Shenmue

aka: Project Berkley, Shenmue: Isshō - Yokosuka, Virtua Fighter RPG
Moby ID: 3558
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/28 2:42 AM )
Special Edition

Description official descriptions

On a November day when the snow turned to rain, Ryu Hazuki arrives home just in time to see his father killed by Lan Di, a man Ryu's father obviously knew very well. Ryu attempts to stop Lan Di but is effortlessly beaten to within an inch of his life. After recovering from his injuries Ryu sets out to track down his father's murderer, as well as uncover his family's secrets and the mystery of the Phoenix and Dragon mirrors that Lan Di seeks.

Shenmue is a hybrid game that incorporates elements of life simulation, adventure, and fighting with light role-playing. The game is set in a 3D environment that can be freely explored by the player. Much of the gameplay involves talking to Ryu's friends and the various people around town, hoping to find hints or clues that lead to the next step in the story. Any details Ryu learns are written down in his notebook for future review. Ryu can buy items from stores or try his luck with capsule toy machines, but most items that can be bought have no purpose outside of filling his inventory. Ryu can also visit an arcade and play accurate versions of Hang-On and Space Harrier, as well as games like darts and pool.

Ryu is a trained martial artist, and while a true martial artist knows it is better to avoid a fight, sometimes it is still necessary. Ryu can train his moves, either by repeatedly doing them while training or by sparring with his friend Fuku-san, which constitutes the role-playing element of the game. The fighting system is similar to that of the Virtua Fighter series, although with toned-down air juggling. Ryu's training also gives him heightened reflexes, and sometimes during a cutscene the player will have only a moment to press a button (displayed onscreen) to get Ryu out of danger. Failing an input prompt is not always fatal, but whether Ryu survives or not depends on the danger he was in.

Included with the game is the Shenmue Passport disc. On this disc, players can receive tutorials about various aspects of the game like mini-games or the battle system, watch cutscenes they've already seen in the game, and listen to music from the game. This disc also includes the option to go online to a special site where players can review worldwide mini-game rankings, get hints for the game from Nozomi, review game maps of Yokosuka, trade uncommon items found in the game for even rarer items only available on the passport, and visit the official homepage. This service went offline along with the rest of SegaNet, and all online features are currently impossible to access.

Spellings

  • シェンムー 一章:横須賀 - Japanese spelling
  • 莎木 第一章 橫須賀 - Chinese spelling (traditional)

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Dreamcast version)

955 People (850 developers, 105 thanks) · View all

Composers
Words
Arrangers
Conductor
Orchestra
  • Kanagawa Philharmonic Orchestra
  • Shenmue Orchestra M-1
Kokyu
Yanchin
Vocal
Producers
Director
Recording, Mixing & Mastering Engineer
Promotion Staff
Recorded at
  • PolyGram Studios STUDIO-A
  • Avaco Creative Studios 301st
Mixed at
  • PolyGram Studios STUDIO-D
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 90% (based on 58 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.1 out of 5 (based on 165 ratings with 8 reviews)

An amazing, incomparable experience. Pure genius.

The Good
For every clone of Ocarina of Time, there is only one Shenmue. Ocarina of Time was the poor mans adventure, simply a 3D version of a 2D game which is Nintendo's style. It added very little to the established conventions of the series, relying on gimmicks such as time travel (which affected little not pertaining to the plot) to sell units. While Shigeru Miyamoto was busy scribbling his brain farts onto a notepad and sliding them under the door of whoever would read them Yu Suzuki was working on what would become the most engrossing, cinematic adventure I have ever played.

You play Ryo Hazuki, a young man, burgeoning on manhood. His relationship with his friend Nozomi is a source of much drama throughout the course of his adventure. At the beginning of the game Ryo's father is killed by a mysterious Chinese fellow named Lan Di. Shenmue then chronicles Ryo's day to day exploits as he tracks Lan Di down around his home and neighbouring areas. The story is heartbreaking at times, the sound design marrying perfectly with the action on screen to produce a delicate harmony of thematic elements. In addition to Ryo's search for Lan Di and his awkward relationship with Nozomi minor characters in the game also feature their own developing personal lives that you can check up on from time to time. One of the best story features I noticed was the inclusion of the telephone. You can call Nozomi occasionally and other people too and have conversations with them. Doing this is a great way of gaining a deeper insight into the characters outside of traditional cut scenes.

Shenmue is different in the sense that everything it does is an effort to differentiate itself. Suzuki San incorporates a flood of ideas into the game and while if others attempted this, the game would seem fragmented, Suzuki San's genius shines through and it all works.

Shenmue is not an open world game, but it does incorporate a world. It is strictly linear, but everything in this linearity seems to exist. Every single person on the street has something to say, with their own distinctive personality. You encounter different people depending on what time of day you go out, some more willing to give you information or directions than others. While Suzuki San wanted Ryo's world to be perceived as realistic he still does his best to emphasise that this is a game. While the vending machines have been criticized by some less than reasonable people they play into the collectibles that could be traded with the Shenmue Passport disc when the service was still active. Elaborating on the living world Ryo inhabits you can pick up nearly everything loose in his house, look at them and put them back down. There is no real practical purpose for them other than to emphasise that Ryo's world is tangible. It's so clever. The player can also play arcade games like Hang On and Space Harrier, or a game of darts of practice the game's QTE system using QTE Excite. High Scores for these games could then be shared online with other Shenmue players.

The QTE system was one of the most heavily advertised features of Shenmue before its release. These sequences are scripted story sequences that feature quick timed button presses necessary to advance the story. If you miss a button press it doesn't always mean you will fail, but most of the time you will need to restart. Shenmue is by no means the first game to feature QTE's. The concept has been around as long International Track and Field but Shenmue is the first game to incorporate them into the progression of the story.

Shenmue isn't all love stories and Space Harrier. Ryo has a plethora of martial arts move he can execute, learning more from scrolls or helpful NPC's. You can practice these in your father's Dojo or around Yokusaka or Dobuita. You then utilize these moves in what is dubbed "Free Battle" a system wherein a cutscene will trigger a fight between Ryo and whoever seems to be antagonizing him. The system takes a little getting used to, being a hybrid 2D/3D fighting engine. The moves you end up being able to pull off though make it worth learning the system. It's satisfying being able to successfully shadow step behind an enemy and then paralyze them with a punishing blow to the back of the neck.

Then there are minor incidental details about Shenmue you might even not notice, because they are so well integrated into the core game. The weather in the game is called "Magic Weather" and in Japan you could dial up your Dreamcast to the internet and Shenmue would download the forecast for your area, changing the weather to match what you could see by looking out of the window. Finishing the game allows you to play with the actual weather from 1986 painstakingly researched for you. The time I mentioned before adds a degree of strategy to how you play the game. You can head into town, looking for clues but if you spend too much time in one place you might miss someone, so you need to plan accordingly what you are going to do that day. You have no shortage of things to do though to pass the time. You can find and talk to Nozomi, give someone a call, grab a Soda, play a game or simply walk around and soak up the guy walking around with a Santa suit on. Whatever you want to do, is up to you. The game doesn't tell you how to play it, it lets you work out what you want to do in this living world.

The Bad
While the music is beautiful, cinematic in its own way the voice acting in Shenmue comes off as lacklustre at time. Ryo's voice sometimes lacks emotion however I believe this is primarily because of the way he was raised, his character is very emotional.

Eventually you have to get a job to advance the story. Compared to the previous section of the game you've just played this tends to drag a bit. There are lots of exciting fights though, so it is balanced in that respect.

You can no longer use the awesome internet features of the Passport disc that comes with Shenmue. It's a shame because there is some really cool stuff on it.

The Bottom Line
Shenmue is Yu Suzuki's magnus opum. It went places that no other game had gone before. It went somewhere different while remaining comfortably familiar. You are engrossed in Ryo's plight as he searches for Lan Di and how his world changes as he matures through this experience. The music is an amazing, cinematic achievement and the graphics are beautiful. Ocarina of Time is often quoted as the best game ever made, but if you ask me it was more of the same flushed with gimmicks that appeals to only the most low brow of gamers with a closed mind.

Shenmue is a masterpiece of the highest order, polished to an incandescent sheen and in a place no other game will ever go.

Dreamcast · by AkibaTechno (238) · 2010

Graphical showcase concealing an average game

The Good
The initial "wow factor" of this famously expensive, extremely hyped-up game is very high. Immediately upon firing it up you begin to bask in the warmth of its visuals. The graphics of Shenmue are quite amazing. The game presents a fluid, detailed 3D world with some very impressive effects. The only thing that blew me away more around that time was Ultima IX, but Shenmue beats it in the smoothness of its character models. There are quite a lot of people walking around the streets of Yokosuka, and they are all different. Even the most unimportant characters, casual pedestrians, have each his or her own face, body, and clothes.

You can explore the game's world at your own pace. Mind you, it's not large at all, it's just busy; but hey, you can't demand too much from a Japanese adventure. At least here you have a reasonable freedom of movement, and physical actions are finally allowed. You can look at, touch and take some objects, including those unimportant to the actual story. You can talk to any character you meet. You can practice your fighting skills or go and play classic MegaDrive games for the whole day. You follow a certain schedule, meet your girlfriend from time to time, go to work and come home to sleep. Oh, and you can feed a kitten!

I liked some of the realism injected into the gameplay to fit the deliberately prosaic plot. You need money to buy a ticket to Hong-Kong, where you hope to track down the murderer of your father. So what do you do? Descend into a dungeon, hack some monsters and see how their dead bodies miraculously turn into gold? No, you get a job and earn the money!

I didn't hate the fights and the quick time events. I didn't exactly love them, either: they were, so to say, tepid - definitely not too off-putting and not particularly exciting. Without those action segments, however, the gameplay would have been significantly more boring. You literally sigh with relief when a fight breaks the overwhelming monotony of the game.

The Bad
Alas, Shenmue is a typical example of an overhyped game. People talked about groundbreaking concepts and revolutions in game design, but those were just words: the actual game is remarkably timid, shying away from any kind of serious concept and trying to convince the player to be satisfied with casual minigaming.

I'm anything but an expert in fighting games, and that's why my experience should really count here: I won all the fights in the game without any problem at all - and I haven't even trained! There is no challenge whatsoever in Shenmue. An even bigger problem is that the fights are not really fun - they are clumsy, repetitive, and way too infrequent to make a lasting impression. Indeed, Shenmue is much more of an adventure game with fighting sequences than the other way around.

And as such, it fails completely. The Japanese used to make good action games and their RPGs can be entertaining; but the overwhelming majority of their adventures are dull and pointless, being almost entirely devoid of true gameplay. Unfortunately, Shenmue is yet another one of those Japanese adventures: it just fools us into thinking it's more than that because of its free movement and fancy 3D. Seriously now: 90% of the gameplay in Shenmue consists of walking around and participating in uniformly dull conversations. There are no puzzles or challenging tasks of any kind. It's just running from one boring character to another and asking a myriad of unnecessary questions. In fact, even that doesn't matter: regardless of what you do, after a few days you get a call from a Chinese master, which completely negates all your previous achievements in the investigation - whatever they might have been.

It's like they didn't even try. And that's the game's ultimate problem: obviously, all the effort went into designing the visually impressive world, while gameplay was clearly an afterthought. There is absolutely nothing there that hasn't been done before many times and better. People went "oh" and "ah" at the sight of Ryo opening a drawer, forgetting they could open many more drawers (and find much more useful stuff) in simple RPGs of the 16-bit era. Once the novelty of seeing familiar actions performed in 3D wears off, you are left with paper-thin gameplay taking place in what is actually a small and restricted world. We are only talking about a few streets of a quiet town where you cannot even enter most of the buildings.

Another mystery, for me, was the praise directed at the story and the cinematic direction of Shenmue. At that point I could only ask: what story? Ryo's father was killed, so Ryo meets a couple of Chinese people who help him, earns some money and goes to Hong-Kong. This is, in all seriousness, the summary of all the important events that happen in the game. To get to them you'll have to endure days upon days of aimless wandering and inane dialogues. As for the game's dramatic qualities, they have been vastly exaggerated as well: the cutscenes are impressive only because they demonstrate the power of the game's engine. Otherwise, they are completely unremarkable and further undermined by bad voice acting.

The Bottom Line
Shenmue has lavish visuals and a few nice ideas here and there, but it's hard to understand why it was considered a revolutionary game by some people. It is, at best, a mildly entertaining collection of minigames superimposed on visual splendor without any actual gameplay backbone. The sequel is indeed more dynamic and more fun to play, but I'm not at all surprised the series was discontinued: the second game has already squeezed everything possible out of the nearly empty formula that tried to pass for a breakthrough in game design.

Dreamcast · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2019

Hello, My Name Is Ryo Hazuki, You Killed My Father Prepare To Die

The Good
Shenmue is a difficult game to label. It is part RPG, part fighting game, part adventure, while the story is a mystery, an action/adventure, and foreign. This game also showcased the true power of the Sega Dreamcast, and is further proof that it was an excellent system that died too soon.

Ryo Hazuki’s life is torn apart when after returning home from school one day, he finds that there are men in suits led by a man in Chinese silk, questioning his father. The man wants to know where a mirror is. When he gets it he asks about a man Ryo’s father killed. Then using a style of martial arts that has not been seen in centuries, he swiftly kills him. Thus begins Ryo’s quest for vengeance, a much bigger fate awaits him, will he succeed? Well that is really up to you. Needless to say the plot in Shenmue is one of the finest ever written for a videogame. Better than most of the stuff Hollywood turns out. It is very enveloping as well. Every time you un earth a clue new questions emerge. Shenmue is one of those few games that had me addicted, even and injured hand could not stop me from playing.

The Graphics are amazing, to think that a Dreamcast game that only came out a year after the systems launch could look this good. It makes we wonder what Dreamcast games could have looked like if the system has not died so early on. Everything in Shenmue looks good, and almost all the items in the game can be manipulated. The buildings in Yokosuka as well as the characters are incredibly realistic looking. The faces of the characters are particularly well detailed.

The Sound and Music is strong as well. The score contains lots of tracks, all varying, from pop, to rock, to R&B, to orchestral. Even classic videogame music! The voices are good, the main characters are very good. But the occasional NPC sounds dumb, but in a way that is more realistic. In real life not every one sound like a voice actor. This was one of the first games to be fully voiced.

The Gameplay, is a amalgam of game types. The meat of the gameplay is exploration and talking to NPCS, as well as fighting and QTE’S. Which has not been seen since Dragon’s Lair. But are much better in Shenmue as they never get Ryo killed, unlike Dirk The Daring. Other game types abound, like sneaking into a warehouse, Sam Fisher style. Pet care, playing classic arcade games like Hang-On, and Space Harrier, buying sodas and toys,(for all those collectors.) and racing a motorcycle. Shenmue was also one of the first games to successfully merge different gameplay types. The only other game that comes to mind before Shenmue, was Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Shenmue does a better job then Omikron however.

The Bad
On the bad side, we may never see a Shenmue III, although there are hints of a movie, which is not the same as playing a game.

The Bottom Line
Overall Shenmue is not a game for everybody. Few games are. Interestingly enough it has enough different gameplay types to satisfy most. If you are a like me and still play your Dreamcast, give Shenmue a try.

Dreamcast · by MasterMegid (723) · 2006

[ View all 8 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
I don't think this is a simulation game White Snail (122) Jan 3, 2021
Clear Game Save GNJMSTR (106) Jul 3, 2009

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Shemue appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Budget

In the 2008 Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition, the Dreamcast version of Shenmue is listed as the most expensive game ever to develop at $70 million.

Development

Shenmue started development on the SEGA Saturn. The Dreamcast and Xbox versions of Shenmue II both contain a video of scenes from the Saturn prototype, accessible when you beat the game and save your file. The scenes are impressive given the limited power of the Saturn. The working title was Virtua Fighter RPG and the protagonist Ryo was in fact based on Akira from the Virtua Fighter series.

The game was supposed to be quite longer than what it ended up to be. The game progressed further into Hong Kong and even had flashback sequences were you got to play as young Ryo. Due to time constraints and market pressure the decision was made to cut the game at the point were Ryo sets sail to Hong Kong, however lots of the mentioned sequences were already produced and included in Shenmue 2.

Inaccuracies

The game takes place in the mid-80s on a definite timeline, but the weather is inaccurate. There is an unlockable mode to play with the actual historical weather for that period of time.

Marketing

During promotions at Tokyo of the original Dreamcast version Sega used displays featuring real forklifts (as used in the harbour scenes) holding TV's displaying previews of the game.

Mini games

Shenmue features the ability to play Space Harrier and Hang-On, the original 80's arcade games made by Sega. Both games were also created and designed by Yu Suzuki.

References

Although the game takes places in the 1980´s, Ryo Hazuki has a Sega Saturn hidden under his TV set. Said console was not available in Japan until late November of 1994, but like the references to Sonic, Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing games, these things have no effect in the game and where included to please Sega fans.

Soundtrack on vinyl LP

In summer 2015, a remastered recordings of the Shenmue soundtrack are released on vinyl LP by Data Discs. The recording contains 13 tracks from the game by the composers Takenobu Mitsuyoshi, Ryuji Iuchi, Osamu Murata and Yuzo Koshiro. The remastering was done by Shawn Hatfield (Audible Oddities). (Sources: Data Discs product description, LP at Discogs)

Awards

  • GameSpy
    • 2000 – Dreamcast Game of the Year

Information also contributed by Chris Chidester; David Mackenzie, J. Michael Bottorff, Juan Pablo Bouquet, Karthik KANE, Lain Crowley, Jo, tangledcontrolpads and Vance

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Shenmue II
Released 2001 on Dreamcast, 2002 on Xbox
Shenmue III
Released 2019 on Windows, PlayStation 4
Shenmue I & II
Released 2018 on Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Shenmue III: Battle Rally
Released 2020 on PlayStation 4, Windows
Shenmue III: Story Quest Pack
Released 2020 on Windows, PlayStation 4
Bright Memory: Episode 1
Released 2019 on Windows, 2020 on Xbox Series
Shenmue III: Big Merry Cruise
Released 2020 on PlayStation 4, Windows
Shenmue III: Complete DLC Collection
Released 2019 on PlayStation 4, 2020 on Windows

Related Sites +

  • Shenmue Dojo
    The biggest Shenmue fansite online with videos, music, artwork and everything else related to this great series.
  • The Hazuki Dojo
    A fansite that contains videos, fan fiction, downloadable material and all kinds of information for the dedicated Shenmue fan.
  • The Shenmue Legend
    Everything you could want from a dedicated Shenmue site plus more. All the info, on all Shenmue topics, no matter how obscure.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 3558
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Grant McLellan.

Additional contributors: Julian McKenzie, Zovni, Kaliban, Unicorn Lynx, Sciere, Joby Kuriako, Игги Друге, —-, Patrick Bregger, Jo ST, FatherJack.

Game added April 3, 2001. Last modified March 25, 2024.