Random Shenmue Thoughts

GYO6161 said:
Jesus. Anyone with a ResetEra account brace yourselves when the re-releases come out.
There's going to be a lot of hot takes and hyperbole running amoc.
Reading the ''Play Yakuza now of wait for Shenmue'' thread has been quite something. Thankfully there's a couple fellow dojo posters defending the game but it's quite ridiculous how gamer culture will just label a game as bad like it's a fact just simply because it isn't for them.
I pray that there will be enough open minded modern gamers that will see the true inner greatness of Shenmue
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Such toothless responses from Shenmue fans in that thread:

"Why are you comparing a 1999 game with a 2015 game?"
"Yakuza needed 7 entries to reach it's current level !!"

How about someone actually asks just how in the hell does Yakuza 0 does anything better than Shenmue? Aside from controls, it does everything worse. It's a regressive franchise when compared to Shenmue (Although I'm not a fan of the comparison because they're so different, but I will indulge this time).

Kamurocho, a location reused over 9 games, is filled with nothing but random, cloned NPCs, none of them are voiced. None of them have any purpose. They just wander and disappear. Some stay at their spot waiting for you to trigger their side quest. Kamurocho feels like a generic RPG overworld. With shops where you buy healing items and weapons. No sense of time either, it's either night or day depending on the story.

Compare this to Shenmue, with it's living, breathing world. Every NPC has a personality, a voice, dialogue, daily schedule, etc... A lot of them have purpose, they direct you to your objective. Time is flowing naturally, day/night cycle, weather system... Interactive world where you can pick things up and examine them. The amount of love and detail that has put into this world is staggering. And unlike Yakuza, you move on... From Japan, to China. Every location is unique with it's own feel and culture.

The gameplay design in Yakuza is so very formulaic and repetitive. You spend the vast majority of your time getting into random encounters with brainless thugs every 10 seconds... Then you undertake a "mission", where you mostly go to the enemy headquarters, beat a boss, then you go back to the street. Rinse and Repeat. Let's not even tackle the way the game frequently uses "fetch quests" in it's main missions... Remember when you had to buy homeless people some treats (spread over multiple stores) in order to advance the mission? Forgot which Yakuza that was, they are so similar it's hard to tell.

Whilst in Shenmue, the gameplay is varied mix of exploration, playing detective, fights, QTEs, Puzzles, and other unique mini-games like jobs. It always keeps things fresh and interesting.

I won't touch things like story, atmosphere, music, as they're fairly subjective, but I believe Shenmue absolutely trounces Yakuza in those aspects, especially atmosphere and music.

That Resetera thread makes me miss Spaghetti, whenever someone there started spouting falsehoods like "Yakuza does everything Shenmue does, but better!" he puts them in their place... But then I remember that if I were him, I wouldn't touch those threads to keep my sanity intact.

This post made it seem like I hate Yakuza, I used to be a fan, but after I played 1,2,3,4,5 and Zero. I just got burned out. It's the same shit, over and over again... Same story beats, same locales, same "lul so funneh" side quest design, same gameplay loop. People who started this franchise with Yakuza 0 are in for a rude awakening after realizing just how similar the rest of the Yakuza games they missed are.
 
Of all the misguided things often mentioned in connection with Shenmue, the insistence that it bears a resemblance to the Yakuza series or that Yakuza is its spiritual successor, is one of the ones I find most exasperating. Any comparisons are nearly wholly superficial and I'd honestly struggle to think of two series that are further apart.

It's not about what's better or worse though, they are just very different games with very different appeals, and a fan of one isn't guaranteed to enjoy the other. Personally I'm not into Yakuza very much.
 
In defense of yakuza, fights are not random... you can discern the thugs and easily run away from them. Although, with such a fun and addictive battle engine to upgrade, why would you? Also, if the tower-crawling isn't your thing, why bother? Just seems like Yellow Head Building all the time, which is a great thing.
 
xatruio said:
In defense of yakuza, fights are not random... you can discern the thugs and easily run away from them. Although, with such a fun and addictive battle engine to upgrade, why would you? Also, if the tower-crawling isn't your thing, why bother? Just seems like Yellow Head Building all the time, which is a great thing.
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They are random, just not in a traditional JRPG sense. They spawn randomly, the composition of each "pack" is random.
Yakuza's fighting system is fun, albeit a little shallow, but fighting really easy enemies over and over again is tedious.
 
Rikitatsu said:
They are random, just not in a traditional JRPG sense. They spawn randomly, the composition of each "pack" is random.
Yakuza's fighting system is fun, albeit a little shallow, but fighting really easy enemies over and over again is tedious.
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Random to me only is the traitidtional JRPG; where enemy pops up out of nowhere and completely unavoidable like... Xenosaga (my turn base is limited i don't like them much)...?

Anyway--semantics--upgrading moves and techniques is quick enough to be a grind, but not too bad til you can freshen things up by the time it is getting stale. For me, of course.
 
The thugs in most if not all of the Yakuza games level up when you upgrade your abilities, as well. So while the majority of the fights don't post much of a challenge, at least they get harder as you get better. The fighting can be fun, but it is pretty shallow.
 
GYO6161 said:
Jesus. Anyone with a ResetEra account brace yourselves when the re-releases come out.
There's going to be a lot of hot takes and hyperbole running amoc.
Reading the ''Play Yakuza now of wait for Shenmue'' thread has been quite something. Thankfully there's a couple fellow dojo posters defending the game but it's quite ridiculous how gamer culture will just label a game as bad like it's a fact just simply because it isn't for them.
I pray that there will be enough open minded modern gamers that will see the true inner greatness of Shenmue
Click to expand...
Resetera is the most closed minded gaming forum I've ever been part of, I wouldn't put too much stock in their opinion...
 
I agree. Era is good for curating gaming content but the community there is god awful. Don't any of you go into the off topic section. You'll thank me later.
 
I wonder if Sega is going to send press copies/codes to the media, if that's the case when the reviews will be out and if they will be embargoed until release.
 
This is really weird. I was listening to some of the Shenmue II jukebox tracks and happened upon this one called 'Gifts':

Faintly on the left channel, they seem to have either sampled in or made up newscasts on some pretty dark stuff including bombings and conflict on the Israeli Syria border, a mass shooting involving the casualties of children, and lab testing on animals.

What the fuck? Even for Shenmue, that seems a bit dark and in bad taste; especially when paired with the chill backing track and a title called 'Gifts'. Has anyone ever picked up on this before?

Edit: A bit of digging reveals that it is indeed a sample from an audio library. It's been used in a few songs and television programs from what I can tell. I found the full sample (uploaded by another Shenmue fan who must have noticed the same thing) here:

Even still though... it just feels a bit weird and out of place in Shenmue to me.
 
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Yikes. Imma guest AM2 had no idea about the context of that sound sample and they thought it was just some cool English voice track and threw it in. Though i'm pretty shocked that this wasn't removed on the western version considering it revolves around massive tragedies and all the other 9/11 and twin tower references were cut like that picture on the Come Over Guest House and that npc which nationality was changed. Clearly someone that spoke English on the localization must have checked this part for QA?

It reminds me of SNK which did this a couple times (take random English sound clips from random sources) They had to remove one of those sound clips in a rerelease of KOF98 due to foul language.

I wouldn't be surprised if its gone on the re releases for licensing issues and also the fact that is quite messed up for the kind of game Shenmue is and is very likely the original team didn't put it on purpose.They could mute that specific channel where the dialogue is being played from and just have the song without it.
 
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