[Kotaku] - Shenmue's Much-Hated Forklifts Feel Revolutionary Today

Ceej

Ceej

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I included some interesting excerpts below, but the whole story is a great read.

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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.
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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.
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I'll read it more closely later, but the first pass over makes sense to my mind.
I don't know that I'd have used the forklifts to demonstrate the point, but the point is correct: much of this story is about Ryo leaving his comfort and entering into confusion, both that surrounding his father's death and the task of becoming an adult in an equally confused 1980s Japan. At times, he seems more out of place in Yokosuka than he is in Hong Kong; perhaps he's making slow growth and developing personal warmth.
To my mind, It's why Ryo probably won't exact his revenge on Lan Di: in a sense, he's more of a plot device to get Ryo growing and seeing a world that's much bigger than that of his safe, walled dojo. Well, it was safe.
 
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Ceej said:
Inb4 "A Kotaku writer said mean things about Shenmue in March of 2008 so I refuse to click."

If you feel that way hold your comment and move along to another thread because I really don't care.
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DIdn't stop me from following Gamespot, whose vocal and popular weriters back in those days weren't as nice to Shenmue or Dreamcast in general than IGN (Save for the unanimously obvious 2Ks, THPS2, Soul Calibur, RECV, etc). There's always a few, but mostly behind the scenes. Actually quite like Gerstmann, although I never defected there from Gamespot, simply stopped forum posting and paying for subscription after his incident; still visited for news and reviews, but like any other publication--taken with grain of salt. They had a nice comeback when John Davison took over and seemed to remold.

Kotaku is a blog, so there's been clickbait potshots, when it was just too easy to take the piss of, but it also has plenty of potential for good reads such as in the OP. We'll see more of these good articles written by sensible, good writers since the saga is revived and closer we get to real Shenmue III discs...! Thanks for the read.
 
Somebody please tell me when this happens in the game because I don't honestly remember.
"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.”
 
A very interesting read indeed, thanks for sharing. I usually find deeper textual analysis into games to be fairly reaching, but this article feels justified by a lot of Yu Suzuki's intentions to create as close to a living world possible in 1999.

Van Joel Sandwich said:
Somebody please tell me when this happens in the game because I don't honestly remember.
"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.”
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I think they're just paraphrasing for effect, rather than literally and exactly describing a questline.
 
That was an interesting read that goes beyond your typical Shenmue analysis.

I appreciate the writer's recognition of the reason Ryo shuts out his friends and family; it is not just because he's obsessed with revenge, but because he is overcome with grief. This has always seemed obvious to me and a clear reason why Ryo is so distant. Of course, some of his awkwardness with women can be put down to his upbringing and age, but even that is an intentional part of his personality. It annoys me a bit when people paint him as a poorly-written dullard with nothing under the surface.

I also liked the point made about the forklift job flipping the tables and putting Ryo in the shoes of the NPCs he's been badgering for information the whole game.

I agree with the article's overall assertion that Shenmue is a demonstration of how grief can irrevocably alter a person's life, which is reinforced by the player getting to know Yokosuka so well, then having it ripped away from you at the end.

I was less convinced about how it's the forklift in particular that is the linchpin of the entire story ?‍♂️ but there you go.
 
Ceej said:
Inb4 "A Kotaku writer said mean things about Shenmue in March of 2008 so I refuse to click."

If you feel that way hold your comment and move along to another thread because I really don't care.
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I don't respect Kotaku for tons of reasons, none of them having anything to do with Shenmue. This article is a perfect example of how awful their brand of "journalism" really is. From making up false scenarios in biker bars, to saying Shenmue 1 was designed around making Ryo and the player feel isolated from the world, claiming the forklifts are generally hated, claiming that we expected the game to NOT be different compare to other games, to Ryo being "too shy" to talk to girls...

I mean it's almost like they're just trying to be as wrong as possible, and that's just what i got from the OP without clicking the link.... But sadly, they're not trying, they're just horrible at their job...
 
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