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Reviews (2)
10 May 2015
A blast from the past, that still holds up.
When the first Shenmue was released for the Sega Dreamcast in Europe and America back in 2000, it was met with wildly positive reception, praising the game for its ingenuity and clever blends of sandbox RPG and Virtua Fighter action.
So it's safe to say that there was a lot of pressure for Shenmue 2 to do well when it was dropped on the Dreamcast in 2001. And Sega lived up to that pressure, making a sequel to join the success of the first game, running along with the idea of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". This is also the only Shenmue to appear on the original Microsoft Xbox, later to be made backward compatible on the 360, which is the version I am reviewing.
So how does it hold up today? In short, still good. With so many open-world games these days, it's hard to be able to see the genre as fresh and original, yet Shenmue 2 manages to uphold the elements that make it so highly regarded. To a new player, it can, at times, feel a bit choppy, having to load each new area, and for visuals these days, it isn't Da Vinci. However, Shenmue 2 is a good reminder of how games during the early 2000's and before, were less about how they looked, and more about how they played, and it plays tremendously well.
It can have a fairly high price tag, due to it being somewhat of a collector's item. But, if you can find it for a fair price, I highly recommend buying it, and experience an absolute classic.
18 August 2016
A personal ride through hell.
Don't buy this game for a serious experience. Yeah, there's not much more I can say than that. Just don't. It has since become infamous for being terrible, and there's a good reason why; the story is somewhat slightly on the good side of generic, with dialogue that's irritatingly crude it makes Duke Nukem forever seem like a women's right activist (up to, and including, fully clothed sex scenes), most of the graphics,if they bother to load in, are extremely bizarre and look blurry at the best of times (although, that's the least of the problems) and the game has more bugs in it than I did after my trip to Thailand (including falling through the map and your bike exploding for no apparent reason, to name a few). It is advised that this game should only be bought as a joke, or if you're the sort of person who has a fetish in maiming yourself through video games.
That being said, if you can find it for a cheap price (I spent $7 on my copy, and yet still somehow felt cheated), it is well worth to pick it up, and just marvel at how something as broken as Ride to Hell Retribution can make it past QA (assuming that the QA consisted of more than just a handful of egotistical developers), or to even invite a few friends over, get really drunk, and just brazenly stare into it's abyss, because you're evil, and want your friends to suffer in the same way you did.
It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will change your life. Although most likely not for the better.
Buy it if it's cheap, don't if it's not.