Longtime lurker here (15+ years if I had to guess) and ironically
this is what finally pulled me in.
First off hi to all.
Just wanted to share some thoughts, perhaps add some perspective and possibly go on a bit of a rant, but please bear with me.
I've played both
Shenmue and
Yakuza when they first came out in Europe and contrary to most comments here I've always viewed
Yakuza as a spiritual successor to
Shenmue to this day.
There are obvious differences on both the conceptual and technical level, but to me
Yakuza is clearly built on a lot of the concepts and DNA of what made
Shenmue; from cinematic storytelling on a level I hadn't seen in games before, to being a virtual window into Japanese/Asian culture, to having a strong focus on fighting/martial arts all the way down to incorporating a plethora of side activities, mechanics like Quick Time Events etc.
At the time I didn't know who Yu Suzuki or Toshihiro Nagoshi were, but the Sega connection was all I needed to confirm there was overlap on some level.
And even beyond that you can see similarities; two franchises trying to break through the confines of niche, struggling to reach a bigger audience in order to survive.
But instead of celebrating each others successes we end up with threads like this one where the fandom of one franchise feels the need to put the other one down, because I'm reading a lot of the same comments here that people are accusing the other side of. Even some of the praise contains little more than backhanded compliments.
I'm not saying you can't dislike either franchise for legimitate reasons - people like what they like after all - but the disdain for the 'other side' from a loud minority of both camps is more than a little obvious and frankly, obnoxious. But that's tribalism-fuelled fandoms and their mostly toxic echo chambers for you.
And while I'm not really interested in getting into the whole generational debate, the experience of being part of something from day one is obviously very different compared to discovering something years down the line, for a multitude of reasons.
Shenmue and
Yakuza are my favorite video game franchises for both similar and different reasons and I wish more people would embrace both.
I like the cousins comparison but I'd go even a step further and say they're siblings. Closely similar, but also distinctively different. There's no need to 'pick a team'.
If you're still reading at this point, thanks for taking the time to go through my incoherent ramblings.