Shenmue I & II are two of the most important games of all time and people who deny that go to Hell and burn alive. The amount of effort put into the games to create the most immersive game of all time at the time. Cyberpunk, Witcher, Fallout, the entire fucking current state of immersive sims. Shenmue isn't the first game to do all of its shit but it's the first to have that big of a budget on it to push these ideas enough to reach a mainstream audience and inspire literally every single game with any kind of slight open world. The LAD series getting massive in the states out of nowhere ruined discussion of this series because for some reason everyone thinks this is the LAD prototype now. Watch a Shenmue funny NPC dialogue compilation what are you reminded of? Not Yakuza Kiwami fucking 2 no you're thinking of Oblivion. Fuck you i hate everyone who plays video games

Takes everything that the first game did and runs to the moon with them. Instead of being in a small and comfy japanese harbor town, you start in a huge and confusing hong kong. The game feels more gamey as QoL enhancements like having automatic waiting for certain events are implemented. The plot goes through multiple chapters rather than just being one big prologue like the first game, and the second and third acts are fantastic. Banger video game that really shows the scale and ambition of the shenmue series moreso than the first.

2001. An unforgettable year. In 2001 we were blessed with three magical events: Two of which being Shrek and...

SHENMUE II.

It was a great privilege to play the original Shenmue, and I am pleased to inform any and all reading this review, that its successor is even better.

as much as I like the charm of this series I cannot give it a good conscious give it a positive score the things that annoyed me about the first game primarily the QTEs are tenfold worse here especially once you enter Hong Kong and omg wtf is the Hong Kong area aside from the money grind they put in towards the end of the game these building who tf designed these buildings I swear if you see screenshots of the interiors you would think its assets from a silent hill game dilapidated buildings everything is dirty whoever designed the elevators deserves prison time, omg the final level of the HK zone being a 17 story climb it takes like a good 2 even if you do everything correctly it feels like one of those smt dungeons where you just want it to end but there is always another level and after all that am supposed to believe that at the top of this completely recked building with elevators that only stop very specific floors is a millionaire's skyrise apartment PLSSSSS. also, the final boss has multiple QTEs at the end in which if you fail you have to replay the entire boss fight... then after the climax of the game goes on for another 3 hours where u kinda just walk with this girl that has only up until now been hinted at since the first game and honestly, it was cool it was chill it was a walking simulator but I was so tired of hong kong section of the game I didn't mind it but also wow leaving your game on a cliffhanger in 2001 to never bee seen again until 18 years later... and I am not very excited to play Shenmue 3 since everyone says that one is a disappointment.

I would like to talk about as well the cultural impact of this game because the first was like wow no game looks even nearly as good as this in 1999 this is insane PS1 and n64 had nothing on this but then in 2001 we have the ps2 and this year in specific we have metal gear solid 2... put mgs2 next to this game it's not even fair and tbh it isn't fair it's a Wii u, ps4 situation where even though it's technically the same generation but one came out way too early too ever compete in specs despite how ahead of its time the Dreamcast was and so what about this games has become impactful over time and it feels like its QTEs (i know this isnt the first game to have QTEs but its definitly one of the games that started its popularity in action/story games for making action scenes seem more interactable then they really are) and... the yakuza series (ironically this having a top of a skyscraper ending is so yakuza lmao) but even yakuza is game that really is nothing like the rest of the triple-A open world games out there so you iam still glad this game exists to an extent but iam not in love with it the way a lot of people seem to be

Platform: PlayStation 4 (Via PlatStation 5)
Date Started: July 16th, 2023
Date Finished: July 27th, 2023
Time Played: 23hours

"Like a polished mirror."

An absolutely perfect follow-up, and my joint favourite video game of all time alongside the first, Shenmue II flips the cosy small town atmosphere of what came before and instead throws Ryo, and the player, into a complete foreign land, huge and brimming with life, massive in scale. It's a perfect contrast to the original's location offering - it's easy to get lost, the locals aren't all as friendly and there are plenty more side stories to get up to.

Each location and environment you visit in this one is a marvel, and the story and characters are just wonderful. Ryo's relationship with Ren is a perfect uneasy alliance, the villains are great and the entire cast of side characters are memorable. Some of the revelations, reveals and moments are staggering, too, and a real testament to what slowing down and taking your time with story-telling can amount to.

Game-play stays mostly the same with the addition of newer QTE's, some new combat moves and scenarios and a lot more action in general. It's all a great blend of slow-paced, long-form story-telling and great action set pieces with a lot of satisfying narrative beats. The final area is just a masterful change of pace, too, ending things with in a true Shenmue meditative way - one of the most memorable parts of the entire series, leading to an incredible setup for the third entry.

Shenmue II truly is a magnificent piece of work and the ideal follow up to the first. Unbelievable stuff.

Shenmue II pegou o primeiro e melhorou cada aspecto mecânico um por um. A encheção de linguiça é bem mais dinâmica e opcional, finalmente tem a porra de um mapa então o dinamismo de locomoção é bem melhor, passar o tempo é BEM MAIS PRÁTICO.

Se Shenmue já era um jogo extremamente ousado pra sua época, Shenmue II consegue ter um escopo AINDA MAIOR. Praticamente tem 3 cidades, a longividade do jogo é bem maior, visualmente é um absurdo de lindo pra época e a história é bem mais "action-packed".

O universo em si é bem maior, introduz uma quantia numerosa de personagens extremamente cativantes que tiram o Ryo da sua bolha de conforto que era Yokosuka, o jogo está cada vez mais ensinando o Ryo os mil significados do que é ser um artista marcial, é lindo.

Mas é meio que óbvio, Shenmue 1 cobria um capítulo da história de Shenmue, enquanto o 2 COBRE FUCKING 4 CAPÍTULOS. E posso dizer que fez um ÓTIMO trabalho, por que em nenhum momento eu senti que o jogo era rushado, de forma alguma, ele é "confortável" como sempre.

Em questão de combate aparenta não ter mudado... mas mudou. O combate meio que reflete a natureza mais "grandiosa" do jogo, foca bem mais em movimento, a esquiva do jogo é tem um alcance bem maior e parrys no geral foram desfocados a favor de counters e rolamentos. Em suma, o combate é menos técnico e menos punitivo que o anterior, é bem "solto" e mais convidativo para aqueles que não querem esquentar muito a cabeça com um sistema complexo e "preciso" como o do primeiro jogo. Eu prefiro o sistema anterior, mas tenho carinho por esse.

Agora pra crítica, é mais uma afirmação de preferência. Acho que o tom do primeiro jogo me agrada mais, esse é épico demais, me vejo muito mais preso ao Ryo na narrativa suave, relaxante e até melancólica do primeiro. Era bem mais humano, se isso faz algum sentido. Mas não posso ignorar que isso é um passo a ser dado na história, Ryo saiu da sua zona de conforto, foi pra uma aventura, na jornada de auto-conhecimento buscar o sentido do que é ser forte, do que é ser um lutador, e é simplesmente emocionante e lindo de ver.

Tl;dr é um jogo com um escopo muito maior e épico e com inumeras melhorias no game design, mas eu prefiro o primeiro por questões pessoais.

Enfim, eu gosto de agrupar os dois primeiros jogos como uma experiência única, pois, no fim, não existe nenhum outro jogo como ele. Shenmue é uma experiência única.

Shenmue, sempre será Shenmue.

Peaks and Valleys: The Video Game is the most mechanically boring but conceptually interesting game I've played since the last Shenmue. Yet again, I have a lot to say about this one. If you want the short version: Shenmue II fixes several things about the first game, creating an overall better experience, but it also doesn't fix enough and I don't like it very much.

Ryo has finally arrived in Hong Kong and spends much of the game haunting the connected districts of Aberdeen and Wan Chai. And I mean that literally, later in the game you're able to listen to a news report about Ryo being responsible for a rash of violent attacks and the police want him for questioning. Hong Kong is massive and it's very easy to get turned around and lost, though it's not as much of a navigational nightmare as Kowloon, which Ryo relocates to later in the game. Shenmue II is a big game. There's a lot to do if you just want to slow down and enjoy things, be that gambling, seeking out one of the four different arcade games, getting more gacha toys, or learning about Hong Kong and its customs. However, unlike Shenmue, you're never required to interact with these side activities if you don't want to.

The biggest improvement over Shenmue is its pacing. In that game, if you needed to wait around for a story event to open up you either had to kill time around town or just stand around and like, go wash dishes or something. Thankfully, Shenmue II gives you the option to fast forward time, which is a godsend. In general, the pacing of Shenmue II feels significantly better, with story events hitting at a more rapid clip, and each beat feeling more impactful. The early parts of the game in Wan Chai are perhaps the slowest, but they're more character focused and actually provide Ryo with some much needed development. Once you meet Ren of Heavens, who is essentially a Han Solo type scoundrel who sees money in Ryo's quest, the game starts to become more action focused and provides context for the death of Ryo's father and motivation for Lan Di. In my review of Shenmue, I said the game felt more like a prologue and speculated that the story would get far more interesting from there. For the most part, I think my prediction was accurate.

This all seems positive, so what's my problem?

All of this sounds good when your point of reference is Shenmue. The bar was never set very high to begin with. Of course it feels better, you could give me just the option to skip ahead to story events instead of playing Hang On for three real world hours and I'd be like "yeah, shit, I guess that is technically better!" The core gameplay of Shenmue II is still crappy. It's still using the same janky Virtua Fighter system for its combat, it still suffers from the same camera issues, Ryo still controls like a car, and you still have to spend a significant amount of the game just walking up to NPCs and asking where to go.

Shenmue II is a game that will earn good will and then burn it immediately after. Nowhere is this felt more than Kowloon, which as I previously said is the most action-packed stretch of the game. That action is infuriatingly bookended by far too many excursions into Kowloon's many inter-connected apartments, each of which are labyrinthine and require you to make use of elevators and stairwells that only deposit you onto certain floors. You may, for example, have to take an elevator up to the sixth floor, run to the opposite end of the building and take the stairs down to the third floor, then take an elevator there to the fifth floor so you can take another stairwell up to the tenth floor, and then all of this is to, like, talk to a kid about a bird. "You should try asking around bird shops." That's great. Good advice kid. Now I get to do all of that in reverse.

I love Ren, he's my favorite character in all of Shenmue besides Tom, but I hate when the game forces you to travel with him because he has to provide color commentary every time you make an extremely minor mistake. Put the wrong key in the wrong hole? Better take 30 seconds to listen to Ren scold you and Ryo to formulate some lame excuse. Oh, it's a dead end? Are you sure? Are you telling me this wall here - which is a stationary object that cannot be scaled or passed through - has impeded our journey? Well shit, I never would have known I took a wrong turn if not for your valuable insight! Thank you, game!

These might all seem like minor things, but they just keep piling on and weighing down the experience, which already isn't anything particularly special given how dire the core gameplay is. Often Shenmue II falls back on its story, which is quite good, and as I reached the climactic fight with Don Niu high above Kowloon I actually thought, damn, this game is at least going to end strong...

Act III: Drug-- Uh I mean, Guilin.

We need to talk about Shenhua, AKA That Girl on the Cover. If you've never played a Shenmue game a day in your life, first of all let me congratulate you. Stay the path, brother. You still probably know who this is, though. She's featured prominently in key art for both games despite only showing up in Ryo's dreams and reciting an oddly prophetic poem during the first game's closing moments. Surely, she's important to the overall narrative of Shenmue given how much presence she has despite not actually appearing in the story. I have to admit, Shenhua is part of what kept me going. She's such an unknown factor and I felt like I've been teased with her grand reveal for so long that I couldn't possibly put Shenmue (as a series!) down until I had a better understanding of who she is and the role she has to play.

Anyway you meet her and spend like two hours talking to her about the drinking water in her village.

The only takes on Shenmue II I've seen have been the very broad and baseline ones. The game is good, it's better than the first. I haven't sought out anything more pointed than that, so I'm not sure what people think of the Guilin chapter. If I had to guess, Shenmue heads probably ate it up. After Kowloon, you're placed on a much more linear track, walking the mountains of Guilin with Shenhua and just spending time getting to know her. Your conversations at times go nowhere, they're about matters that are completely unimportant, and yet they give you a feel for who each character is. Ryo is able to pull back for a moment, so far from civilization, and just reflect on everything he's experienced. There's almost something therapeutic about talking to this girl, it gives him perspective about the path he's been walking and permits him a moment to feel nostalgic about his father and his friends in Japan.

It also just does not need to be in this game at all.

Much of these conversations Ryo has that recaps his quest feels better suited for the start of a game, catching players up on everything that happened before diving fully into the next chapter of Ryo's adventure. Even the more gameplay-centric parts of this chapter feel more like an introduction to Shenmue's mechanics, and the sound effect for quick time event prompts is noticeably different. At best it feels like DLC, at worst it seems like Yu had some sense that whatever work was done for a third game might not be fully realized, so he stitched it onto the end of II. Tonally, it just doesn't work. It wastes Kowloon's momentum and feels at odds with the rest of the game. Even the cliffhanger ending with the gigantic copies of the dragon and phoenix mirrors feels like a late title shot.

I don't know, maybe this is an unfair assessment. I did just play like, 30 hours of this game that I was not really into, and draining another two into this extremely slow finale just kept me thinking "shut up, I want to play Signalis" over and over again. Who gives a crap about Shenhua, Joy is my wife anyway. Just let me get to the credits already so I can see the names of those responsible and add them to my list of enemies.

The highlight of this entire experience is that someone finally said "Shenmue" in a Shenmue game, and after 60 combined hours of this crap, it's the most leo_pointing_at_tv.jpeg I've ever been about something in my entire life. I still have Shenmue III to play, but I am not touching that for at least a few months, because I've already ingested a nearly lethal amount of Shenmue and I would like to just stop thinking about these games and play something fun.