I'll Defend Yu
After trying to be productive for the better part of the morning, I found myself without much to do. Boredom set in. And naturally, my thoughts turned towards the stack of games I'd gathered in the past month; free time proved to be a precious commodity during the weeks of E3 preparation and I often chose to spend it socially rather than with a controller in-hand. Yet this afternoon, rather than peel the plastic off Enthusia or Devil May Cry 3, or return to Guild Wars to level, I somehow got the urge to robotically run through the streets of '80s era Hong Kong in Yu Suzuki's flawed epic Shenmue II for the Xbox. I know. I'm completely insane.

Right trigger to run? Come on. Required d-pad assisted turning that make Resident Evil's oft-ridiculed controls feel fluid? Yup, it's in there. It's almost as if the developer went out of its way to make playing the game as frustrating as possible. And don't even get me started on the dialogue or voice acting. If I hadn't already had an early save game on my Xbox, I would've returned to the subtitled Dreamcast version. The Japanese vocal track is far superior to the laughable localization most are familiar with.

The gameplay, too, is heavily flawed. I'm quite fond of the fact that Ryo Hazuki, our main character, has to work a job to afford life on the road. Or rather, I'm fond of the idea. In practice, the work segments are a bit too repetitious and often too dependant on luck rather than skill. I don't expect work to be fun, even in a videogame, but I would like the ability to excel and earn more money in turn. Shenmue, unfortunately, doesn't often allow for that sort of thing. And can it get tedious...

And yet, I'm compelled to continue, even now. There's something about walking through densely populated, relatively contemporary environments in a videogame that I find hugely satisfying. Will stopping to chat with a street-side flower vendor or thug change the course of the game? Not likely. But the interactions often provide some clue that'll help the player find someone or someplace else who can aid the player. I suppose knowing that I can talk to anyone I see at anytime is just comforting. It makes the world feel ever-so-slightly more believable.

More importantly, the tale that Yu Suzuki envisioned for the series is nothing if not completely epic. The second game contains three chapters of the original sixteen that were written -- its predecessor only contains the first. I've wandered through remote Japanese villages. I've been a participant in a coarse relationship with a cutey from my home town bound for Canada. I've become a member of the most feared gang in Wan Chai. I've travelled to a near-uninhabited tropical paradise where i talked for hours with a beautiful young woman with whom I shared a secret connection; literally, for hours.

And it's in this respect that Shenmue II shines brighter than the vast majority of its peers. It's not Shakespeare, and it ain't Scorsese. But it's the closest thing the videogame world has to the original Karate Kid trilogy, and that's somewhat comforting.

Posted by ryan at May 28, 2005 09:46 PM | TrackBack