It has been a while since I "gave up" on a game. Usually I don't play games that you "give up" before they are finished, but this is one of them. Let me explain why I did this.
Why Shenmue 2 is disappointing
 |
| Cutting the main character's throat would have been a relief |
First a little background history. The first Shenmue game was once the most expensive game ever created. It cost something like a 100 million dollars to make and was part of the reason why Sega went out of console business and has since only been a software studio.
The game became a cult classic, because of its nostalgic value and the many little cultural references in it. You can even go to the arcade in-game and play classic 80s video games. Stuff like that made the original Shenmue great, as well as a fantastic soundtrack.
I loved the first Shenmue. It was slow-paced, but beautiful and atmospheric. It's not a perfect game, and some people describe it as a fork lift driving simulator (because a considerate portion of the game has you drive around in one to earn money), but still, it's good for what it is.
Now let me explain how things happened to me. When I discovered the first Shenmue, it was already several years since Sega had gone out of business (so to speak), and the lifespan of the dreamcast console had been over already. I think it may have been 2008 or 2009. I decided to order some dreamcast games because my library was kind of small. I liked the game, the only sad thing was that the second game was never released on the dreamcast, but on a different console that I didn't own.
So I thought I might never play Shenmue 2. Then, there were talks about Shenmue 3 being released, a game that was in development hell for very long. It was only by accident that I then found out that Shenmue 2 (and Shenmue 1) had been re-released for PS4 about a year ago already!
So I bought Shenmue 1 and 2 for 20 euros. A good price, considering you get a great nostalgic game as well as the game that was totally out of reach. I thought it would be great in order to play the whole trilogy as soon as Shenmue 3 would be released later in 2019 or 2020.
The first game was easy to play through. Same thing as back in the old days. Then came Shenmue 2. And Shenmue 2 sucks and it's a big disappointment. Let me tell you why.
Reasons why Shenmue 2 sucks
Shenmue 1 and Shenmue 2 are not too different from one another. Both rely on similar gameplay. But Shenmue 2 is worse because it emphasizes on the more annoying parts and has stupid story elements. Let me explain:
- As soon as you start the game (you can even use the save data from Shenmue 1), you are robbed by a gang and lose ALL your money from the first game. Whatever you brought over in terms of currency is gone. What a fantastic middle finger!
- There is supposedly a place where you can sleep for free at the harbour area where you start the game, however, without even trying hard, I already pass that area on the first day and can never go to that inn because it is "closed for construction" for the rest of the game. What good is a resting place that is shut off on the first day???
- Earning money in Shenmue 2 is harder than in Shenmue 1. You have only two legitimate regular ways of income. You can either carry crates, which amounts to 10 hong kong dollars per crate, but that way you may often end up only with 60 dollars per day. Spending the night at the guest house costs 38 dollars a night, so you hardly gain any money and later on, you need THOUSANDS of dollars to progress!
The other way of earning money is to assist at the lucky hit stand. This is a game partially based on luck, and even though you may win every once in a while, there is a chance your earnings will be extremely low as well.
In reality, the best way to earn money is to take all the money you have, SAVE YOUR GAME, and repeat a dice throwing gamble or some other "all or nothing" event until you have tripled or quadrupled your entire wealth, including saving and reloading of course! You know you have a bad game on your hands when the only way to make serious in-game currency is by saving and reloading if you don't get the desired results - The game is a TERRIBLE series of quick time events (QTE). A QTE is when you suddenly have to press buttons that appear on the screen in quick succession. You need lightning reflexes. These events were already a part of Shenmue 1, but back then, you only had to memorize about 3 movements (left, right, button) in a row, for instance. In Shenmue 2, the button combinations are merciless, extremely quick and you need the brain of a 15 year old to react quickly enough. This game made me feel REALLY old. The worst thing is that I sometimes felt I DID things correctly, but the game still treated me as if I didn't react in time.
- The fighting is quite bad. Even though you have a very sophisticated library of fighting moves, a lot of this is lost when you are constantly backed into a corner and can only save yourself with button mashing. This may be a weird comparison, but in Street Fighter 2, you have a lot less moves but feel much more in control of what you do and WANT to do. In Shenmue 2, I can't even REMEMBER which moves to apply and I don't have the space to use them because I get a fist in my face before I can execute the correct movement.
In the end, here is what happened to me: The longer the game dragged on, the more I lost interest in playing it. At some point, I felt like I just wanted to finish the game to be done with it. I was disappointed already. But then, things got worse. The QTE got more and more complicated, and at some point I thought to myself: If this gets more complicated, I might end up at a point where I seriously don't think I CAN finish the game because I don't have the reflexes / skill / nerve to complete these movements.
And that's what eventually broke the game for me. My willingness to repeat the same cut scenes over and over, just because of ONE button I supposedly didn't press in time, meant that I switched off the game.
The tragedy is that I was already in the final third of the game and would probably soon reached the best area of the game and enjoyed finishing Shenmue 2. But when a game is only a burden to play and constantly angers you, that's when you need to stop.
Shenmue 2 is a big shame, it sucks, it disappointed me big time. I don't know what the developers of the game were smoking when they made it. Look, I don't mind that the game is slow, or a little stiff with the movement, or that the main character is a humorless wooden plank that repeats every statement he hears as a question. I can enjoy a slow-paced game. And I do enjoy what Shenmue actually is deep inside. But let me get one thing straight: Shenmue was never supposed to be this button-mashing nightmare.
Imagine any game you like: Sonic, Mario brothers, GTA, whatever. Now imagine, instead of being at the controls and DOING things, you are suddenly faced with button combinations you are supposed to press in order to survive. If you miss, or are too slow, the previous scene resets and you have to watch a boring cutscene from before. That's Shenmue 2.
How did they screw this up? How? Terrible game with so much good potential. And it's not that everything is terrible. The scenery is good, the story is good, the whole "revenge is not the answer" vibe is great. But the QTE stuff just kills the whole game.
