Endurance Run: Shenmue - Part 27 (Epilogue)

Extra Episode next?

Post Morten

Ya know, the repeated mispronunciation of Ryo throughout the entire endurance run is pretty dumb. It's a three letter word. Basically think of it as saying Rio from Rio de Janeiro, but with more emphasis on the second syllable. It's not hard.

It'd be like if someone called the three guys Vanny, Dun, and Elex regardless of how many times they heard how their names are actually pronounced. Characters in the game repeatedly say Ryo's name correctly. There's no reason not to correct themselves besides laziness.

"And even food for kittens! But what am I gonna do with cat food?"

Can't think of a more appropriate way for this series to end.

I think we all learned that it's WAY uncool to blackmail people.

Shenmue: loved it back in the day because of its ambitious design and despite it's flaws. Today I think it's neat to look back on as a proto open-world adventure game/RPG, but a lot of its core mechanics are rough due to it taking a backseat to the new tech that was being shown off.

In order to be a success Shenmue III must not be the same type of game, and take to heart lessons learned from Part II and the countless other games in its vain since then.

Looking forward to the Shenmue II ER, as I've only played through that game once, and it was the EU version w/Japanese VO. Finding out m save wouldn't work with that version was probably the most heart-breaking thing 15 year old me had to endure up to that point.

Wow, I don't remember the Passport trailers. The Forklift Preview looks like a straight-up Youtube parody video.

Man, Alex is right. These trailers are almost as bad as the NMS stuff. Not quite at that level, but the trailers actually made the game look GOOD even by today's standards. I'd certainly buy it if it came out today if Shenmue didn't exist.

Mark talking about money sounds like a Wesley Willis song

Mark kind of looks like a Khajiit.

I gotta say, that "Oh" moment regarding the training system felt real good.

It took a week, but episode 2 of GI's Shenmue 2 run is up now. They were probably scared stiff that this run hadn't ended yet. ;)

That's pretty cool. I had no idea. I never really felt like it was poorly translated, it's just sort of strange. It's not even bad strange. Like an old movie where all the characters speak really quickly.

Ha! I had a feeling the trailers would be screaming, "action Action ACTION".

RPG has changed! into a completely different genre that has very little in common with a RPG.

And so the latest Endurance Run ends, not with a bang but with a whimper. My overall feelings on the video feature itself was pretty middling. I thought Alex and Vinny had so many hilarious riffs and reactions throughout. Dan was okay sometimes but I thought he added very little with his special brand of podcast banter. I ended up treating it like a podcast by having the video playing in the background while I did other stuff. More importantly I don't think this game ended up being a very good choice for one of these. In the end this felt like a really long Choose Our Own Adventure, with a game that isn't very fun both in tone and game mechanics. Maybe it's just that the "Endurance Run" branding has less meaning behind it today since the site has featured more and more videos of full playthroughs of games. Even if the prerequisite is to play a long and quirky Japanese game, Shenmue just doesn't hang in the quality of craziness as any of the previous E Run's. In conclusion, thanks for the content and for the website. Keep up the good work.

thanks for enduring!

That forklift trailer is beyond amazing, especially considering what it actually entails. If you told me someone on Giantbomb made that as a joke in response to the forklift segment I would not question it for a second.

They would have inevitably spoiled almost every major event in the game if they had watched those promotional trailers first. Even if they knew better than to check that part out they'd still spoil the reveal of not-Gollum. Often the best parts of any Endurance Run is hearing their reactions to things like that for the first time. They made the right call, even if unkowningly.

Besides, we all know they'd only remember like 10% of what they said once they started playing.

Great run, thanks guys!

Since I'm sure that someone here wants to listen to this seperately.

Man, Mark's face looking straight at the camera is nightmare fuel... Thank goodness we didn't have to see that in the game itself.

Also, there is a 2 hour video of someone actually connecting to the online part of the Shenmue Passport. The video was recorded and uploaded back in '12 (at least according to someone in the comments who claims to be the person that recorded it), so it looks like Sega kept that stuff up for a good while assuming it finally got shut down.

Edit: Between the thumbnail and manually skipping through it, it looks like some data was eventually lost. I'm actually curious about what was there if those screens didn't show the "required data cannot be retrieved at this time" error.

@grulet: It was worth it.

It was all worth it for this.

Well that was fun! See you next time, ER.

@pxbart: I think Shenmue III can still champion the idea of very detailed living-breathing small world; but the content and the story of that world needs to be more interesting, modern, and fun.

If you haven't seen the Mega64 Shenmue skit, I'd suggest giving that a look.

I never got online with Shenmue but you could trade capsule toys. I was so jealous of anyone who could ;_:

@zeik: I meant more the information page rather than the other stuff (but you're right, I guess if they even just saw Chai that would've spoilt it somewhat). I previously mentioned levelling up your moves and mastering them was something you could do in one of the earlier episodes and people called me out on it because the game doesn't tell you. This is a game from an era where reading the manual mattered. It's only more recently that they've been phased out because games became better at tutorialising and teaching the player (although some games can just be a little too hand-holdy). I had to read the manual for MGS 4 just because some of the gameplay systems aren't exactly spelled out to the player and I don't think I would've ever found otherwise.

RPG...RPG never changes.

@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?

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

Was this comment really necessary?

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.

Bummers Tom wasn't one of the seven characters.

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.

Even food for kittens!

This is art.

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.

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

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

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.

@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 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.

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

Thank you! What a journey.

Bring on Shenmue 2

All that and we never learned what a Shenmue is.

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

@jetlag: Does it matter?