When I finished the first half of Shenmue 1 & 2, I felt no desire to move on to the next installment. The idea that there are 5 or 6 or however many more planned entries in this saga seemed ludicrous to me. Not because the game was bad, the opposite in fact: Shenmue 1, on it's own, already told a genuinely powerful, succinct, and standalone story of a boy who gives up his girlfriend, hometown, and life to pursue a meaningless quest for revenge that will destroy him.

It's been two years since I played this, and I still don't really want to play the sequels. Everything I've heard about them tells me that they are just elaborations on what was already here. Shenmue makes you fall in love with it's town, a space better realised than any game up to this point, so it can make you understand what Ryo is throwing away when he finds those sailors and gets on that boat, but also why he does it. The game is both celebratory and revealing in it's mundanity. When you're spending an hour on a forklift, knowing that this was your life if you were to stay here, wouldn't you go on a quest to escape it?

It's just really good. A classic, but not really in the ways anyone told me it would be. Know when to leave well enough alone, Suzuki.