Endurance Run: Shenmue - Part 27 (Epilogue)

shen-moo

@obeast: I so wanted to see Vinnie's "Wall Hit" stat. When I played this back in the day, I nearly rage quit after considering some torture universe where keeping it at zero gives the "good" ending.

Even if Shenmue 2 wasn't a proper ER but more like a weekly/semi-monthly feature |I'd be cool with it. Too bad they hate the game, as the second really is more interesting and they introduce some new things.

I remember really liking Shenmue when it came out, but now feels like it could've been a graphic adventure/point-and-click and I would've been fine.

I really like Chai's theme. It's a tune that I would be super nostalgic for right now if I had played the game.

No, because while the tree in Shenmue 2 is based off a peach tree, the name "Shenmue tree" is fictional. Like everything else about the Shenmue games, this is part of the slow burn. You're not meant to know what it means until the end of the second game. Some people will find that to be a weird choice, but it's deliberate.

So is that just common knowledge in Japan? The game seems to make no reference to it.

I have to give credit to this game. Despite all its flaws, it really tries to make the world seem like a real believable place. Too many modern open world games just don't give shit. Looking at you, Watch_dogs and all your bus stops but no buses.

I regret never having owned a Dreamcast. I bet I would have enjoyed this game back in my teenage years.

I'm glad I never had to play this game. Holy cow this game sucks. Glad you guys endured it! Thank you for all the laughs

Thank you for this endurance run. Wasn't sure at first, but your commentary made it very enjoyable. Loved it.

I was curious myself, so I searched online a bit. Apparently, it's the name of a tree (possibly an ancient tree) that has the Shenhua flower. It resides in a small village name Bailu, which is where the stone mirrors are from. It appears towards the end of Shenmue II.

It makes a difference in the sense that you can find one or two effective moves and then make them really effective, so that you do them very quickly and do more damage. Then you can just spam them and it makes the fights much easier. The way it works is repeating the move in free training fills up the bar, and when it hits certain break points it levels up into a more effective version. There's a very strong elbow move that you can do extremely quickly that knocks people over once it's levelled up, and you can win almost every fight just by using that over and over. The idea is that your proficiency with the moves carried over to Shenmue 2. Also, you can get move scrolls throughout the game but if you don't train with them, you can't do them in a battle. So you have to learn them overnight, particularly the throws, which are very powerful.

But Vinny didn't have much problem with the fights anyway, so it wasn't necessarily worth spending time training. Definitely could have used the bed time training though. It's remarkable that they never even pressed the button really. If they had levelled up a move they'd have seen it hits harder, and I think is less likely to be parried. You can see in the final fight Chai parries almost every move Vinny tries that isn't a counter, and the fight goes on for a long time, because none of his moves are levelled up.

Since they won't be able to carry their move progress over to Shenmue 2, and anyhow they sort of did away with the training idea in Shenmue 2 anyway, there wasn't much reason to do it in the end.

I love that Vinny never went into the Abe store in Sakuragaoka. It's pretty wild since he ran past it twice a day every day, pretty much. Quite an achievement for someone who is usually so curious.

Sweet dreams, Shenmue.

@shaunk: Dio is just an overcompensated Japanese R-sound, so it's still somewhat correct (just a bad accent). Absolutely no one in the game says Ryu, which the crew says a good 90% of the time.

I wound up feeling similarly. While Vinny, Alex and Dan have a pretty good dynamic going, I don't think the material ended up doing any favors for the endurance run format or vice versa. Shenmue seems to be a game designed for a leisurely and explorative play style, while endurance runs and quick looks tend to work better when the player is consistently encountering new stimulus to react to. I feel that the nature of this game resulted in an endurance run that had moments of brilliance interspersed with periods of little interest.

Getting a demo derby vibe from this.

Are you serious? The game pronounces his name multiple different ways. It's literally been the topic of conversation in multiple episodes on how the game has no one set pronunciation of his name. Half the cast calls him Dio, for fucks sake.

@melodiousj: The moves not only get more powerful, but faster. Some of the moves become new animations, basically new moves, when leveled up.

How did that stuff work? I get that your moves got better if you spent time training, but I'm a bit fuzzy on the details.

Also, the million dollar question: if Vinny had maintained his training, how big a difference would it have made during those late-game battles?

Can't wait for that Shenmue II!

There were stats and leveling in Shenmue, they just didn't do any of it lol. Man i want to fire up shenmue 2 now!

Dat shredding butt rock during the forklift preview!

Loved the Endurance Run. Cannot wait for Shenmue 2: Hot Dog Boogaloo. That passport disc sure is a weird thing, but I guess a cool inclusion that didn't happen much with most games. I will have nightmares about Marks' mouth.

My favorite part was the action shot of the map getting spun around.

Yakuza Endurance run

I only know one thing about Shenmue 2, but god damn it makes me want to see Vinny play that game so god damn much!

@corwag: Sorry you were offended, I forgot some people are more sensitive than others.

Stay golden Shenmue.

Mark Mark, I know you're excited, but take it easy, man!

@jetlag: Does it matter?

@jetlag: The shenmue was in your heart all along!

All that and we never learned what a Shenmue is.

Bring on Shenmue 2

Thank you! What a journey.

thank you for playing this so i didn't have to.

I CANT WAIT for when they get to experience Joy's theme(and Joy of course). Good times ahead if they do end up playing Shenmue 2.

@danryckert@vinny You meet Xiu Ying in Hong Kong in Shenmue 2. You also sorta meet Sha Hua, but she's not until like the very end of Shenmue 2.

I bet this game looked unbelievable if you saw a trailer in 1998. I never had a dreamcast so I never followed anything, but this sure as hell blew anything the playstation had at the time out of the water.

I'm gonna miss having one of these every weekday.

@corwag: God forbid Vinny show some class. Who's the overly sensitive one here?

Also, this was eye opening for me, as my older brother had the Dreamcast (I believe he bought it specifically for Shenmue to begin with) and played the first. Not too much later I owned the original XBox, and at some point was curious about Shenmue 2, and...my memory may be hazy, but I feel as if the second one was nowhere near as tedious as the first. I remember the one thing that bummed me out was that there was no forklift driving in 2, but now I can see that I did not miss much. I doubt I would have had the patience to play the first one for more than an hour at that age.

I vaguely remember something resembling fast travel in Shenmue 2, but I also remember a lot of "Hey old man, do you know where _____ is?"
"Why yes, in fact, I'm headed there now if you wish to follow me!"

Thankfully you wouldn't have to control Ryo while he was following anyone's slow ass to the desired destination, but often I would literally start following some old guy to some shop or something, put the controller down, go make a sandwich, come back and see that this guy was still taking his sweet ass time getting to where I/we needed to go, I'd finish the sandwich, then come back and maybe wait another minute or two before arriving.

So maybe I should have just looked up where locations were instead of following old dudes everywhere, but I just know that if I could drive back then I would have started that shit, run some errands and come back.

This is art.

Even food for kittens!

This whole endurance run is great, but I had no idea how hilarious this supplemental material would be. Bless those beasties for doing this disc as well. This may be the most I have laughed out loud at any video feature on this entire site, and that is saying a lot.

Bummers Tom wasn't one of the seven characters.

The Japanese voice acting of the European Shenmue 2 on Dreamcast is great, plus you can carry over some of your Shenmue 1 save data, so hopefully they go with the Dreamcast version for Shenmue 2 (along with using a Dreamcast VGA box next time).

But if they go the XBox route, it would be best to play it on an actual XBox, as there's a load of bugs and glitches when played through 360 backwards compatibility.

Was this comment really necessary?

Would love to see you guys do Shenmue 2. It's a much better game, too.

@bcom33: Well, I've noticed that Vinny has a tough time with Japanese names/words like many people. It's a thing. By that I don't just mean it's difficult b/c it's a foreign language whose words/names have zero meaning to them so their minds don't click, but Japanese syllables (or mora, I should really say) sound similar so they say a shu instead of a shi or a hi instead of a ha. Hayabusa might be recalled as Hayubusa or Hiyabusa like Ryo as Ryu. Dan is actually better since I've heard him say Ryo correctly more and then going back to Ryu right after Vinny says it. Remember a recent Beastcast where Vinny was kinda amazed that Alex said Konohamaru (or some other character? from Naruto) correctly and without difficulty and Alex said he's had more practice recently from all the JP wrestling?

RPG...RPG never changes.