In 2001 I walked Ryo Hazuki into a mysterious cave, turned off the Dreamcast and went to bed. 18 years later I walked him back out of there in Shenmue III. The game has spent so long as a distant fantasy that having it as a tangible thing in my life is deeply surreal.
Yu Suzuki’s Shenmue III is the video game equivalent of Brian Wilson’s Smile, an artefact tossed forward in time from a past that feels like it brighter than the dowdy present. It’s the kind of media that makes you reflect on who you were, who are you and everything that happened in between.
That brighter past was 2000, 2001 and 2002 – my golden age of videogames. I finally had my own money and autonomy, had left home and was making a new life in a new city. My console at the time was a Dreamcast, and though its unceremoniously termination by Sega was sad, it also meant that new and second-hand games were going for peanuts.
I ended up with maybe 100 games from various regions, many of which were seriously bizarre design experiments like Samba de Amigo, Seaman, Cool Cool Toon and Typing of the Dead. But Shenmue was the biggest boondoggle of them all: a mega budget simulation of 1986 Japan. I loved every dull ass second.
While the world changed beyond recognition, Ryo remained preserved in that Guilin cave like a mammoth in a block of ice. It’s a weird miracle when he calmly emerges like it’s no big deal, the game mercifully avoiding a fourth-wall breaking wink to the camera about the length of his incarceration.
The world he walks into is higher-resolution and more intricate, but still recognisably Shenmue. And full credit to Yu Suzuki for having confidence in his original design: there are no concessions to modernity and Shenmue continues to amble along at its own pace.
This means you spend half the game killing time in a small rural village populated by children and the elderly, as you work menial jobs while investigating someone’s disappearance.
Things pick up a bit in the second half as you explore a small city, but the pace remains purposefully slow: the plot doled out in breadcrumbs between lengthy, repetitive martial arts training sessions and my chosen profession of medicinal herb-picker.
I don’t know if it’s just nostalgia talking, but I loved every long and lazy moment of it. Most video games try to make every second engaging so it’s refreshing to play one that simply doesn’t care if you’re bored or not. I’m not kidding when I sat that spending my own leisure time chopping wood while being berated by a weirdly rendered elderly Chinese man speaks to the masochist in me.
Sure, some of the rougher edges do aggravate. The new wrinkle of keeping Ryo fed ends up as busy work and the martial arts system takes some getting used to (and is initially pretty damn unforgiving). But I have almost limitless resources of forgiveness for Shenmue.
The cherry on top of all of this is that the game is perverse enough to begin teasing Shenmue IV. By this point I don’t particularly care whether Ryo Hazuki avenges his father’s death or not, I’m happy just checking in with Ryo every couple of decades and seeing how he’s doing.
I’ll keep playing Shenmue as long as Yu Suzuki keeps making them. Though I recognise that they’re inevitably going to turn me into the video game equivalent of a middle-aged man sat alone in a motorway service station Burger King listening to Baba O’Reilly on tinny speakers and wondering where the years went.
Pixel Hunted 