GaijinPunch wrote:Shenmue feels like you are walking around a small town of Japan. Ryu ga Gotoku does not.
A
very small town. Also, one with nothing for you to do in it.
And sure Ryu ga Gotoku doesn`t make one feel like they are walking in a small town. That`s because none of the games are set in small communities. Either way, Ryu ga Gotoku`s locations are modeled closely after real life locations. Ryukyu does look and feel like Okinawa, Kamuro-cho does look and feel like Kabuki-cho and the pleasure district of Gion in Ryu ga Gotoku Kenzan! is portrayed the same way such districts are usually portrayed in movies about Edo-period Japan.
There are vids on YouTube that demonstrate the meticulous detail with which real life locations in Japan have been copied into the games.
Skykid wrote:The last Yakuza I got through was 3 (I started 4, and liked the diverging plotline element, but never finished it) and the battle system is still clunky as shit. The cast of characters remains fairly unlikeable and the crime aspect is used to the nth Japanese derivative.
If RgG`s cast is unlikable then what does that make Shenmue`s cast?
We must have played different Shenmues. The one I played features a cast of flat personalities helmed by a token teen protagonist that`s treated like a kid by everyone and refused a drink in the bar. I mean, fuck, doesn`t every second JRPG in existence do that shit already? You`re old enough to save the world but not old enough to have a drink and whenever you wander into a bar you`re constantly reminded of your age; every fucking bartender has to rub it in. I was amazed that Shenmue had exactly the same crap. Ryo is so hell-bent on following JRPGs archetypes that he does his best to
not notice women around him. Nozomi: "Ryo, I want to have sex with you." Ryo: "You said something, Nozomi?" Little wonder he is called "baby-boy Ryo".
Long story short, I don`t think too highly about Shenmue`s cast. RgG`s Kiryu Kazuma and Miyamoto Musashi are much more to my liking than Ryo.
I'm not sure what anyone thinks Yakuza does to improve on the Shenmue formula so drastically to make it a vastly better game - it's essentially the same thing with more distractions, padded out with flatter storylines and altogether less endearing characterisation, and that makes its repetitive nature grind a lot harder than in Shenmue.
I understand that you think Shenmue is better than Ryu ga Gotoku, but I`ve yet to hear any specific reasons why it`s a better
game more than anything. I know that Shenmue`s gameplay is the subject most if not all of the people who profess love for Shenmue tend to avoid and their reasoning for liking the game never goes beyond it being "elegant", having a "soul" etc. It`s understandable since such a dreck that is Shenmue`s gameplay is hard to defend("Forklift races are awesome!", "Dojo training is totally worth it!"), be it its individual parts or the sum as a whole, but I`d appreciate if people at least tried.
I`ll get to the point why I think RgG does a better job at being an actual game and not just an interactive visual novel with instances of Dragon`s Lair like Shenmue.
RgG unlike Shenmue doesn`t just dump you into a relatively open-world environment and leaves you with nothing to do outside of walking around and waiting for the next event to trigger. The game opens up right from the beginning and stays that way until the end. You can spend hours fighting street punks and participating in underground coliseum fights to earn exp to learn new moves and Heat Actions, training in dojos, playing Shogi, Majong, Hanafuda and Pool, fishing, crafting weapons and armor, wooing hostesses or just exploring every nook and cranny in the town. And you can do all that before proceeding to the next plot point. The game doesn`t force the story on you and that`s something I really respect.
RgG`s battle system doesn`t feel like it was tacked on during the last minute. It`s well integrated and actually fits the game(Shenmue fans should be the last people to call anything clunky). The side activities aren`t meaningless either. Almost all of them net you exp, items and crafting materials. Some of them are genuinely fun(I spent about thirty hours in RgG3 playing Shogi and Pool). Completing all the sub-missions(of which there are more than a hundred) leads to a powerful secret boss and even the simple wandering around the streets is rewarded in the form of locker keys.
Talk all you want about Shenmue having a great cast of characters and story(something that I can only partially agree with), but at the end of the day, if a person doesn`t like them, all he is left with is an extremely dysfunctional game. The impressive interactivity found at Ryo`s house is limited to that house alone and doesn`t spread to the rest of the gaming world. Training at Dojo is a complete waste of time since there are no battles to fight anyway. Money serves next to no purpose. There is nothing to talk about with the townsfolk(most of the time they only talk about the subject relevant to the current plot point which is finding someone or something; likely a technical or a budget limitation given that every NPC in the game is voiced). And again, the forklift races. The game is struggling so hard to occupy you with anything that it forces you into this crap. An entire CD is dedicated to it. How can anyone defend that bullshit with a straight face?
But forget about Ryu ga Gotoku for a second. I finished Way of the Samurai 4 a few weeks ago. It`s less polished than RgG and has a considerably lower budget, but it`s still a better game than Shenmue. Kenka Bancho? Better than Shenmue. Red Seeds Profile(Deadly Premonition)? Again, better. Fuck, Chulip is better than Shenmue too.
Now to be fair, Shenmue 2 was a considerable improvement over the first game(if the series hadn`t been cancelled and kept improving like that it would`ve turned into a legitimately great franchise after like five or six installments). But the first game left such a bad taste that nobody gave a shit at that point. Shenmue 2`s drop off in sales in Japan was in excess of 50% compared to the first game.
) and it was also made on a much tighter budget since it was unclear at the time if the game would be a success(Nagoshi confessed in a private conversation to Kojima that he`d have to leave the industry if the game failed).