Game Discussion of The Week: Shenmue

Added and stickied.

One of my favorite games and one of the top games for the Dreamcast that really showed what the system could do when given the proper amount of care and attention.

Even though I had already played some pretty impressive similar stuff on other systems at the time, like Shadow of Memories on PS2 for example, it was still an impressive experience and the immersive nature of it remains some of the best in all of gaming even to this day, being able to open and look through every single drawer, take down paintings from the walls to look behind them, turn on and off every lamp and so on, I haven't played any other game with such level of detailed interactivity on such a big scale since, not even Shenmue II as far as I recall allowed you do as much as the first game did.

I enjoyed the story (as unresolved as it remained at the end), I liked interacting with the insanely large amount of unique NPCs, I fell in love with the environments, the minigames are fantastic (it has arcade perfect ports of both Space Harrier and Hang-On) and it had some great little other things you could do like collect toy figures of Sega characters (like Sonic The Hedgehog and Virtua Fighter), care for a stray kitten and operate/race fork lifts!

Not all was perfect though, the controls were clunky and awkward both for interacting with the environment and when in battle, it had a lot of real-life martial arts moves but I could never pull most of them off, even while training them where all I had to do was execute them to show the game I could it still always took many tries before I did it, so in actual battle I just relied on the basic moves making it very repetitive and lackluster, had the moves been easier to pull off the fighting would've been a lot more fun, also from beginning to end the game is absolutely packed full of mandatory QTEs and the story forces them on you on a regular basis, there are even a couple of minigames focused entirely on practising for the QTEe.

Still, the negatives are a minor part of the experience and the great stuff far outweighs the bad, so it's an easy top score from me.

I remember when I first discovered QTEs (I was playing EOE: Eve of Extinction), and I thought: "Why haven't other games this mechanic, it's so fun". Nowadays I hate them too. So damn boring and tedious.

Weird. I have a Japanese launch Dreamcast and a US launch Dreamcast and both are rock solid reliable to this day. You just got some bad luck homie.

He didn't make Dance Dance Revolution, though. The one he did was Digital Dance Mix, which is mostly a tech demo for the Saturn.

You should add Virtua Fighter in that list, it basically created the 3D fighting genre. Yu Suzuki is certainly a genious, too bad he is not as well respected as Miyamoto.

I'm a big Yu Suzuki fan, too. One of the true legends of the industry.

Just chalk it up to Sega being Sega (ie stupid).