Turning on the Dreamcast is a magical journey back to a simpler time. To be precise, it’s November 27, 1998, because the fucking internal clock is just as miserable a sack of crap as the Xbox’s. I hate turning the thing on because looking at that time setup screen reminds me of the Dreamcast’s fate and why it wasn’t wholly undeserved.

This time, though, there was extra horror. I stood there, not daring to move a muscle lest I release the 37-eyed, five-assed horrors that lay before me in digitial form, exposed by the semi-stuck lid of the chronologically confused Dreamcast.

As a general rule, I try to avoid touching a Shenmue disc for two reasons. It’s not that I’m that freaked out by the game… okay, I am. Growing up on a steady diet of video games full of visceral thrills and excitement and then playing Shenmue is like finding out your best childhood friend is one of those intense anime fans. Sure, they were polite enough to never tell you, but now you’re stuck with a head full of mental images of them dressing up as gay ninjas with day-glo wigs and furiously masturbating to violent rape comics while haphazardly waving around the shittiest katana money can buy at that cutlery store near the mall food court.

How awful is this game? Despite some bright spots, Shenmue belongs in the firm, sweaty grasp of parents who want to convince somebody to ban games. Not because the content is objectionable, but because it’s a tutorial on the merits of doing anything else at all besides playing video games, including murdering cats or Santa. The game is so horribly written and implemented that the only people who like it are people who wish fervently that they’re angsty Japanese teenagers, exploring one of the most boring towns on the planet. Except when it’s having freakish outbreaks of violence from punk kids and a completely out of place mafia.

I know, I know. You like this game. Here’s the thing, you suck and so does everybody who agrees with you. So I might as well start where the inevitable backlash will begin.

“It’s so epic!”

No… no it’s not. In fact, it’s no more epic than Sesame Street, and not nearly as well-written. Take the basic trappings; a revenge story with a young man trying to find his father’s murderer. Basic, classic, really depends on what you do with it. The revenge motif is a blank template that has seen many interesting variation.

Dear reader,

NONE OF THOSE VARIATIONS MAKE YOU SPEND OVER TWENTY HOURS TRYING TO GET A FUCKING BOAT TICKET.

Oh, that’s epic. Epically stupid. Epically boring. And don’t try arguing the incidentals. The first rule of writing is that you should summarize your plot in one or two sentences and THEN see how it sounds. Just break it down to the clear essential drive. Shenmue fails before it even begins, in this regard.

For those of you who haven’t traded your souls to Naruto, I’ll explain. Your father is killed. You swear revenge. You quickly find out the killer is Chinese and is returning to his country. You vow to follow him.

I tried playing the game again to get a fresh impression. Really I did. But then the notebook popped up to remind me what I was supposed to do… this being so fucking epic… and a few minutes later Mike came by to investigate the crying noises. I waved the controller at the screen.

“Sailors hang out in bars at night.”

Either this game really sucks or my Dreamcast is trying to induct me into the Inverted Fraternity. Eh, I’ll give the system the benefit of the doubt, what with all the other glaring flaws the game possesses. First, it’s boring. There’s a day/night cycle that goes by painfully slowly, which is a good thing in most games as it gives you time to finish the most tasks during a cycle (hands up those of you who had the slow-down song active in Majora’s Mask CONSTANTLY), but here it’s a nuisance as the pacing of the game is absolute shit when you realize a lot of the obstacles to what passes for progress can only be passed during a certain time of day… usually the same time or earlier, making you waste a day in Shenmue’s various arcades, slot houses, and other activities that make a nice side dish but quickly drag the fuck on when you’re forced to go to them just to pass the time.

The game makes you find ways to distract yourself because it just can’t keep up with you doing more than one or two things a day.  In fact, I ran into about three or four events in a row that made you wait until the next day to continue. For a story to be engaging in any medium, you have to have pacing appropriate to the field you’re working in. The idea that it’s acceptable to toss you out of the story for a prolonged period of time and say “Hey, go entertain yourself” is an interruption of freedom of choice that should be pointed at and scorned. That any of the assorted time wasters aside from the awesome Space Harrier is incredibly dull just highlights the fact that the game’s mechanism grinds to a halt on a regular basis.

The plot, such as it is, involves the aforementioned murder and vow of revenge. Then you go and take care of an orphaned kitten and get a job driving a forklift, with awful side games including racing the aforementioned forklifts. That’s pretty much it, and when the MMO was announced nobody could figure out what the hell the game would be like. Maybe hundreds of players had to be the first to catch the kitten by racing it down with forklifts.

Fuck it, bring on the next theoretical whiner.

“It has an excellent fighting engine!”

True. It has an incredibly complex engine for a hybrid game, in fact the best. It’s a pretty good combination of simple combos and semi-involved fighting moves that seems to have been competently tooled for multi-opponent battles. You can spend the greater part of the game learning the system, building up your stats through practice, and the pacing of learning new moves is pretty well-integrated.

It’s still hopelessly stupid for two reasons.

One, the fighting seems like a mini-game. Certainly, for the vast majority of the game, no combat revolves around the plot. The villains are practically unseen for the whole game, with the exception of the Gollum-esqe motherfucker who eats the boat ticket you had to slave away to earn. Mostly, the game creates dozens of superfluous school bullies and asshole foreigners for you to beat to a pulp on a repeated basis. They don’t matter to the plot, and they don’t matter to characterization… they just don’t matter. They’re a series of line-drawn caricatures who are there to provide some momentary excitement after hours of dull verbal fetch quests.

They are exciting. They just didn’t belong in this game. They belong in Shenmue’s spirital successor, the Yakuza series. Yakuza has a much less involved fighting system, with enemies who are just as pointless, and yet it’s a better game. Why? Because it didn’t make the pretense of being massively fucking EPIC movie drama. It lets you know that it knows it’s a video game and throws the appropriate experience at you.

“Well… the forklift racing was the best part!”

I’m kind of weirded out that I’m the only person on the fucking planet who has played a racing game. If your game features a heavy object with a lot of momentum scraping a wall at a two degree angle coming to a full stop, it sucks. NES games have better physics.

“It’s an emotionally moving experience!”

I want you little gi- and yukata-wearing homos to make me a promise. Never watch the Lifetime Channel and for fuck’s sake, never youtube Korean dramas.

If Shenmue has any drama, it’s something like Closetland except YOU’RE the prisoner and Shenmue is the inquisitor. A parallel line of similarity is that you will witness the same question asked over and over and over, as Ryo questions his neighbors in the same dull monotone throughout the entire ordeal. In fact, every single person sounds like they took English as a second language and have been SPECIFICALLY INSTRUCTED to act like a bunch of retards on Ny-Quil. And the fanboy credo of not translating to fit intent but keeping things PAINFULLY LITERALLY FAITHFUL must have taken hold, because it sounds like they barely bothered inserting English modifiers into the script. The results are sometimes completely nonsensical unless you’re used to heavy, heavy Janglish. Give it a listen for yourself. Then check out the AA archives here.

So the pacing is shit, the majority of the gameplay is shit, there is no plot so that’s spared the shithammer, but the writing is definitely shit, the minigames are shit with the exception of Space Harrier… is there anything worthwhile here?

Well, yes. There’s a wonderful amount of attention to detail here. You won’t have to try doors to shops to find out if their closed, as there are typically open/close times marked clearly on each building, security shutters, and even an open sign that will be displayed. These aren’t copy-pasted buildings you see in virtually every other game, there was some serious work put into these that doesn’t show in any other aspect. And it’s really impressive. If only that weren’t like baking a diamond inside a shitmuffin.

There’s Space Harrier. That’s always awesome.

A neat idea was turned to shit by a complete lack of foresight. In Shenmue, you can waste your time and money by purchasing little capsule toys from vending machines, themed from many different Sega games like Virtua Fighter, Sonic, and NighTs, and you can try to collect a full set. It seemed kind of useless to me, until I found out that the sequel had you penniless in Hong Kong, able to sell off your toy sets for good money.

It was a neat idea, but seeing as the US never say Shenmue 2 on anything but the Xbox, you couldn’t port your save file. Maybe the team should have thought to implement a good old NES password in regards to your possessions, but I suspect they were busy spending part one and two’s SIXTY MILLION DOLLAR BUDGET on crack and metal detectors. They certainly didn’t spend it on talent.

I wish I could compliment the graphics, but saying something was “amazing for its time” is pretty stupid. It looked pretty damn good, but in some cases they went into way too much detail. When your character reaches out to grab an object with all the mechincal precision of one of those science lab robot arms, you’ll notice his 18-year-old hand is about as veiny as a giant, blood-gorged erection. Unless Ryo’s been a career drinker since age 5, this is just stupid.

I almost forgot to mention the QTEs, which is impressive since they’re reponsible for a large patch of seared, blackened flesh on the left side of my soul. Quicktime Events, or QTEs, is what Shenmue calls the elementary technique of avoiding all that hard planning and coding work that would allow the player to accomplish fantastic feats and instead make you follow a series of button-matching prompts while they just show you your character rocking on along. It’s lazy, it’s stupid, and Shenmue seems to have reintroduced it into popular gaming, and for that reason alone Shenmue should be shunned and its creators nailed to various structures at a certain height off the ground by their evil little wrists.

When you put it next to the astounding level of detail, it seems like a curiously lazy decision, but then again there’s not much you can do with the heinous placement of the analog+d-pad on the Dreamcast as far as intricate control work.

What was Shenmue’s legacy? One sequel out of a planned six (that later got mercifully shrunk) and a much more interesting sequel with better pacing and some actual goddamn story. Mostly, I think it encouraged developers to avoid bigger, more ambitious games. All the fine detail in the world can’t save a game with poor planning. Eventually, people started to use Shenmue as a blueprint in what to avoid and we got games like Yakuza, that had all the exploration and combat, without the hideous drippy shit involved in the mundane, real life activity involved in going between the two.

Shenmue is a sentimental (or sympathetic) favorite of diehard Sega fans and idiots who wish to god they were no longer the obaka gaijin paleskin that they see themselves to be when they’re not dressed up as whatever horrible fucking Japanese cartoon character is ripping off Dragonball Z this month. In fact, until it became not-reviled to be so pathological about anime, I could only grasp liking Shenmue as some sort of Stockholm Syndrome that kicks in around hour 26 of looking through peoples’ drawers to glance at single flat textures of silverware and socks, which this game has in fucking spades.

But mostly, Shenmue taught us that no matter how much we suffer, it will get better eventually. Because it will end, and you’ll have to do something else.