Shenmue I & II

Shenmue I and II are the games that invented the genre vocabulary for open-world storytelling, and playing them in 2018 and beyond is a genuinely strange experience - like reading a foundational novel that every book you love has quietly stolen from. You play as Ryo Hazuki, a teenage martial artist in Yokosuka, Japan, whose father is murdered in front of him by the enigmatic Lan Di. What follows is a slow, deliberate revenge quest that stretches from a snowy Japanese suburb to the crowded back alleys of Hong Kong's Wan Chai district. The pacing is not fast. It is arguably not even medium. But if you let it breathe, the world-building rewards you with a kind of mundane intimacy almost no modern game attempts. The open-world design is micro-scale by today's standards, but incredibly dense. Every shopkeeper has a name and a daily schedule. You can pick up virtually any object in Ryo's house and examine it. The first game has you working a forklift job, asking locals about sailors, and feeding a stray kitten. This is not padding in the traditional sense - it is atmosphere construction, and it builds a portrait of 1986 Yokosuka that feels weirdly real. The second game tightens up considerably, throws you into Hong Kong, and introduces a broader cast of martial arts characters who actually get proper arcs. The writing rewards patience; certain throwaway lines in the first game pay off hours into the second. Combat is a mix of free-roam brawling and quick-time events (QTEs), and it has aged in obvious ways. The move-set system, where you learn and practice individual techniques like Tornado Kick or Double Blow, is genuinely interesting from a build perspective - you can grind specific moves to proficiency by practicing them in the menu, which feeds into a light RPG progression loop. The brawling itself is functional but stiff, and some QTE sequences require a reaction window that feels tuned for a 2000-era Dreamcast controller. The PC version at least lets you remap inputs, which helps. The D3T remaster is not a full remake. Textures are upscaled, resolution support is modern, and there are quality-of-life additions like a fast-travel option and a toggle between the original and a re-recorded voice cast. The original dub is famously wooden in the best possible cult-classic way and I personally recommend keeping it on, at least for a while. Character models still show their age. The lip-sync is still haunting. These are features, not bugs, at this point. What matters is that the games are playable and stable in a way that decades-old emulation never quite guaranteed. Who is this for? Honestly, not everyone. If you need your RPGs to have reactive skill trees, meaningful dialogue branches, or a plot that moves at modern blockbuster pace, Shenmue will frustrate you. But if you care about games as a medium with history, or if you want to understand why a generation of developers cites this series as formative, or if you simply want to spend time in a reconstructed world that feels like someone actually lived in it - this collection delivers something most contemporary open-world games spend hundreds of millions of dollars failing to replicate. The story cuts off right at the start of where things get genuinely epic, which is a very Shenmue thing to do.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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