And full credit to Yu Suzuki for having confidence in his original design: there are no concessions to modernity and Shenmue continues to amble along at its own pace. The world he walks into is higher-resolution and more intricate, but still recognisably Shenmue. It’s a weird miracle when he calmly emerges like it’s no big deal, the game mercifully avoiding a fourth-wall breaking wink to the camera about the length of his incarceration. While the world changed beyond recognition, Ryo remained preserved in that Guilin cave like a mammoth in a block of ice. But Shenmue was the biggest boondoggle of them all: a mega budget simulation of 1986 Japan. I ended up with maybe 100 games from various regions, many of which were seriously bizarre design experiments like Samba de Amigo, Seaman, Cool Cool Toon and Typing of the Dead. My console at the time was a Dreamcast, and though its unceremoniously termination by Sega was sad, it also meant that new and second-hand games were going for peanuts. I finally had my own money and autonomy, had left home and was making a new life in a new city. That brighter past was 2000, 20 – my golden age of videogames. It’s the kind of media that makes you reflect on who you were, who are you and everything that happened in between. Yu Suzuki’s Shenmue III is the video game equivalent of Brian Wilson’s Smile, an artefact tossed forward in time from a past that feels like it brighter than the dowdy present. The game has spent so long as a distant fantasy that having it as a tangible thing in my life is deeply surreal. 18 years later I walked him back out of there in Shenmue III. In 2001 I walked Ryo Hazuki into a mysterious cave, turned off the Dreamcast and went to bed.
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