by Spaghetti » Fri Nov 06, 2015 6:40 am
I personally find the original Shenmue to be a grand experiment gone mostly right. After all, they were treading a lot of new ground. As a result, there are sometimes things that work, and things that don't quite work. I think Shenmue is a fine game and a lot of people absolutely love it playing it for the first time even in 2015, but a lot of people can get turned off about how initially aimless it is. There's a lot of chaos in Shenmue's game design that really reflects throughout the whole thing. That's not a bad thing though, it's just that a lot of people don't really know what to do with a game like Shenmue laid open at their feet after the first cutscene.
I guess that's the point though, they wanted us to explore the world, and do stuff. Shenmue II is a refined iteration on that, it gives the player a sufficient funnelling towards objectives early on before opening up and becoming a broader adventure. Mechanically, narratively, and technically Shenmue II is a big improvement over the first game, but the original, I suppose, has a soul and feel entirely of its own developed through the chaos and its atmosphere.
Yokosuka has that great familiar feeling that develops as you spend the entire game within it, but Shenmue II takes you through many different environments as you progress geographically through China. You can get comfortable in an area, but to progress through the game you inevitably have to leave at some point and you don't really get the sense of attachment you got in the first game.
To really boil it down, nothing like Shenmue had been made before and with II they refined the formula in a way that made creative sense, but in doing so ordered the game in a way that rubbed a little bit of the uniqueness of the first off in the process.