Shenmue Dojo

It's interesting that Martin Robinson decided to write a retrospective now, of all times... Lovely write-up.

My piece on Shenmue II will be finished in the week. This series needs to reclaim its voice.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rccW9Tig6_Y[/youtube]

Really nice article; basically sums up my own feelings about Shenmue's brilliant atmosphere

Who Really Cares? wrote: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rccW9Tig6_Y[/youtube]

The music in that video is actually very good; pretty reminiscent of Beck.

It's a bit embarrassing, but I want it on my iPod...

Quite a good article. We've been lucky to have two very good retrospectives lately

Roll on the Shenmue 2 retrospectives I say. There never were enough (and can never be enough) retrospective's on Muey 2

This was surprisingly vibrant and freshly written... you can tell he really enjoyed the experience of visiting Dobuita, laptop in tow.


To any Shenmue non-believer this would be a good touch stone. Very readable and informative... also his thesis of 'travelling to games worlds' is very clean and precise. now it sounds like i'm describing champagne...

I preferred the other recent article, IAmNotABot's, where the passion flowed off the page. This one's a little more restrained, written in a self-conscious style of forced analysis that barely reflects his motivation for such a pilgrimage. If you want to convert a non-believer, show them the other one first.

whilst i liked the other one very much.. It isn't as sharp, the first few paragraphs are dulled with platitudes you see in many articles. Shenmue is this, Shenmue is that. It bogs down the message but I don't want to be too critical as the underlining essence is great.

I hear you on that. Perhaps I was too all-encompassing in my approach, but I wanted to appeal even to the uninitiated (Newb Review) - in that even if the essence of Shenmue doesn't impress them, I wanted for them to at least appreciate the game for its superficial accolades, while engaging fans at the same time. Not easy.

This will not be an issue in my Shenmue II write-up, as I now have that out of the way.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P9eecvkhcs[/youtube]

Let's Get Sweaty wrote: I preferred the other recent article, IAmNotABot's, where the passion flowed off the page. This one's a little more restrained, written in a self-conscious style of forced analysis that barely reflects his motivation for such a pilgrimage. If you want to convert a non-believer, show them the other one first.

This. I preferred the Iamnotabot's one too. The EG one definitely comes across as a lot more self conscious and forced, almost pretentious at times. It may please a faux-arty/intellectual gamer more, but as you rightly pointed out it's nowhere near natural or impassioned as Bot's, and most importantly, it doesn't really capture the heart of Shenmue as well. I got a bit annoyed of the EG guy constantly describing Yokosuka as "dull", I mean yeah sure there are a lot of mundane elements about it, but he seemed to almost completely ignore the wildly colourful, flamboyant and mystic side of Yokosuka. What about the vivid and rich colours, what about Tom with his dancing dreads and hotdogs, what about the crazy guy with the pompadour, what about the trip to the secret basement at the Hazuki dojo? He even claims the dub is disconnected and detached, well yeah Ryo is, but what about the rest of the delightfully campy dub? The appeal of Shenmue for many was as much it's flamboyance as it's grounded nature, and the author definitely seemed to dismiss this flamboyance. It would have given me the wrong idea about the game if I had read this before playing the it. And yeah, you'd wonder why the author wanted to go to travel Yokosuka in the first place.

I did still enjoy reading though, but I liked Bot's one better too.

IAmNotABot wrote: I hear you on that. Perhaps I was too all-encompassing in my approach, but I wanted to appeal even to the uninitiated (Newb Review) - in that even if the essence of Shenmue doesn't impress them, I wanted for them to at least appreciate the game for its superficial accolades, while engaging fans at the same time. Not easy.

This will not be an issue in my Shenmue II write-up, as I now have that out of the way.

Perhaps i was being critical because i know how hard it is to write about Shenmue. Talking about all the crucial nuances which make it what it is: a thousand words can disappear in a flash. I bet you deleted just as many notes and paragraphs as there was published :] all equally important to the essence of Shenmue