Shenmue As Arcade Realism

31 May 2025

Shenmue might be the most impossible-to-talk-about game ever made. Despite the legacy it has left in the wake of it and its sequel’s releases, Shenmue is a game whose magnitude in scope and ambition defies whatever written histories may try to qualify as important. In some ways, we still live under the shadow of it, unable to live in a world where its promise is fulfilled with increasingly evolving technology over the years; Yu Suzuki’s tale of revenge and realism unfinished as the world adopts simplified, streamlined and, in some ways, cheaper ways of achieving what Shenmue wanted to do.

Yet despite that, Shenmue still lives on. The fact it is still talked about and revered in the corners of the internet stands true to how important Shenmue still is, not just as a historical piece —a game whose structure invariably influenced the current landscape of AAA games— but as an expression of what games can be when taken to the logical extreme of a philosophy, an ideological perspective on the nature of games as reflections of reality.

It’s impossible to talk about Shenmue because Shenmue is everything. It is a revenge narrative as told through the framework of an arcade designer; it is an expression of realism in space taken to the absolute extreme; it is 15 different NAOMI/Model 3 arcade games where each one is a bespoke interaction with the world. Shenmue is a game about reality, and most of all, how games are expressions of that same reality we live in.

To talk about Shenmue is to talk about all these things. It’s impossible to segregate all these elements into their cleanly-labeled categories because they all coalesce into the whole of the experience in such a way that not mentioning them would create a gap in the critique of the work itself; a gap as big as the thing that is being discussed. Because of that, I don’t think I can adequately cover Shemmue as a whole in this post. However, I want to discuss one element that takes elements from every single part of the game and creates a picture of the intent and what it left me as a player. Because most of all, Shenmue is an arcade game about reality.

A primer on Yu Suzuki and Taikan game philosophy

This isn’t a historical blog, so I’m not gonna dabble on specific sources on how director Yu Suzuki began his career at SEGA and how Shenmue came to be, since I want to keep most of this post’s content about the core idea of Shenmue’s ascendants as elements of its legacy. So to keep it short: Yu Suzuki began working at SEGA in the 80’s and headed its AM2 division for most of his stay there. His most popular games are arguably the holy trio of Taikan arcade games Space Harrier, Outrun, and After Burner (If you’ve played any SEGA classics collection or Yakuza games you’ve at least played the first two). I make note of mentioning the Taikan part of these games (体感ゲーム or “Bodily Experience Game”) because it’s an important part of the historical experience of SEGA’s development from the 80s towards the future. Taikan games were not only just arcade games, but full-body experiences where you’d sit in a recreation of a cockpit, motorcycle, airplane, etc, and the arcade machine would move around as you moved the controller, creating an immersive, almost realistic experience.

The development of Taikan games continued throughout the 80s in various forms, but eventually, Suzuki directed a certain game called Virtua Racing. Unlike other games that used 2D sprite artwork and various techniques to emulate the feel of 3D space, Virtua Racing was a fully polygonal 3D racing game about F1 cars, and it was also one of, if not the first, 3D game of its kind. Coupled with one of the deluxe models having its back modeled after the cockpit of one of the cars, the intended experience is simple to ascertain: to create a feeling of realism and immersion, as close as possible, to the real thing, within the structure of an arcade machine. The next game of the Virtua Series, Virtua Fighter, tried approaching this idea differently.

Virtua Fighter utilizes a classic arcade setup: one stick and three buttons. These buttons were for punching, kicking, and blocking, and utilizing them in conjunction with the stick in different forms, be it holding the stick in a certain direction, moving the stick in a certain motion or even just leaving it in a neutral position, and doing all that with any possible combination of those three buttons, the player could input an incredible variety of moves for each of the playable characters. In addition to this, unlike its contemporaries like Street Fighter and Fatal Fury, Virtua Fighter has little to no fantastical or mystical elements in its mechanics. There are no quarter-circle Hadoukens or Power Waves; if you want to hit your opponent you have to learn the spacing and characteristics of your character’s attacks and learn to execute them while you hold an advantage over the other player. Coupled with the revolutionary 3D character models, all fully animated with no 2D tricks to fool you into thinking it's not real 3D, it created another immersive, realistic, experience that you couldn’t get anywhere else. It was a specially made game for specially made hardware, exclusive to the domain of the arcade machine.

There were a couple of other games in the Virtua series that followed this philosophy. Virtua Cop utilized light-gun technology and 3D graphics to immerse the player in its shooter gameplay. Virtua Striker and other Virtua sports games followed the same ideas by letting the player partake in fully 3D recreations of sports like soccer, and later on basketball and track and field.

All of this is to say that the core philosophy behind Yu Suzuki’s games during the Virtua era is as such: to utilize the freeform nature of the arcade machine and its lack of standardized input methods to create games that utilized those bespoke controllers to create experiences that were both irreplicable on home consoles at the time, and also let the player be immersed in cutting-edge graphics that showed the next step in gaming: fully realized worlds utilizing 3D graphical technologies. Every subsequent game in the Virtua series expanded on these ideas by improving the graphics, refining the gameplay, and adding more and more complexities to its mechanics, like Virtua Fighter adding more bespoke mechanics to each of its playable characters and creating individual playstyles for each of them that required mastery to play them well, and Virtua Cop 2 adding extra realistic levels for the players to shoot their way through.

However, throughout the 90s Suzuki was developing a secret project for the Sega Saturn: a full Virtua Fighter RPG starring its main character Akira Yuki, as he incurred a journey of revenge against the man who killed his fighter, eventually becoming the character we know him to be in Virtua Fighter proper. It was quite an ambitious undertaking, especially for the time and for the targeted hardware. Eventually, this project would change from its origins as a Virtua Fighter RPG and into another game entirely: Shenmue. A game that would take every single concept from Yu Suzuki’s career and adapt it all into a project with one goal: to create the most realistic game possible.

An expression in arcade realism

One of the most striking things about Shenmue is how it starts. The moment the player presses the new game icon, a cutscene begins. Our protagonist, Ryo Hazuki, enters his house in horror as he slowly approaches his father’s dojo. There he finds him fighting another man, Lan Di, asking for some object he calls the “Dragon Mirror,” which he gives him right before he kills him in front of Ryo. Four days later, on December 3rd, 1986, Ryo wakes up from injuries from the beating he took and he resolves himself to find Lan Di and kill him to avenge his father.

The game opens up the notebook function, it shows you the first two pages with a little bit of background info and one instruction: Find Lan Di. You’re not told where to go but you know what you have to do. The game has begun.

When you leave your house an event plays out with one of the children around the neighborhood. One of them, Megumi, found a lost kitty whose mother got run over by a black vehicle in the middle of the night a couple of days earlier and she’s been caring for her since then. A pretty sad story all things considered. Megumi mentions that she hasn’t had anything to eat today, so Ryo mentions that the shrine nearby has some dried fish and tofu. You pick between one or the other by holding the left trigger and focusing the first-person camera on the shrine offering table and go back to the kitty, now mildly happier than she was a little while ago.

But that black vehicle she mentioned before was sort of suspicious, especially considering it left in the middle of the night, at the same time Ryo’s father was killed by Lan Di. So you go around the neighborhood and ask the lively bunch of housewives if they’ve seen any vehicles around recently. None of them seem to remember, but one of them says that the old man Yamagishi was splashed by something that could have been what you’re looking for, and she mentions he’s at the park nearby. So you go to the park and ask him if he’s seen a black car recently. He says that he saw that black car speed by towards the shopping district of Dobuita, but doesn’t know much besides that. Now you have a new lead, somewhere around Dobuita, someone must have seen that black car go through.

As you enter the stupidly detailed map that is Dobuita you start to ask all the shopkeepers and pedestrians walking about if they’d seen that black car around. One of them, Ryo’s friend Nozomi, asks if he’s been ok ever since his father died, to which he responds a dismissive “Yeah” before asking her about the black car. She mentions that, while she didn’t see who was in the car, there was a rumor going around that the American hotdog vendor Tom had an argument with them for trashing his stall in the middle of the night. Ryo then goes around town, eventually finding Tom, who says that the men in the black car looked suspiciously Chinese, and urges Ryo to go ask the Chinese people in Dobuita about it instead since he thinks they might know more than him.

However, Dobuita is quite the large map, and every single NPC strewn about has its schedule to abide by from 8:30 AM to 11:00 PM, the amount of time a day in Shenmue takes. Realistically speaking, you will not find more information by blindly asking every person if they’re Chinese or not. However, if you took the time to find one of the maps scattered through Dobuita, you would notice that there’s a Chinese restaurant on one of the side streets right around where you came from. So you mark that spot in your mental map and go find it by remembering the general layout of the district and the things around it, like how there’s a vegetable shop near the Chinese restaurant, so by finding the shop and going east through the street, you’ll be able to find the spot you’re looking for: Ajiichi Chinese Restaurant.

Inside, the chef Tao Duo Ji, and his wife Tao Lin Xia, are working, same as usual. Ryo asks him if he knows of any other Chinese people around who could help him locate Lan Di. Duo Ji says that he doesn’t really know of any, but that maybe the “Three Blades” could help him. The three blades are three people around Dobuita specializing in different trades: a barber, a cook, and a tailor, all of which use bladed tools. Lin Xia then mentions three names: Maeda, Itoi, and the chef at Manpukuken Ramen, as they might have information that could help Ryo find what he’s looking for.

So you now have your next objective: go find the three blades of Dobuita, since one of them might have a clue as to where Lan Di might be. Itoi and the cook don’t know anything about Lan Di, and Maeda only mentions that Liu of Liu Barber and Hair Salon might know more than him, as he’s only a second-generation immigrant while Liu is a first-generation immigrant. After asking around town for Liu’s whereabouts, Ryo finds him in a park near the arcade. After being asked about Lan Di, Liu mentions that, by the sounds of it, Lan Di might be a member of some Chinese black market gang, or perhaps even the leader of the Chinese mafia itself; and also mentions that the Chinese mafia has been making the port nearby their home base, so it might be prudent to go find some sailors nearby and ask them if they know anything about Lan Di, since they’re more likely to have interacted with the mafia in the past. Now with this new lead, Ryo, the player, needs to go find somewhere where sailors might be during the day or night. You have to ask around, deduce, and find your next lead to get to Lan Di.

I don’t like recapping video games much, but I feel it’s important to tell you, the reader, what Shenmue is doing here. From the moment you’re given control of Ryo, you’re only given one instruction: Find Lan Di. You have three maps to explore and talk to people in to find information about Lan Di, and as you do, you slowly start uncovering who Lan Di might be, what he’s doing here, and how to slowly, bit by bit, get closer to him.

You’re playing a detective story, lead by lead, beat by beat, conversation by conversation. Nothing you do in Shenmue comes from actions outside of your purview. You have to find Lan Di on your own, with the information you gather, and slowly deduce how to get to him as you’re given more and more leads throughout the game.

This type of gameplay was not new in 1999. Adventure games like The Portopia Serial Murder Case and Famicom Detective Club had already gamified the process of deducing and playing through a mystery lead-by-lead utilizing text prompts and commands. What Shenmue is doing here is not necessarily new. However, the degree and the scope in which Shenmue is doing it is. You, the player, are not just investigating this by telling the computer to go east, or by pressing the “talk to X” prompt, but you’re actively controlling a real character, a character with a motivation, who is controlled with a third person point of view and can interact with the entire world on a per-drawer basis. If you go around Ryo’s house at the beginning of the game, you can find a multitude of unique, bespoke items that only exist in this one house, and you can only find them by holding the left trigger, focusing in on the drawers, cabinets, and closets, and finding them, piece by piece, cabinet by cabinet.

This level of bespoke interaction with the mechanics of the game is present throughout. When you get into the scripted scuffles around town, you fight utilizing a modified version of the Virtua Fighter combat system to do it. When you’re chasing someone, you’re in the middle of a cutscene with button presses that you have to time correctly, or else you fail and have to start over (nowadays this is the much-derided Quick Time Event, something Shenmue invented). During disk 3 you must play through 20 real-life minutes of forklifting crates between two warehouses until you find the next lead. If you need to pass the time because you have an appointment at 3 PM and you go to Dobuita at 9 AM, you can go wait at the arcade and play some Space Harrier or Hang-On, though you better check the clock because if you’re late you’ll have to go try again the next day. When you go into a convenience store you have to focus on the specific item you want, select it, and then a cutscene plays where Ryo buys that individual item and then plays a raffle minigame that could net you a unique Super Sonic minifigure, or a home console port of Space Harrier (which you can also play in your house with an anachronistic Sega Saturn that’s just sitting under the TV) You interact with the world of Shenmue as you would a normal person. Bereft of the abstraction that exists in other games, it forces you to approach it like you would real life, creating a connection between you and the game that makes you approach it on its terms, the terms of real life and not the ones of a videogame. Shenmue is, at its core, a Virtua World.

Yet it isn’t without the touches of what came before it. I want to circle back to how I started this section, with the game starting the moment you’re given control of Ryo. The game would start as you take control of the protagonist, that much is obvious. However, think about it in the same context as you would something like Outrun or Space Harrier. When you press play in those games, you start playing. The objective of the game, its main verb, and its progression are all apparent and clear-cut once you start playing. The game says “drive” and you will drive until the end.

Shenmue is the same. Its mechanical objective, contextualized through narrative, is to find Lan Di. Just like the dude from Outrun can do nothing but drive until he reaches the end, Ryo must investigate, deduce, talk, fight, labor, and open, and close the myriad of interactable elements in the world to get to his end goal. Its arcade simplicity in design is clear; the only thing Shenmue is adding to it is narrative contextualization and the scope to make its story feel as enormous as the martial arts revenge movies it's taking inspiration from.

Playing this game for the first time in 2025 felt like I was experiencing a world that should have been but couldn’t be. Shenmue is a pure expression of mechanics and history condensed into a single vision. Taking the last 10 years of SEGA’s arcade history and turning it all into a bespoke experience where each element of the idea of an interactive martial arts movie was accounted for. You explore a world so detailed you can see everyone’s cabinets. You play through the story with minimal to no shortcuts, where you finish the day off by walking home and sleeping in your bed, only to wake up in your house and go back to town to continue to investigate, the only thing missing being a food and water survival meter to make the experience even more akin to real life. Shenmue is more so than a game, it’s the maximum expression of what a game can be, and bearing witness to the level of ambition on display here was awe-inspiring. Shenmue is the concept of video games taken in as a whole, more so than anything else in the world.