As a Japanese kid growing up in Canada, Shenmue felt like I was visiting my grandparents from the comfort of my basement. It was so insanely new but also nostalgic at the same time. I was so sure the Dreamcast would dominate lol. How naive of me.
fartsparkles@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Shenmue was insanely cool when it came out in 1999. To consider Ocarina of Time came out the year before, open world games were a brand new thing. Shenmue paired that with an epic action life-sim. It was just so unexpected; so many minigame-like mechanics for doing things around the world. It was incredibly immersive and ahead of its time.
I don’t think it has as big an impact on players as it had on developers.
The Yakuza series sticks out as greatly inspired by Shenmue / spiritual successor, as with Persona series. Also games like Lake, Fahrenheit / The Indigo Prophecy, GTA/RedDead, FFVII Remake, all owe a little to Shenmue.
k0e3@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
fartsparkles@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Dreamcast was the best console of the sixth generation. If Sega hadn’t spun up MegaCD, 32x, and Saturn in such a short time, I think developers would have embraced the Dreamcast more rather than be weary Sega would abandon it for another system a couple of years later.
wolfinthewoods@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
In 2001, at 16 years old, I snagged a brand new Dreamcast with five or six games for dirt cheap from a local game store. The DC had already been discontinued at that point, the PS2 was about to launch or just did, and retailers were just offloading the Dreamcast merch. Shenmue was one of those games, and was the game I ended up spending the most time with. There really just wasn’t anything like it, it was this epic action story of loss and revenge with this sprawling open world with all kinds of sidequests, mini-games and interesting NPCs to explore. The most painful thing for me at the time was the damn cliffhanger at the end, and I never ended up getting a chance to play Shenmue 2 (I think it only made it’s way stateside on Xbox). It was definitely a memorable, once-in-a-lifetime experience. There were flaws, to be sure, but they were easily overlooked due to the expansive, ambitious nature of the game.
B0NK3RS@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think that’s a good way of explaining it. Shenmue can be a love/hate kind of game and with the Dreamcast’s short lifespan too it isunderstandable that mainstream gamers have never played it.