Endurance Run: Shenmue - Part 08

Ahaha yikes these comment sections. Anyway thanks for all the vids, y'all. I still enjoy 'em.

@lv4monk: I feel like Dan has fulfilled that role multiple times already. The first time the phone showed up he was like ' no other game let's you do this stuff!' , and whenever Vinny rages at something (no fast travel) Dan is there to tell him that you can't fast travel in real life neither. He even told Vinny about the Saturn, and that you can collect home versions. All that stuff clearly informs the viewer that Shenmue was an ambitious project that paved the road for new ideas about what a game can be.

I never got into the previous Endurance Runs but I am hooked on this one. Actually gonna go back and give the previous ones another go.

I hope they talk to Tom at least once every episode

@onemanarmyy: There is fast travel, but I can't imagine using it.

@onemanarmyy: More than Dan occasionally saying "no other game does that" is the player (Vinny) actually doing what no other game let you do.

Maybe it just comes down to a frequency thing but in no way do I get a sense of what separates Shenmue from its peers when watching these videos. It's not the rare "well that was weird" so much as the constant stream of random, otherwise useless little doodads to poke and prod, AI routines/personalities, interactive living spaces, and bizarre attention to detail when it comes to recreating a very specific time and place.

In a way it's kinda like playing No Man's Sky while only ever looking down at your feet, never straying from the obvious path. It's a game that lives and dies by it's "unimportant" side details, even though individually none are that impactful.

@madbootsy:The thing that gets me is there's a lot of people who don't like / have never played Shenmue, who keep making some variation of the statement, "Even if they DID do everything in the game, it still wouldn't be fun!" Well, how do you know? You literally do not know what you are missing.

I kind of hate accusations like this so I hate to make this implication, but I really do believe there are some people who are just having fun riding on the hate train that Jeff has been conducting for the last 8 years or whatever. I don't know why it's such an absurd concept that there could be good things about the game that keep people in love with it 17 years later. Even if it's not specifically your cup of tea, the game obviously has a massive cult following that broke a number of Kickstarter records. So maybe put away the pitchforks and try to understand what other people see in it before having your opinion cemented for you by the editors.

Like, I hate Final Fantasy games and think they're all garbage, but they keep selling by the millions so I understand that there must be SOMETHING appealing about them to a large audience of people, and I wouldn't try to deny that because it's a shitty thing to do.

I think Austin was Giant Bomb's chance at deep analysis with historical context, and now that he's gone it's not going to happen outside of viewer comments.

What am I missing? Just put it in spoiler tags.

@danryckert@alex@vinny

Reading hanzi & kanji is not at all like reading the standard english alphabet, even for first generation native speakers.

They still think they can meet Charlie at the arcade after having a fight with him and his henchmen. Strange. BUT I also thought that when I first played this, because the way that string of events plays out is weird.

Also, Tom's boombox TOTALLY is interactive.

@artisanbreads:Wow, that's some aggressive white-knighting, but good job nonetheless.

@gregalor: if it was done today, you'd have a quest log on the right side of the screen telling you exactly what to do next while an arrow over your head points you in the right direction with the minimap in the corner showing you a guide line of your projected path. Plus costume DLC.

Okay, they are totally trolling the comments on this one, right?

Find the Chinese dish shop Ruyssia... go to the map, first thing it centers on is China Ruyssia... proceed to look around and say it isn't on the map. I know people get up in arms about the CB gang missing obvious things, but I have never found that to be the case, other than situational awareness in levels, but this really takes the cake, they have to be doing this for entertainment purposes.

Also Shenmue continues to be trash, fans of this are insane.

If talking to major story characters is such an important thing then the game does a pretty shitty job letting the player know about it. Vinny is fumbling with the controls, that's true. But even if he interacted with the things in the environment, what would that get them? Playing the boombox?

My comment was as useless as interacting with this shallow world of 4 loading screens. Me, personally, don't care at all about anyone in this game. And at this point I can barely remember who the antagonist is.

Yep, this game is pure shite.

If it wasn't for the commentary this would be real boring. Vinny, Alex and Dan makes this watchable.

@dudelongcouch: it is still shitty design that the game doesn't present them with that information or make it readily apparent

@shiztoid: God forbid a video game doesn't hold you by the hand and make it a guided rail experience from start to finish. Remember, this was 1999 when some games still expected you to have a pulse. They don't need to be presented with any information to think, maybe these people that are close to Ryo are worth talking to every now and again. And I mean seriously, the game world is NOT large. It's dense, sure, but you can go to every area in Yamanose, Sakuragaoka, and Dobuita in less than like 10 minutes each day, just to see if there's a cutscene or dialogue worth hearing. Why would you not be expected to explore a little bit in an adventure game of all things?

@flagsdev:

Off the top of my head, the biggest thing is that there's a letter on Iwao's desk that he left to Ryo. It's his last words to his son and reveals that he knew that Lan Di was coming. There are also lots of items around the house, like two new fighting moves, and pictures of Ryo's friends, that reveal who else is worth talking to and who Ryo would have dialogue with. There are a lot of conversations with Ine-san and Fuku-san that add to the world building, and they could have even learned a new fighting move from Fuku-san if they'd gone to the dojo on day 2, but they missed it. You can also call all of your friends and have dialogue with them. There are cutscenes with the cat and the neighborhood kids if you feed the cat. They haven't thus far but in this video it sounded like they might start soon, so we'll see. If they hadn't been so scared of the other path into / out of Dobuita, they also could have gotten a cutscene with the old man, Yamagishi-san, where he talks about his past with Ryo's father and some things they did together, and then learned one of the best moves in the game from him. There's more things that I can't remember because I haven't actually played the game in 10 years, but it's been covered in other replies.

Now I know what you'll say, most of that stuff sounds boring as shit and you don't care if you're missing it, but the point of all of it is that it gives you contextual information about Ryo's life and personality and how his mission is affecting him and the people who love him. It all comes together to add more emotional weight to the story and make you care about this little town and the people who live in it. If you still don't care, then that's fine, the game is not for you and I will never begrudge you that. But that's the point of it.

The point is, the game is not as obfuscatory and awkard as they're representing it to be.

@dreiszen: "Overwhelming majority", that's untrue. They haven't talked to even half the characters in Dobuita alone. The reason they get a lot of "busy" characters is because they're mainly asking the ones walking around, or customers. Instead, they haven't entered enough shops or talked to shop owners. Either way, investigation threads change, one NPC who didn't help you with one thread, may help you with the next. In addition, they haven't even realised there's a fortune teller in Dobuita, who supplies you with clues on what to do next. If they would bother to examine the area more, perhaps they would of found it by now.

"there are clear prompts for some interactions with the environment but not others" In regards to buildings, not every building can be entered. Those A button prompts in front of doors indicate which buildings can be entered/interacted with and which can't. And for NPC's that are obstructed somehow, like if one is behind a counter or on the floor, zooming in on them allows Ryo to talk to them. Likewise, for everything else, you also need to zoom; opening drawers/ picking up things on tables/etc, all require using the zoom.

"the game just taught them that several important locations aren't mapped and have to be searched for" That's true, the maps in this game are largely superfluous. The game instead relies on the player zooming or using the head-look to look at shop signs and store fronts and naturally memorise the surroundings. This is a mechanic itself, as whenever Ryo looks at a store sign, a yellow subtitle at the bottom appears saying the name of the shop or open/close times. The developers wanted to encourage players to explore their surroundings, and not constantly refer to a map. I can totally understand people with poor sense of direction and memory (such as all 3 of these guys) not loving this, thankfully they rectified that with a full on map/marking system in Shenmue 2.

"I imagine someone with an in-depth knowledge of the game would be frustrated by this" I don't think you need in depth knowledge, you just need to be cognisant of the experience you're entering in to. At around 27 minutes in, Vinny says 'this is really all this game is, huh?'; he really didn't understand the sort of game he was playing in the first place.

They open the map and the first thing that shows right in the middle is "Chinese Russiya" but they all go like "yeah, it's definitely not on the map". I completely lost it.

Holy shit I was so confused when they did that. Right smack in the middle, super duper obvious. How did they not see it lol.

That's how I react every time I see Sonic too.

Man, when I saw the short run time on this video my first thought was the game locked up on them again.

SEGA put out the hd releases already!!!

If you were confused by what happened like the crew in this episode, Charlie wasn't at the arcade at 3 because he ambushes you earlier, at the construction site. He's the guy who gets kicked in the head with the soccer ball.

It's really interesting playing this at the same time as watching these videos.

I also got Gao Wen's grandmother to translate the letter, but I didn't hear about her from the kid. Instead it was Tao-san's employee at the coke machine who told me her. I guess she moonlights as a teacher or something.

Dan, modern Chinese has 7000 characters.

that Mambo N. 5 comment caught me off guard, good job Alex.

"Buy a capsule"

"That may take too long"

Old memories like those do not fade, huh Vinny? :P

@chillicothe: Shenmue would have been so much better if time passed as fast as it did at the Taps machine haha

who needs maps? everyone under 35 doesn't know directions or phone numbers. i'm in my 40's and it's disgusting how stupid young people are getting with all these electronic stupefying!! machines!

Just finished in less time than the time you've already spend!!

@ljrepoman: Wow guy, calm down.

Wait... so the Chinese grandmother runs a shop that sells China?

@melodiousj: And Indian immigrants often run Indian restaurants, isn't that WEIRD???

Whatever, I'm enjoying these. Let's keep it rollin'!

Episode 9

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/endurance-run-shenmue-part-09/2300-11561/

Matches my experiences pretty well - kanji is a huge hurdle to clear in learning Japanese. There are just so many, and differentiating and remembering them is a nightmare, at least initially.

I recently played Persona 4 The Golden in Korean and in Japanese - in the Korean version, I more or less picked up hangul as I went (_far_ from perfectly, but well enough to read names/skills/persona without thinking about it too much, and could at least hazard a guess at the pronunciation), despite having no prior exposure to it. For the Japanese version, I already knew katakana/hiragana, and had at least some exposure to Japanese speech/script prior to playing, but I probably only learnt ~20 kanji throughout (party names/elements for the most part) and had no idea how to pronounce most of them.

In this episode, they read a letter.