The Unconventional Beauty of Shenmue

The fact that it's so easy to look at Shenmue through modern eyes and see all the ways it was ahead of its time doesn't speak to how poorly Shenmue has aged in the 18 years since its release. If nothing else, Sega's re-release of Shenmue I and Shenmue II is a testament to the passionate fans that have kept the mystique of the aged series alive. It's almost appropriate that, aside from boosts in resolution and smoothing out some of the more jagged edges, neither game has gotten a full makeover for its current-gen debut. Shenmue I and II's mechanics don't hold up very well today, and Sega doesn't try to fight the scrutiny. We are expected to take Shenmue I and II, largely, as they were. And what they were is...well, complicated.

"Complicated" as it pertains to Shenmue is a funny word considering how embarrassingly threadbare the narrative and gameplay for both games are. Shenmue was always mechanically clumsy. The game's control scheme tries splitting the difference between old-school Resident Evil-style tank controls, and the full-3D movement we all currently know and love, and the result is clunky, where just getting Ryo to walk straight or look in a specific direction is like taming a wild horse. Voice tracks in the remasters are just as muffled as ever, though the ability to turn on the original Japanese language track on both games does wonders for the quality of the various performances.

The narrative setup is this: In 1986, young Ryo Hazuki's father is murdered in his own dojo by a man named Lan Di, who steals one of a pair of precious jade mirrors in the process. Young Ryo swears revenge, and after finding the second mirror and vowing to keep it safe, he follows Lan Di from his quiet little Japanese suburb all the way to the bustling streets of Hong Kong. There he discovers the mirrors may be more important to the future of China than ever imagined.

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That two-game synopsis is four sentences, and those four brief sentences cover between 50 and 70 hours of gameplay. It's only at the end that the plot finally picks up steam, and then the credits roll. That leaves a lot of dead space to fill, in both games. But Shenmue's complexity has nothing to do with immediate gratification. It has to do with something that the vast majority of open-world titles in Shenmue's wake have trouble with: purpose.

Think about the best open-world games in recent years. In most cases, the moment the initial tutorial shackles come off, you're free to flit about the world however you see fit. Typically, you have all the basic tools and knowledge you need to go forth as the master of the world. If you don't possess the power to rule the world, your goal is to obtain it. The objective stops being about what the plot demands, and more about gaining enough to power where nothing but the loading screen will ever stop you from doing what you want, when you want, to whoever you want. Ultimately, this is what most open-world games provide and promise: eventual mastery over the world.

Shenmue never makes such promises. Ryo isn't meant to be master of his world. He's a citizen of it, just like everyone else. Aside from the ability to fight, the only impressive thing about him is knowing virtually everyone's name in his hometown. As a foreigner in a strange land in Shenmue II, he has even less than that. Ryo's quest for revenge starts from absolutely nothing. Moreover, there is so very little to tell you where to begin, other than following the innate instinct to talk to strangers, sorting through the he-said-she-said of provincial life until you find the first of a series of leads.

These things have nothing to do with the mystery of the jade mirrors or avenging Ryo's father, and everything to do with the kind of world-building that makes Ryo's life feel real and quaintly beautiful.

Despite the search for your father's murderer being the driving force through Shenmue's story, it's the little, inconsequential discoveries you make along the way that leave a lasting impression. Ask a neighbor about the whereabouts of the notorious black car, she'll tell you how it almost ran over a man she knows a block away, who you find stretching in his front yard because he pulled his back dodging out of the way. You could get the address wrong and meet someone unrelated who still heard about your father and offers genuine condolences. You can stop in a grocery store to pick up a can of tuna for the little girl caring for a lost kitten up the road. The man who owns the Chinese restaurant in town could be out of change for a vending machine, and you can buy him a soda for no other reason than the fact that he's a neighbor, and wind up shooting the breeze for a minute about the menu. There are no arrows or compasses or waypoints ushering you from one plot point to the next. You have to unearth the next step by going out and being curious, paying close attention, and listening to the people Ryo lives and works with. These things have nothing to do with the mystery of the jade mirrors or avenging Ryo's father, and everything to do with the kind of world-building that makes Ryo's life feel real and quaintly beautiful. Shenmue doesn't revel in giving you power; it revels in wrapping you in the mundane.

As the world starts to come together, then, it has the magic effect of making every chaotic moment all the more impactful. It's not out of the question that a schoolboy roaming down the wrong dark alley after dark might get attacked by drunken thugs in a video game. It means a lot more when that fight makes Ryo late coming home and Ine, his gentle live-in housekeeper, is worried sick. It means a lot more when word gets around that Ryo's looking for Chinese men who killed his father and the calm and collected vet who runs the nearby Army surplus store starts to worry about possibly outing his connections to the yakuza. Suddenly, taking a moment away from your investigation to play arcade games, or hang out with the kitten, or talk to the cute, awkward girl down at the flower shop feels like a valuable respite rather than a frivolous open-world gimmick. Often in Shenmue, you run into situations where you can't take the next step in your investigation until the next day. There's no way to fast forward time, or turn in early. The game essentially invites you to go out and live, work, and play, and you, essentially, can. Ryo says his purpose is to find his father's killer. The ultimate counterpoint of Shenmue is the idea that maybe life is too big to let revenge rule over it.

Ryo is, objectively, living a small life, however, and one that feels ever more constrained as the scope of his investigation leads closer to Hong Kong. The first Shenmue is all about creating a microcosm of suburban Japanese life. The second is all about taking that familiarity away. Throwing Ryo into the big city presents him with more to do, but nothing resembling safety, and while it's so off kilter creating an atmosphere in one game that doesn't truly pay off until the second, there's no doubt it works when playing them back to back. The first night Ryo finds himself in a tiny hostel, with his only possessions strapped to his back, thousands of miles from home, and not a penny to his name having been mugged earlier on, is such a lonely one. Suddenly the memory of Shenmue's prevailing normalcy--even the normalcy of the tedious factory job that slogs down the final third of the first game--makes you feel a little homesick. Hong Kong doesn't become a truly warm place until close to the end of Shenmue II, and what tension there is in the game's plot comes from just how far from that warmth Ryo must go to get his revenge.

The size of Shenmue's world and its humble nature create expectations that the game itself flies in the face of. On paper, it's a series of fully explorable cities packed with reactive NPCs--something only the best open-world games manage today. The ethos behind what happens within these cities is the part that we don't see and remains a marvel of patient and humanistic game design. Everything immediate and mechanical about Shenmue has been outclassed several times over. Everything experiential about the game is operating on such a different wavelength. It requires you to be present and mindful at all times. That portion is important, as open-world ethos leans ever more towards keeping you busy as opposed to engaged. Shenmue is so broken and creaky in so many ways, and yet it's a game dependent on the calm of passing time, and reminding its protagonist (and you) of all things good in the face of life's hard and harsh moments.