Backtracking is a blogging project that I’m embarking on in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
Why I Chose This Game
Shenmue made its way to my list in a different way than most of the other titles. It's influential, of course, a notable influence on games like the Yakuza and Grand Theft Auto series'. But I haven't played any of those games. It was also the most expensive game ever made at the time of its release, which is fascinating to compare to today's ultra-expensive games. Shenmue is also famous for its hilariously clumsy English voice acting and goofy investigation sequences around things like finding out where sailors hang out.
None of those things are reasons that I played Shenmue. No, the reason I played it was a trio of video game critics whose writing and commentary are influential for me — specifically, the hosts and guest of the Shenmue episode of Abnormal Mapping: Jackson Tyler, Em Marko, and Dia Lacina.
Following compelling critics with whom I disagree has been a fundamental part of my own growth as a writer. Jackson seems to hate everything I like. Em invites chaos seemingly on purpose with a number of hot takes (just listen to the opening of that episode). Dia regularly comes out swinging against beloved mainstream titles (and tends to be entirely justified in doing so), and sings the praises of games that are often a little obtuse for me. I disagree with these critics probably more often than I agree. All of that said, they're some of the most incisive, thoughtful, and earnest people in the space. And when they find something they truly want to celebrate, it tends to really deserve the attention.
What I Thought
Despite being drawn in by a recent critical evaluation, I went into Shenmue largely fresh. I didn't listen to any of the aforementioned Abnormal Mapping episode until after I'd rolled credits, though I knew the gist of the hosts' overall impression from comments on Twitter and Dia Lacina's writing.
It's hard to get far without realizing that this game is loaded with mechanical ideas that are loathed by modern gamers: real-time clocks, missable side stories, quick-time events, gacha machines (alright, fine, this one is a joke), and lots of tedious interactions with busses, phones, and Ryo's notebook full of reminders. Shenmue tends to be meandering, awkward, and occasionally inscrutable. It's also, despite it all, really damn good.
Despite drawing heavily on the martial arts movies during its cutscenes, most of Shenmue's moment-to-moment play is grounded in daily life. Throughout the game, players contend with a real-time clock that slowly advances as they guide teen protagonist Ryo Hazuki as he looks for the man who killed his father by interacting with the people and places in his hometown. In the early parts of the game, Ryo will frequently have to wait until a particular hour before he can continue his search, meaning that he'll need to find ways to kill time. The clock builds the sense of anticipation as you move between steps of Ryo's investigations, but it also builds a rhythm of daily life. You might kill a few hours at the arcade, practice martial arts with Fuku-San, or stop by the store to buy a treat for the injured kitten that Megumi is nursing back to health. Despite Ryo's distance from his loved ones, who might resist his fixation on revenge, elements of his daily life still intercede.
This relationship to time changes as the game progresses. Ryo Hazuki begins the story distant and aimless, reeling from the death of his father and unsure how to proceed beyond a single-minded fixation on finding the man responsible. Ryo follows a meandering sequence of tasks in the early part of the story, inching closer to his goal with each curious question he asks of those around him. In between these connected dots, he continually brushes off those closest to him, stepping into their lives only to defend them from direct harm.
As Ryo gets closer to the dangerous elements who were involved in his father's murder, the story escalates and the underutilized combat system begins to come into play more often. Ryo's loved ones fret over his safety, and he becomes increasingly frustrated with and estranged from them. Ryo is drawn farther and farther from what was once his daily life, and goes to increasing lengths to pursue his revenge.
This crescendos when Ryo gets a full-time job just to draw out his enemies. The function of the in-game clock inverts; now, every day is subsumed by Ryo's work responsibilities, turning about 25 minutes or so of real-life gameplay into pure forklift operation. The plot events begin to unfold around Ryo's workday, and though he can still explore in the evenings and nights, the sense of disconnection from the people in his life is made even more palpable. As his pursuit entangles him in machinations bigger than he understands, the reins of the story are gradually taken away. By the end, Ryo is locked into increasingly scripted cutscenes and gameplay sequences, as if carried off by a river of destiny that he was so determined to wade into. Some of the later moments of the story include fond (yet stilted) goodbyes with characters that Ryo assumed would be fixtures of his hometown, people whom he could always come back to when this was all over. It turns out, instead, that some of them have aspirations of their own.
in the first 2 discs of shenmue the game moves lightning fast as days become an interconnected weave of linking clues and understanding the space. in the final disc things slow to a crawl as each day brings little new events. this is an accurate portrayal of “getting a job”
— yuuko from nichijou (@headfallsoff) October 20, 2023
Shenmue's greatest strength lies in its straddling of grandiosity and mundanity, and its understanding that the two are ultimately intertwined. As Ryo alternates between smalltalk with his neighbors and dramatic fights in seedy parlors and back alleys, a picture of the normal life he might have once lived begins to emerge. The soundtrack moves between somber ballads with beautiful erhu melodies, rhythmic urban backtracks, and momentous orchestral swells. Ryo's sense of companionship with an orphaned kitten gets the same gravitas as late-night stare-downs with gangsters at the docks.
I'm not convinced that the overarching story is all that interesting, at least not in this first entry. The rumblings of a mystic martial arts adventure reverberate in the distant background, focalized occasionally through particular plot beats, but existing largely on the sidelines of Ryo's pursuit for revenge. The game is so much more about details; about the immaculate melodrama of Ryo's brushes with criminal elements, about the bustle of his little hometown full of folks who know him, and about the myriad ways he can interact with the world to kill time, or perhaps lose track of it.
The game ends with a voiceover, the final line of which is "And thus, the saga begins." In the end, Shenmue's scale eclipses even itself, gesturing at a grand destiny for Ryo, teaching him a combat moves he won't even get a chance to use (until the sequel). The box art and opening sequence of the game feature an unnamed woman who never appears at all, except during cryptic dream sequences, evidently a part of some future plot that awaits him beyond this game's story. Shenmue's ambitions seem to be simply insurmountable (evidenced by the fact that the series remains incomplete after 2019's Shenmue III, with no news of a fourth title being developed). And while the ambition often leads to setups that don't pay off and awkwardly elaborate systems, it also makes the game the beautiful mess that it is.
Reflections
The sense of grandeur with which Shenmue holds itself seems like it should be corny and outdated, but even as the technologically impressive details have lost their luster, the game that they cohere shines through nonetheless. The whole experience feels inexplicably stronger, nostalgic and timeless.
All of this exists only underneath a layer of clunkiness, whether it's Ryo's awkward movement, a combat system that's apparently lifted out of the Virtua Fighter series but not well explained in context, and a dozen other protruding corners and snags.
This blogging project, which I started last year thinking I'd have at least completed one game per month, has driven me to play games that I might not have had patience for casually. Most of them have been quite rewarding all on their own, but they've also helped me develop my appreciation of the craft. Shenmue was only within my reach because of the patience and attentiveness that I've developed playing slightly older games, games with awkward interfaces or frequent bits of tedium, the kinds of games I might have thoughtlessly turned off earlier in my life.
Age of Empires II forced me to admit that there are some genres that just don't appeal to me, despite my earnest efforts. But Shenmue proved that the patience and grace I've been trying to develop can help me access games that are genuinely remarkable.