Endurance Run: Shenmue - Part 17

@gyozilla: There are cutscenes and fights that can only be found on specific dates at specific times in specific places.

@gyozilla: On the contrary, by beating the game early you miss out on seeing neat stuff like the girls in kimonos for Christmas/New Year's. Come on, you should know better by now what kind of game Shenmue is :)

@scarbearer: Alex kinda sorta always sounds like that :P

I can't wait until we get to the final episode and Vinny experiences the totally bullshit ending to this game. He's going to be so angry.

For a few minutes I thought Shenmue 1 had come to a close. I was so happy.

@lovcol: You keep replying to people, yourself here. People generally don't care if other people say that the game hasn't aged well. It did a lot of impressive things for its time.

@gyozilla: Nope it's just dumb luck they did this, the only thing that's set is the weather on each calendar day as the weather is based on the real weather for the real locations on those dates. You get nothing for beating the game quickly, and I suspect their aim was for the game to be slow.

As far as I remember the only major date based thing in Shenmue 1 is if you take too long you get the bad end which , but the date is so far out the only sane way to see it is to keep messing up the warehouse bit. Most of the extra stuff is actually triggered more by exploration or by visiting certain characters. Shenmue 2 has a lot more stuff linked to dates based in it.

Is there any fork lifting in this game? I've yet to see what this commotion of the fork lift is all about.

Seems to me like that's more the game's fault, not the crew's.

@ghost_cat: The Shenmue speedrun is 8 hours. Reaching this point takes 2, fork-lifting takes the next 4.

Vinny has become Shenmue: "I will make little progress for 30 minutes. Wanna see more? Come back at 3am est tomorrow!"

@nasher27: The game is split into days that take roughly an hour of real time. You can say a lot of things about Shenmue, but it actually lends itself really well to consistent hour-long episodes. How are back-to-back 30 minute episodes the game's fault? They're just calling it every chance they get, which is a crew decision.

The more I hear Dan defend Tom, the more I think that Dan once lied to someone about knowing where a warehouse district was and is now defending himself through Tom.

But it did them so baaaadly.

Like you get points sure for being the ones to try it first but not full credit.

I actually remember people disliking Shenmue when it came out because of the waiting. If I'm not mistaken most thought it was an interesting idea, but dull. So saying people were impressed back in the day seems wrong to me. I always thought Shenmue was a niche thing, that most people thought was just alright. I may be misremembering, but I remember it having review scores around 7s and 8s. I could be wrong.

Airport safe snow-globes made me laugh.

@ungodly: It's always been divisive and that's reflected in it's review scores. Still, they are mostly very positive:

THAT GUY ATE A TICKET!

@squirrelnacho: Well, you did come to me first..

Anyways, I'd love to like this game. It certainly has aspects that are interesting even though not implemented in a great way. Reminds me a bit of "The Last Express" (real-time adventure/investigation game) from 1997, which I liked.

That was great. Best part so far. Disagree with their opinion of Arthur though. Dudley Moore is a real convincing drunk in that movie, and Liza Minnelli looks surprisingly hot in that flick. Yes I'm old.

@squirrelnacho: Yeah, cuz Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Super Mario World totally don't hold up.

@nasar7: right on. I remember Dreamcast magazine being hot for it, but I never trusted the official magazine's reviews of first party games. When Shenmue was first announced, it sounded amazing, but I stopped playing a little bit after the first QTE. Went right back to playing Maken X. Now that was a fucking video game!

Are times on the website in Pacific?

Do not really see why people love this game. Granted it was in a different time in gaming but hey who am i to judge.

@johnseminario: So to settle this, I just checked Episode 09.

At 11:19, while asking around for about Warehouse 8, they talk to Tom, and....

Ryo does not ask Tom at all about the Warehouse No. 8, unlike nearly every other character.

As a result, Tom can't have lied, because he was never asked. It was Ryo's fault, not Tom's. Tom Johnson is innocent, and Vinny and Alex have defamed this pure man's good character. They even try to ask him again, and Alex explicitly notes that they can't ask Tom about the Warehouse.

HOWEVER

A scant 11 seconds earlier, at 11:08, they ask Honey about Warehouse No. 8... and Honey claims to have no idea. Either she only goes there for the first time after Ryo first arrives at the harbor, or she's the liar.

FREE TOM

@crushed: so if I'm reading you right, you're saying that honey is tom, and Tom is a warehouse

@lovcol: It definitely was not a game that appealed to everyone back then.

What are you even talking about? Some games hold up better than others. Those games didn't try as many new things.

Santa lied. There was no special christmas deal to eat :(

I have to watch this later, im glad they continued i honestly thought they quit last episode lol.

I'm not sure what your argument is here. Are you saying you wanted a longer episode or a shorter one?

Also the point of an Endurance Run is to "endure" through a game in its entirety. Everything is done on-screen and nothing is cut.

Keep in mind that this concept started with Ryan Davis' desire to play through Persona 4 when he didn't otherwise have time to do so. You can currently watch all 150+ hours of that playthrough and others in their entirety, without a single edit.

I knew nothing about Shenmue before this ER started, and each episode I become more impressed with it. If I'd been able to play this when it was first released I would have gone crazy for it, and even now despite all its obvious flaws I think it's a deeply impressive accomplishment and an important part of gaming history.

Reading the comments is not a good way to judge the consensus of the audience.

I got this funny feeling in my hands... its like I just wanna... cut Tom's hair.....!!

@ungodly: I completely forgot about Maken X! Yeah, a game like that makes it apparent that Shenmue is more life-sim than game. I totally get why a lot of people are not into that.

You mean Vinny I think.

Friendly reminder that the the longest episode in the first 11 episodes of the persona run was 35 minutes long.

You definitely can win that fight but it's hard. Lots of low kicks.

That looked... a lot like VF stuff. Is there actually a really deep fighting game in there somewhere, shenmue fans? Cause those were neutral reversals of punches and the way you dodge in VF.

@crushed: Thank you for the investigative journalism on this wrongfully convicted beautiful dancing hot dog man!!

@gyozilla: Off the top of my head, I can only think of one cutscene that you need to hang around AFTER Christmas to see. I think everything else is doable in pretty much any time frame. I could be wrong though. I know Shenmue II has a pretty long and involved sidequest where you need to do certain things on specific dates, but I don't remember Shenmue I having anything like that.

@grondoth Yes. They can also train up specific moves to be more effective and assign moves to the L and R buttons for easy access, if I remember right.

Very astute observation! I would still say that Tom AND Honey are innocent as the Hot Dog Truck is parked near the Old Warehouse District, so just because they are there doesn't mean they know what's around the corner. And according to what we have seen, they only recently moved to the Harbor area just when Ryo got there. So as brand new Hot Dog Truck Residents (Their legal title of course), I wouldn't expect them to know the area well enough to know the Old Warehouse District and that maybe they just picked that spot because it was open?

FREE TOM AND HONEY

@grondoth: Yeah, the fight system is basically VF-lite. There are lots of cool arm, leg, and throw moves that you can train in order to master them (complete with new animation upgrades once you master a move). In addition, some of the elders around town can teach you new, hidden moves and you can find some at the house/buy really powerful ones from the antique shop. This game is very niche but if you're into some very specific things (adventure/rpgs, dating sims, fighting games, old arcade games, japanese culture) it's a really cool experience.

Just R, L still serves as the run button in battle. L + A makes for a sweet drop kick, IIRC.

@azuresama: Actually that's not true about the weather. The weather system itself is also randomized, but there is an option when you go to the options menu on the games menu screen to set the weather to be specific to the actual weather data that was going on at that point in the game. I'm guessing that the weather is randomized on their play settings.

@mirakurutaimu: The times are your local time zone.

On the subject of Shenmue, coming as someone who never played through the game until about a year a half ago, I actually really enjoyed it when I played through it, but I also didn't mainline it like GBE is doing, I did a LOT of side stuff, lots of capsules, cassete tapes, fight moves and soda were bought, rest assured. I'll post a link to my thoughts here, but if you want a brief synopsis, I really enjoyed the game b getting immersed in its setting, characters, attention to detail and devotion to realism, innovation and story, but totally can see why the game is super divisive and why people hate it. And again, I played through it a year ago, I don't have any nostalgia for it. Anyway, here's the link to my thoughts. http://www.giantbomb.com/shenmue/3025-602/forums/it-s-2015-and-i-finished-shenmue-for-the-first-tim-1768579/#10

@chicken008: Surely not, I was up at 3AM EST last night and this episode definitely wasn't up until I woke up this morning, but the time the video is uploaded shows 3:00AM.

@mirakurutaimu: ER is uploaded at 3am PT / 6 am ET. I'm in the eastern time zone and the times appear like this for me.

@chicken008: weird, guess I must have my timezone set up wrong, guess it's time to look into that

@grondoth: The fighting literally IS Virtua Fighter, which Suzuki directed. Of course, no one on these videos is going to tell you that.