To our great delight, just last week Shenmue I & II were announced to be releasing to PS4, Xbox One and PC later this year.
Unlike most rereleases in the past few years, Shenmue I & II are not being remade from the ground up (as seen with Crash, Spyro and the PS2 Yakuza games). Instead, the games will be releasing as enhanced ports, thus retaining the graphical style of the Dreamcast originals. What more, the games will seemingly not be altered to cater to modern gaming sensibilities. Most notably, the ability to time skip (fast forward the clock to when a business opens) will not be implemented in Shenmue I while it will still be present in Shenmue II.
We wanted to ask you, the reader, this: How do you think the modern gaming audience will react to Shenmue I & II?
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I honestly think people are going to react very poorly. Years of build up towards this, a common concensus among “big” let’s players that they’re secretly bad games, petulant Yakuza fans parading the series as “Shenmue but good” or “Shenmue done right,” it doesn’t seat Shenmue with a lot of advantages.
I sincerely hope modern players can enjoy these games but I don’t see them making waves.
Likely, they will praise the writing, but not the gameplay. Truth be told, having played Shenmue on my Dreamcast recently… the controls are very clunky and certain concepts such as the forklift stuff have not aged well at all.
Agreed with the top two posts — the things that made Shenmue groundbreaking years ago have been milked by so many content creators since then. If players can get by the voice acting and the controls, things that they may appreciate is the setting (still original), gameplay that isn’t so focused around fighting (might attract niches who aren’t into that) and most of all, that the protagonist is an identifiable Asian person in the the real world, and not and not some bro-y, ultra-characterized Overwatch rip-off.
The real-ness of the whole game is very attractive if you can get past some of the things that haven’t aged well. At $30 though, I bet a lot of folks eager for a long and involved AAA production will buy it.
There is certainly a curiosoty among modern gamers due to the hype created by Shenmue 3’s Kickstarter campaign back in 2015. However modern gamers will not buy the game or will buy but not complete it. They would expect to fight when they want, to have weapons in game, to invite Nozomi for a ride, etc. Basically they would expect to do like in GTA. Only the smarter fringe of the modern gamer would appreciate. Never forget that videogames are mostly played by silly people. Shenmue is an elitist game focused on emotion. I do not agree with previous comment about controls. Modern games have sometimes controls far worst than Shenmue.
The rerelease is having modern controls anyway so that won’t be an issue.
What will be the main issue is the lack of patience people have. Shenmue is a game with a plot of course, but it’s not about going from A to B the quickest. It’s about enjoying the adventure and all that the world has to offer. Train, collect toys, play in arcades, talk/learn about people, buy products that could help you later on (torch, moves) discover hidden moves and bonds between the Hazuki family and the people around them. It far more of live in this world type of exeperince than a straight up game.
I haven’t played them, and know almost nothing about them, but I’m planning to before the remaster comes out. The little I I’ve heard that Yakuza is a spiritual successor to Shenmue, and if that’s the case I’m pretty sure I’ll love it. I heard the
Most new gamer will be disappointed! very few new comer will be playing it and considering that this games is almost 2 decades old! Mechanics and graphics didn’t age well and most people now are more about the graphics than the experience! God of War, Horizon, Uncharted 4…. they will hate it!!
Not altered to cater to modern gaming sensibilities? What do you call the option for new or classic control schemes? The language and subtitles options? The scalable screen resolution? You’re hung up on one thing – a time skip feature that wasn’t originally present – and overlooking all the other work going into this.
I think you misunderstood me. I wasn’t making an argument for or against, I was simply citing that they are not altering the gameplay. Time skip had its place in the sequel, and not adding it to the first game is a sign that we are getting Shenmue just as they appeared on the Dreamcast. I personally love that. As for resolution, analog controls and language options, I’ve mentioned all of those in the original news post. I’m not overlooking their inclusion.
Whats really sad is that people are already saying and making lots of noise that the games are outdated ect ect, while these things usually don’t bother me as peoples opinions are people’s opinions i am a little scared how people are going to react to the games in this day of age.
To me i think its a little unfair to judge really any game from many years ago. Its kinda like films, its not really fair to judge a film from the 30’s or the 60’s and compare it to the special effects to today’s films. However if one puts the mindset of the time’s on, they can find some amazing experiences, at any rate they will always be some of my favorite games and its great that they are involving members of the Shenmue community in these ports
While people do complain about the pacing and the controls, to me they where and always have worked perfectly together. They way Shenmue is Designed lets the controls work well and the reason people have a issue with the pacing is that lets be honest, people have no patience now days so its very hard for them to just slow down and take in the experince
I agree completely. It’s hilarious because Shenmue has aged pretty well aside from the fighting mechanics. Graphics are still alright and the controls aren’t that bad. Shenmue is a 3rd person adventure game first and action game second, modern gamers were taught that Yakuza is the spiritual successor (which is a retarded claim perpetuated by people who have never played Shenmue in the first place) and they wrongly expect the same fast action packed experience in Shenmue.
What’s even more stupid is that games that aged way worse and are downright unplayable today are being praised left and right as kings of gaming, but Shenmue is treated the complete opposite. The original Deus Ex is considered to be one of the best games of all time (rightfully so), but as far as shooting mechanics go it’s absolutely trash, yet nobody points that out. With Shenmue people seem to point out every flaw and none of the numerous genuinely good and innovative sides the game has that games that came after it have promptly adapted.
For me OT is the king of this. Its still a great game but is it the greatest game of all time? I played it was new and even then certain things bugged me and in terms on control it works great for the game but to me Shenmue in terms of Camera and other factors is just better in that department
Those kitten feeding mechanics sure don’t hold up as well today as they used to… ;\
I played back then, and I loved, it was beatiful, the history is engaging and you could interact with people in the streets, enter a shop, buy things, some action scenes of Quick time events ( one of the things that god of war became famous for). So it was the game of the time for me, and yes yakuza have some of the elements that make shenmue ground breaking, but its diferent
Shenmue was not received well. Gamespot’s original rating was 6.8, which was later amended to 7.8.
You can read the Wikipedia article on how everything wrong with the game today was wrong with it back then as well.
I found ocarina of time better at the time. Not graphic wise.
At cube. Get prepared to be harrased by hardcore fanboys
There coming in with tough Sailors!
I am not saying anything personal, just stating an objective fact. It was a flagship first party game and it is often hard to bad mouth them. I obviously am a Shenmue fan and I paid a great deal than I normally would for any Kickstarter project. But what I hate about the Shenmue community and the mainstream media is they pretend that Shenmue was perfect. It is a flawed game, that is why it failed to meet sales targets on X-Box. It wasn’t simply because Sega choose the wrong platform to release the sequel on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenmue_(video_game)#Critical_reception
Good thing there will be modern controls… also the game was meant for a pad with one joystick and only 2 trigger buttons…