Ceej
Been here longer than you
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2018
Link to Story
I included some interesting excerpts below, but the whole story is a great read.
I included some interesting excerpts below, but the whole story is a great read.
Mario has Yoshi. Link has Epona. Ryo Hazuki has a forklift. This unassuming industrial vehicle has become so closely identified with Shenmue that when series director Yu Suzuki wanted to tease the announcement of Shenmue III, all he had to do was tweet a picture of one. For both advocates and detractors, Shenmue’s forklift sequences are emblematic of how unexpected, different, and downright strange the much-hyped adventure game turned out to be, compared to the game we were conditioned to expect.
The majority of Shenmue’s critical path is a straightforward investigation. Ryo wants to know who killed his father and why. To figure that out, he stops going to school and starts asking rather impertinent questions around town. The process of playing Shenmue is the process of leaving an established comfort zone and heading out into a place where you don’t belong.
Shenmue never lets you forget you don’t belong, either. Much of Ryo’s journey is awkward and uncomfortable. Ryo will stroll into a cartoonishly rough biker bar and ask the studded vest-wearing patrons if they “know anything about unique mirrors.” Ryo’s not good at this, because it’s not what he’s supposed to be doing: he’s a guileless karate boy too shy to talk to girls.
Ryo’s incongruity is meant to be funny and cringey, but it’s also meant to be tragic. Watching the boy who feeds stray kittens threaten to break a grown man’s arm feels wrong. We feel that wrongness because Shenmue’s gameplay commits to so completely to the idea of Ryo as a fish out of water. The whole world is designed to make you, as Ryo, feel isolated outside of it. Even this aspect of Shenmue feels unusual. In most sandbox games, the world is designed to make you feel integrated into it. It’s designed around your experience. Shenmue inverts the relationship, making you the isolation. The fact that you’re controlling Ryo is why he feels so out of place. Everyone else has a place to go; you’re the only one running all over without a clue.