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Shenmue: A Story Left Unfinished

7 months ago1,364 words

This well-regarded and influential series of games was left abandoned for almost two decades, then finally got a sequel... which only disappointed fans and left them hanging once again.

I wrote a post on ∞ my Patreon ∞ last Sunday with a half-an-hour-long video showcasing Dreamons gameplay, if for whatever reason you're seeing this but haven't yet seen that.

Also, I've been kind of trying to stick to updating this blog in one 'weekly update' on the weekend for years now, though often that leads to collecting thoughts throughout the week then writing some mega post about several unrelated things at the end of the week, which isn't great for a bunch of reasons. So I'm just going to try updating this whenever I have something I want to write about, at least for a while. See how it goes.

(This likely means more posts rather than fewer.)



This time, I want to write a bit about a game series called Shenmue.

I heard about it years ago, but was never really sure what it was. I think I read some article somewhere talking about how its vastness and realism were very impressive for its time, or something? But I can't remember when or where or anything. Wherever it was that I saw that, it got me vaguely curious, but not enough to look into the game any further.

(I just checked Wikipedia, and apparently the first two games have been included in several 'greatest video games of all time' lists, the first pioneered several technologies and could be called the first open-world game, and the series also named and popularised quick time events, of all things.)

Recently, I... think I saw a Reddit thread where it came up in the comments? Was that it? I can't remember, it was a while back. But for whatever reason, this time my interest was sufficiently piqued, and I looked up a longplay to finally see what it was all about.



I watched it over several mornings while eating breakfast, then when it was done, I learned there was a second, then a third, and starting my days watching Shenmue has been a routine for a few weeks now.

I just finished the third though, so that's the end of that, I suppose.





The games aren't really the kind of thing I'm even interested in, in terms of either gameplay or story themes, though I suppose I found the small scope of the first one intriguing compared to a lot of other games I've played. It's set entirely in some little local area, and it left me with feelings of something like longing for some local hometown that I've not had since I was a child due to moving around a lot.

The gameplay seemed to involve martial arts battles with a ton of moves you could train and master, but the number of actual battles in the game was surprisingly small? (I read some pages of the dedicated Wiki, and one thing mentioned that 98% of the game wasn't combat.) Much of the gameplay was just walking around and talking to various people.




The realism of the graphics in the first game seems to have been revolutionary, and likely wowed people at the time. I also found it interesting how every single NPC had a unique appearance, from streetwalkers and shopkeepers to nameless fighting fodder.

I found some stuff related to race particularly interesting and refreshing after being bombarded with media messages about that in recent years. It's set in a real Japanese city called ∞ Yokosuka ∞, which has a high concentration of immigrants. The visuals were realistic enough that you could discern race from appearance, and I found it interesting seeing obvious Westerners among the Japanese majority. Some were rough criminals, or bullies, or the target of bullies, or friends to the player. Race seemed to make some subtle difference to characters' levels of alienation, but the overall feeling was that it was irrelevant to a person's overall worth, and it wasn't explicitly talked about (in contrast to modern stuff which often deliberately includes minority (in the USA) races to win virtue points, but usually avoids showing them as flawed for fear of seeming racist... but that's a whole other discussion).

The main reason I'm writing about this game series at all is because of things on the production side. Shenmue I was released in 1999, then the sequel came out two years later in 2001. That then got a sequel in 2019, 18 years later!

This massive gap is especially egregious because the stories of both the first and second games ended on cliffhangers.

(SPOILERS AHEAD FOR SOME OBSCURE(?) GAMES.)

The first game begins with Ryo, the main character, witnessing the murder of his father, so he swears revenge on the killer and sets out on a journey. He learns the killer is in Hong Kong, so you spend much of the game preparing for a journey to get there... only for the game to end when you get on the ferry. (Like if FFVII ended when you left Midgar... Wait.)

The second is then set in Hong Kong, ostensibly searching for this murderer, though much of the story is getting caught up in fighting a local gang or something? Eventually Ryo learns - at the end of a long 'final dungeon' - that the main villain is involved in that gang, but he only briefly appears and immediately escapes. Ryo then spends several hours running through countryside to reach some village, but before he gets there he enters a quarry, retrieves a magic sword or something... then it ends.

And the story was left there for 18 years, Ryo's revenge quest achingly unfulfilled.

Apparently Shenmue III was crowdfunded or something, and I - and probably most or all of the backers - assumed it'd give a conclusion to that hanging thread at long last. But no! It begins in the cave with the magic sword, but that's immediately abandoned. Ryo finally makes it to the village, but buggers about not doing much of anything for a while before departing for some other town that felt like a parallel to Hong Kong from part II. After fighting some local gang - another parallel - he makes it to their hideout, then there's some very rushed-feeling battle-filled gauntlet which ends with the reveal (which wasn't so much as hinted at by previous events) that the main villain guy was behind this gang... or something. Ryo fights him, but can't so much as land a punch, then he escapes and... The End.

(END OF SPOILERS.)

I was just looking into whether there is or will be a Shenmue IV, and saw a lot of poisonous reactions to the third installment. It was the creator's one big chance to conclude the story and he didn't; he dropped the magical elements teased at the end of part II to focus on narratively inappopriate minigames; there's no money in a continuation so it'll be left here forever.



I think a lot about MARDEK being left unfinished. I don't really hear from people about that these days, for whatever reason, but I used to all the time.

I have strong doubts that my recent projects will earn enough money for the time I've spent on them to be worthwhile. I keep wondering whether to just go back to MARDEK, since there might be a higher chance of people being interested in that...

But I know that whatever I were to do, people wouldn't be satisfied. What they'd really want would be a rekindling of magical feelings they felt when they were younger and more impressionable. What I'd want would be to update things using all I've learned since then, as I tried to with Taming Dreams and then Divine Dreams. I've gone through all this before, multiple times.

It's a shame, though, when stories are left hanging like this...