall action, it's a boring, shitty game. It's like watching Gone With the Wind at 4x speed for a school project. You just won't get it.
Cindi Mayweather
Member
Also, recording in Japan was common back then.
Spiral Insanity
Banned
They are not the brightest bunch when it comes to playing Shenmue. I think they should have read the manual or something.
Shenmue isn't trying to be an arcade experience that is easily grokked, it is trying to be immersive. That's where it shines, even if it is obviously awkward and clunky, or mundane at times. The sense of time and place that it conveys is remarkable, and I wish more games would take lessons from it.
To call it 'garbage' is just wrong. Go play a garbage game instead.
Sad to read about the localization issues.. the game could have been a lot better if the localization was on point.
There weren't any. I think a lot of you people don't realize that this was the first game to do some of this stuff. Specifically the in-game time and having to wait for shops to open was touted as a innovative new feature and a selling point leading up to the game's release. They were proud of it.
They did include plenty of other stuff to help a player pass the time. Vinny throwing a tantrum and literally going home was not part of the design.
They are not the brightest bunch when it comes to playing Shenmue. I think they should have read the manual or something.
Shenmue isn't trying to be an arcade experience that is easily grokked, it is trying to be immersive. That's where it shines, even if it is obviously awkward and clunky, or mundane at times. The sense of time and place that it conveys is remarkable, and I wish more games would take lessons from it.
To call it 'garbage' is just wrong. Go play a garbage game instead.
Sad to read about the localization issues.. the game could have been a lot better if the localization was on point.
They understand what the game is, they just have no interest in doing the side stuff over and over while killing time. To say they are not the brightest bunch about Shenmue is kind of insulting.
How is it not part of the design when they give you free reign?
stump sock
Member
I don't know, sounds exactly like something a game that touts player agency and free will should let you do.
Scientist Supreme!
Banned
This confirms it.
Best endurance run yet.
broncobuster
Banned
Genuinely curious if there's a quote from Yu Suzuki about adding the ability to skip time in Shenmue 2. You can choose not to, if you want to mess about to pass time. Or, for everybody else, you can skip to the next action. I don't believe it harms the experience at all.
It was a consequence of a lot of things, unfortunately.
But either way, we're here 15 years later with a much better understanding of video game voice acting, a humbled Yu Suzuki, and a much smaller budget. Who knows what III might bring?
I do wonder if they'll record in Japan or not. I'd hope for them to do it in LA for quality reasons, but the budget is always going to be the issue here. Maybe they'll go between the two, with Ryan Payton supervising? Corey Marshall (Ryo) is LA/California based right now, Eric Kelso (
Ren
Berserking Guts
Member
For me Shenmue is a product of it's time and it's value is measured by how old you were and what games you were playing at the time. The stars aligned perfectly to make Shenmue one of the best games I've ever played at the time. I have so much nostalgic value attached to this game that I can overlook all of it's unorthodox game design.
Where people who are new to shenmue see schlocky npcs, wonky controls, obtuse clue gathering, and time schedules, I see charm and memories.
I guess what I'm getting at is, some of you think that because you've been exposed to Shenmue via an ER now, that it somehow makes you qualified to shut down fans who genuinly enjoy it. Thing is, the game you see and the game I see are worlds apart.
I realize that I'm generalizing things a little, and the divide isn't that black and white. And that most of the people in here who don't like the game have legitimate reasons and don't give a fuck. But I've seen enough drive by shit posting in this thread by the 'lol shenmue fans are so sensitive' people who think they're somehow point scoring, and that the crews dissatisfaction with the game somehow invalidates the fans who like it.
Where people who are new to shenmue see schlocky npcs, wonky controls, obtuse clue gathering, and time schedules, I see charm and memories.
I guess what I'm getting at is, some of you think that because you've been exposed to Shenmue via an ER now, that it somehow makes you qualified to shut down fans who genuinly enjoy it. Thing is, the game you see and the game I see are worlds apart.
I realize that I'm generalizing things a little, and the divide isn't that black and white. And that most of the people in here who don't like the game have legitimate reasons and don't give a fuck. But I've seen enough drive by shit posting in this thread by the 'lol shenmue fans are so sensitive' people who think they're somehow point scoring, and that the crews dissatisfaction with the game somehow invalidates the fans who like it.
Most I've heard about him comment on it was that not including the time-skip made it a longer debug process, though I'm sure the reason it made it into II was to allow for the player to make up their own mind if they wanted to go goof off or not.
It does bring me back to the late-Beta of the original Shenmue that someone found, where you could advance time with the debug; but that it could seriously cause problems with the game's systems. I have to wonder if it eventually became a planned feature but conflicted too much with the game's systems to fix in time for release...
stump sock
Member
well Shenmue certainly pioneered "spending way too much money on a game that underdelivers," so I'll give them that one
"Generalizing things a little" is a huge understatement.
I meant intended design. Sure you can go home any time, but you'll find a whole lot of nothing there. Just like the guys did.
This game has very little player agency as it exists in modern gaming. Life is what happens to you, you have very little control over it. Shenmue is what happens to Ryo. He's not driving the game, the game is driving him.
You're supposed to use the down time to go around town and absorb the atmosphere of a small Japanese town. If you don't like that, you're playing the wrong game.
Berserking Guts
Member
Oh yeah?
Well that won't happen until they fully appreciate how Shenmue 1 and 2 brought them there.
If they continue to not play Yakuza for no reason after that then they will just be regular Shenmue fans who just don't care about Yakuza.
| Praxis |
Banned
It was a long time ago... Ten hours? Maybe
Hm. You're not wrong exactly, but I've seen a lot of cases of people playing Shenmue for the first time in the modern era (and a lot more since last year) and enjoying it, irregardless of age.
I've seen grown ups come to Shenmue recently and really have fun and appreciate it. I've also seen stories of older fans getting their kids into the game, and I remember hearing a story about a kid playing Shenmue at some video game history event at a museum and being totally engrossed.
Personally, even though I played the first two games at ages 8 and 9 respectively, I've kept playing them and have gotten different things out of them and appreciated wholly different aspects as an adult, to when I played them as a child and a teenager.
Hrm. I'm not exactly sure where that'd place you in the story, as I'm pretty sure someone out there has spent ten hours in the very first quest of Shenmue II.
I'd agree that Ryo is flat in the first game, but not in the sequel. He doesn't start off super engrossing, but the game surrounds him with good foils and supporting characters, as well as the plot driving Ryo into a lot of places and situations he's never found himself in. I mean, he has an actual story arc in Shenmue II.
I dunno. It could be you just weren't getting on with what the game had to offer?
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