yup

Mostly because retarded fanboys can't argue about graphics.

***** DEUS EX & UNREAL LOOK MUCH BETTER WITH 3Dfx CARD LUL LOL OMG! But yeah.

agreed

Don't worry. There's a third one that was crowdfunded a long time ago by the creator of the game. It broke a world record for being the fastest, highest grossing Kickstarter campaign. Just in case you didn't know. 😐

And the lack of those free battles for fours as you play killed the game for many fanboys. It should have been all over the areas, too late now though.

Such a deep battle system that, sadly, barely even showed up in the actual game.

Dmitriy Odesskiy You missed the point of the game then. It’s called restraint. Who would Ryu be fighting in a small town full of friends? This isn’t Yakuza or True Crime. That strong sense of restraint really shines when you finally unleash everything you’ve learned in the 70 man battle, the ultimate fight for survival. People like you are why we got those shitty Star Wars prequels. “HUUURRRRR, NEEDS MOAR LIGHTSABERS.”

Gabbiadini Really? Explain :O

Are there any similar games with similar system is yakuza?

Agreed, in a very real way.

Check out sega's yakuza series, they're basically spiritual successors of shenmue

vammainenlapsi I know the Yakuza series, and no, they have nothing in common with each other apart from the fact the protagonist from Yakuza looks a bit like Ryo Hazuki. Its not even developed by Yu Suzuki san. Yakuza story about japanese mafia gangs, Shenmue, a boy on a quest for revenge against his father's murder and uncovering the mistery behind it. For me they are two completely different games.

nico5179 Agreed, even if Yakuza took some inspiration from Shenmue, both series are totally different.

I see this comment and face palm because sega is still bringing quality with the Yakuza series and most recently Judgement..to me, the yakuza series pays the same amount of detail kamurocho and how the city changes in difference time periods..

You mean Dreamcast 2?

+jsk_1789 mmmm... i think xbox is like a "dreamcast slim" and not a "dreamcast 2"

"Slim"... gnaaa xD

Dreamcast was ahead of it's time unfortunately for all the wrong reasons and was faced out pretty easily by more powerful consoles a year later. Had the Saturn being more successful maybe Sega would have had more time to add much better components like a more powerful graphics chip or even an actual GPU and a DVD drive.

Dreamcast was the xbox x of the ps2 Era.

Most powerful console of 20th century

Yup. They didn't skimp on hardware. I mean the Quake III Dreamcast port was pretty much PC perfect and Quake III was a tough game to run back in 1999/2000. But then the DC had the PowerVR2 chip and a hefty 200Mhz Risc CPU so it clearly had the hardware.

That award goes to the PS2, but the Dreamcast was far and away much more advanced than the other consoles it competed with when it released. Too bad it didn't sell very well...

What award exactly? power? no the gamecube and the xbox were more powerful. Tech? without the dvd it was pretty much obsolete. It didn't had a modem or a broadband conection, until it was sold separately and only some games used it. The only award it deserves is that it had good games.

+delukard07 TRUTH!

yep. same here.

Just as it is for me, with Panzer Dragoon Saga !

Still haven't completed that one. I think I am on disc 3 somewhere...

First game I ever felt really invested in, absolutely captivated. I had to wake up early to play everyday. Good memories. Good memories indeed.

December 29th, 1999 in Japan. November 8th, 2000 in NA. So it was very, very late 1999, pretty much 2000, even when it came out in Japan. Still insanely impressive, but not "1998."

Let's not forget Outcast from 1999 as well for PC which was the first true open-world game while Shenmue was semi-open, just like the PS4 Pro is semi 4K but not true UHD.

@@protestantsfailurend7890 it was rendered in voxels and was a terrible game

Well-said. It was breathtaking.

not a problem anymore now with Shenmue HD Collection. Load times are instant now.

TheGideonGames Metal Gear Solid 4 anyone?

Valid point. Videogames have refused to scale back even though nothing has been incredibly improved since the pioneers like Mario64 and Shenmue.

Brayan Argandona Florentino Those were installs, not load times.

@@FoundationsofPause You seem to have no idea what you're talking about but video games dont have to "scale back" on anything to avoid having long load times. Bethesda are just a bunch of inbreds

gameplay wise Alundra 2 for PS1 was also admittedly fairly impressive playing through it, it had lots of varied 3D puzzles and the voice acting was superb, with comedic storytelling not unlike animated movies of the time. Shadowman wasn't bad either, an impressive Zelda/tomb raider hybrid, but fugly graphics but those were like some of the first console 3D adventure games

It hasn't aged well, but I think it has a lot to do with the Dreamcast controller design. Dual analog controls would have made this game quite a lot more playable by today's standards. I loved it back in the day but it definitely feels awkward now.

@Reginald Rivera There was nothing ailien there. Kung Fu theater was on tv every Saturday in the US. This was perfect. It's more about the lack of free battles much sooner, plus the controller. I love playing it with a PS4 conttoller now. Feels so right...

@@aaronbuffalo7769 Alundra was better than Alundra 2. OoT was 100 times better than Alundra 2, as far 3-D action RPGs go.

***** Sorry. Yeah 80s would be unreal.

Lol that sounds ridiculous and you're stupid enough to believe it.

I wouldn't be surprised. Yu Suzuki made one dev spend a week on programming the correct physics for phone cords in Shenmue.

I'm sure by programming he meant "animating" the phone cords because there is no way it would simulate the physics on that hardware. And guess what, making a ton of pre baked animations takes a ton of time and effort. Remember how this one guy spent two years animating Batman's cape for the Batman game simply because the hardware couldn't afford cloth simulations so it needed a lot of ore rendered animations to blend realistically. So all in all , I believe the phone cord anecdote but I still have my doubts regarding the Feng Shui story.

No, I do mean physics. Giving the individual loops a weight and an elasticity. And the room generation story is covered in "DF Retro: Shenmue 2".

I googled it. Apparently both the Feng Shui and phone cord story is true. The game does have a Feng Shui algorithm built in and Shenmue2 does simulate realistic Phone Cords and handcuffs. It was quite unbelievable.

Poorly Playing Retro I had this game on Dreamcast, back in 03 I was 6 year's old it was in Japanese, was the best game I played! Still have memories of this beautiful game. Especially the game cover artwork. I sold it to a friend when I was in Junior high, stupid 12 year old me uhh 😣. I hope to play it again someday.

I remember in my teens that I always wanted to play Shenmue on the Dreamcast but I can't, because it cost money and it's really hard to find where I from. Getting Shenmue on the emulator is rough because it is confusing to boot it up and I get worried if it may damaged the computer. Finally I can get the game on the PS4 for next month

i'm ten, but i understand how good it looks for 1999. i love shenmue, i have it on an emulator

Dreamcast is basically a scaled down Naomi arcade hardware with some differences: memory which was expensive back then. So it matched majority of arcade level even Model 3 (Sega did a demo of Super GT, shame the company did not go further).

Yup, that's right. I miss the big tech jumps each new console generation used to bring with it.

You must realize that the character model examples for the PC were from 1997 and there were many more NPC's, thus they had to cut down on the poly count. Shenmue got to spend its poly budget on very little but detailed character models instead of putting 50+ NPC's within view,

One of the best looking games in history for me.

...what?

It still is. That art design, that architecture and that obsession for perfectionism are still unmatched. The inside of every drawer is carved in a different way for f sake.

The batteries, the potato chips, the cassette tapes and the wrinkles on people's fingers. What more can you expect.

We didn't get it on Dreamcast in the US

I loved it when it came out. It was jaw dropping to experience in 1998 and still is impressive today

What? Shenmue sold very well for the Dreamcast. It's not exactly a mainstream type of game. Sega was expecting a game like Shenmue to save the system. It was expensive to make, and It's simply not that broadly appealing. It's an experimental role-playing game. Dreamcast needed more 1st and 3rd party games that focused on straightforward gameplay. They needed a Goldeneye or a Halo. They simply didn't have it.

I felt Final Fantasy 10 was very close.

It was the most impressive game of all my life and I played it this year.

The best world details, NPCs i have seen in a game

Game Galaxy Musattique Ali Shenmue 1 and 2 HD remakes are out on PS4 and Xbox in a couple of months. Pick them up on the single disk. Then get ready for Shenmue 3.

I second that :D

Yeah, but did you understand anything that went on?

Douglas Yeaman I need to play this damn game! When are they gonna release Shenmue for PS4!

GoAceDetective Its Comfirmed Ps4 Xbox Steam

Musattique Ali Shenmue 1 and 2 HD remakes are out on PS4 and Xbox in a couple of months. Pick them up on the single disk. Then get ready for Shenmue 3.

They are out

How?

Re-released next month! Can't wait!

nah

ocarina of time says "hi"

no. Uncharted 4 is the greatest game ever made.

+Pung nah

I wasn't aware this game turned into Re4 at some point.

+TheUmbrellaCorpX7 And pc

Mr. Bushido I wish I knew what they meant by scalable resolution. They refuse to say HD remaster, but i imagine the resolution had been improved and the game is now in widescreen.

Mr. Bushido I'm glad as I rather not use an emulator to play it.

Yeah but it also exists in a day and age where open world games were dime a dozen. This came out at a time when they were basically unheard of due to the major technical hurdles surrounding them. And Witcher 3 isn't even the biggest open world game, not by a long shot.

the npcs in the witcher are A LOT more detailed tho and thus require exponentially more work per npc model

Gavin King Yea but 3d modeling and texturing tools and resources are much more significantly advanced now than they were back then. Back then they were still using the same techniques essentailly as they did back in the PS1 and N64 days, and Shenmue actually is one of the games that helped define techniques for modern 3D game art.

downphoenix that's true but games like the witcher 3 have a lot more to worry about than npc models, as they have a lot more systems in play

Gavin King and you're also comparing hardware that is about 15 years newer than the Dreamcast. Witcher 3 may be technically much better, but that doesn't make it a better agme.

You did fabulous work, John! Made us fellow Sega fans proud!!

Shenmue doesn't kick off for me until I met Ren.

most still do, it's a lot harder though nowadays

So true

That's funny ! In 2012, an an English teacher in France, I prepared a lesson plan on Shenmue, which made quite an effect on them. I had showed them Shenmue the movie at the end of the lesson plan.

Get rid of your friends.

wow that's cool, I can't imagine one of my old teachers giving me a game console lol

Well, you have your answer now.

Aleksandre Mzhavia it’s finally coming

Sanity restored 🤭

2 years later... we are getting that wish. Only a few more days...

Shenmue was considered the most expensive game when it came out with $47 million budget, if this game was low on budget it would looked like GTA 3 on PS2 While GTA San Andreas only had $10 millions, GTA Vice City had $5 millions

Oh the loading was badddd. I noticed because I played a bit before going school and it took forever.

GTA3 especially was a bloody joke in comparison to Shenmue.

Ok now compare the size of san andreas and the amount of stuff in the game to whats in shenmue. San Andreas is on a whole different level. They had to settle for lower quality textures and models to make a game like that

Oscar yes but its a 6 BLOODY YEARS OLDER GAME.

You are all forgetting that the Dreamcast was a very powerful console, on certain aspects it was better than PS2.

Not really comparable. Shenmue's enviroments are way more simplier in geometry, complexity and overall density. NPCs in GTA games also have much more complex AI and there are tons on them active at any given moment. Basically there's not a lot going on on Shenmue on the screen most of the time. Don't forget the Dreamcast's graphics chip is a Power VR2, which was a common chip on the PC market during that time (and it wasn't even that powerful since it wasn't still a true GPU and relied a lot on CPU power for basic stuff like Transform and Lighting) @Alfredo di Nuzzo The Dreamcast isn't really better than PS2 in any aspects other than having more video RAM. However the PS2 was never designed to utilize much RAM in the 1st place due to it's insanely fast fill rates. The problem is many developers never took full advantage of this and also many games were just ported from other consoles/PC without taking this into account.

Enjoyable*

+McMiller no I like 'enonyable' better. From now on enjoyable will forever be known as enonyable.

The world needs more great art like Shenmue. And Nujabes

one of the few times in history europe got something that north america didn't haha. i remember importing it and borrowing a friends cheat disc thing to play it. good times

***** i remember reading about that in the official dreamcast magazine and wanting to play it

Yeah, I love when that happens.