This week, Sega’s Shenmue games will be available on modern platforms for the first time since the early 2000s. Both original games, 1999’s Shenmue and 2001’s Shenmue II, will be released on Tuesday, August 21st as a $30 compilation for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows PC.

Perhaps you haven’t had a chance to dig deep into either game, not just because they’re old, but also because they were only released on consoles that are barely popular in the West (Dreamcast and the original Xbox). This week’s compilation changes the accessibility side of the equation (and aims to reassure fans while they wait for the crowdfunded game Shenmue III). But is it an essential return to Sega’s home console “swan song”?

Not really. The teams responsible for restoring these two games placed too much emphasis on authenticity. The good news is that everything from the original games has been polished to the highest possible standard: graphics, dialogue, presentation. These are the best versions of the Shenmue games in the world. But while hundreds of open-world games have surpassed Suzuki Yu’s classic since then, none of them inspired Sega to fix what was broken here.

70-Man Battle returns!

Nearly 20 years ago, Shenmue proved to be the most ambitious video game of its time. The characters in this Sega game all looked realistic (for the time) and had plenty of fully voiced dialogue. You could enter most buildings, walk around and browse extensively. And the whole thing was wrapped up in “interactive” cutscenes, supported by a robust martial arts combat system.

These might be considered common or familiar buzzwords today, but when this game debuted on the Dreamcast in Japan in late 1999, it was unparalleled.

Still, we shouldn’t forget. Nearly 20 years ago, some of us wondered what was fun about Shenmue. Webcomic writer Penny Arcade famously mocked Shenmue’s inconsistent tone. My own review in December 2000, when the game was released in the United States, pointed to “sloppy controls,” “tedious tasks,” and dialogue that was “worse than a Jackie Chan movie.”

Still, the game’s combination of ambition, intrigue-filled plot, and “realistic” immersion received some praise, and its sprawling plot was sadly cut short by the end of the Dreamcast in 2001. Fortunately for fans of the series, an English version of Shenmue II appeared on Microsoft’s original Xbox, but neither future episodes nor the original port ever saw the light of day.

The games focus on Hazuki Ryo, a teenager desperate to get revenge for the murder of his father at the hands of Chinese crime lord Randy. The first game follows Ryo as he travels from his home village across Japan, tracking Randy to Hong Kong. In the second game, Ryo arrives in Hong Kong and immediately finds himself in trouble due to his possession of one of two mysterious mirrors (the other mirror is the one that Randy used to murder Ryo’s father).

QTE does not mean Quality Turning Experience

To get to these battles, you have to go through two things: “QTE” cutscenes and city exploration.

QTE (short for Quick-Time Events) became a plague on the gaming industry during the PlayStation 2 era, as countless games padded out overlong cutscenes with button prompts, keeping the player constantly on alert during what were essentially static cutscenes. But almost 20 years later, Shenmue’s take on this system seems a little appealing, if only because its scenes are so simple and predictable for anyone who’s been playing these kinds of adventure games for years.

But the way we move through the city and the interiors of the buildings have aged so badly, that’s the crux of the problem with the new buildings. Both Shenmue games revolve around “tank” controls, a result of the Dreamcast’s single joystick controller, and Sega hasn’t found the need to address this with controller modifications for the gamepad or mouse-and-keyboard versions. (In fact, when playing the PC version, mouse movement is completely disabled, and these players cannot map mouse movement to their view or movement.) To make matters worse, the tank version of the original game has some quirks, such as the command “rotate”; “180 degrees” being associated with pushing back on the joystick.

To some extent, players can get used to this cumbersome system, but it’s all too common to have to aim Ryo at a precise location near a building, closet, or other required interaction, losing 10 to 15 seconds to this ancient system. The game fiddles. This frustration is multiplied when certain interactions require you to press the “look” button to switch to a first-person view, which is necessary to find and enter many of the game’s closed drawers, shelves, and cabinet door holes.

From there, what you think of this series comes down to personal preference. The Shenmue games do things in their own way, with the designers confidently guiding the player through tedious tasks and ridiculous dialogue. (Have you seen any sailors around here, readers? We’re looking for sailors, and we’ll be asking everyone we know until we find some damn sailors.) You might find this whole package exhausting, fascinating, or a mix of both. That’s totally okay. Shenmue’s importance lies both in its limit-pushing technology and in the sense that time is standing still, that a series like this could only exist in the incredibly weird Y2K era (burning up the last piles of old Sega’s cash in the process). After all, the series reached the top of the weird Sega mountain via the wonderfully weird Samba de Amigo, Space Channel 5, and Seaman.

We only tested the pre-release version on Windows PC, and in addition to the aforementioned cumbersome controls, we found another puzzling limitation: a fixed 30 frames per second setting. Sega representatives did not respond to our questions about this limitation before the game’s release, so we don’t know if this limitation is due to the original code that set the animations to update at 30 frames per second, or if there is another issue. Still, the ability to at least increase the default camera movement refresh rate would have been welcome.
The menus in the PC version provide an easy route to supersampling, meaning we were able to run both games at an effective 8K resolution while setting the refresh rate to 30 frames per second on our high-end test unit. That’s probably because the game’s original low-poly models, strange shadows, and very blurry textures are all back in place. If there are any system optimizations going on under the hood, such as for lighting or rendering, they are completely undetectable. Luckily, I only noticed a few very brief bugs while playing, nothing worth reporting, and I was happy to get a stable, clean version of the game that runs at the resolution I wanted. (And it looks like SEGA chose to port the Xbox version of Shenmue II instead of the Dreamcast version, which means a bit more polygon count and an improved lighting system, so characters can have shadows and the shadow cards have a higher resolution.)

Attentive fans will notice at least some welcome updates to the game’s interface. Shenmue I now has the same button icons as Shenmue II, and the menu interfaces in both games have been optimized, making it easier to select everything from game options to martial arts moves to toy capsule collections. The fonts have also been completely revamped throughout the game, and while the changes are neither small nor subtle, it makes you wonder why Sega didn’t go a step further and rework the controls.

Another Sega option?

In my wildest dreams, this Shenmue duology would have come back as a VR experience. Frustrating controls would be eliminated by the headset control system, and the “boring” tasks and distractions of the game would take on a new quality through the immersive elements of VR. “I’m actually in 1980s Japan and China, looking for a toy capsule machine! Instead, those who come to Shenmue via this duology will have to overcome many hurdles from the late 90s (and that’s not all). “I’m a forklift driver” part of Shenmue I, ugh).

If you’re willing to spend the energy to forgive Sega’s age-old design decisions while navigating Suzuki’s ridiculously dense approach to dialogue, quest completion, and side hobbies, this compilation is for you. Meanwhile, if you’d like to see the spirit of Shenmue reflected in more modern gaming ideas, you’ll want to point your tank at Sega’s new Yakuza series (now available on Windows PC).