Jesus. Anyone with a ResetEra account brace yourselves when the re-releases come out.
There's going to be a lot of hot takes and hyperbole running amoc.
Reading the ''Play Yakuza now of wait for Shenmue'' thread has been quite something. Thankfully there's a couple fellow dojo posters defending the game but it's quite ridiculous how gamer culture will just label a game as bad like it's a fact just simply because it isn't for them.
I pray that there will be enough open minded modern gamers that will see the true inner greatness of Shenmue
Such toothless responses from Shenmue fans in that thread:
"Why are you comparing a 1999 game with a 2015 game?"
"Yakuza needed 7 entries to reach it's current level !!"
How about someone actually asks just how in the hell does Yakuza 0 does anything better than Shenmue? Aside from controls, it does everything worse. It's a regressive franchise when compared to Shenmue (Although I'm not a fan of the comparison because they're so different, but I will indulge this time).
Kamurocho, a location reused over 9 games, is filled with nothing but random, cloned NPCs, none of them are voiced. None of them have any purpose. They just wander and disappear. Some stay at their spot waiting for you to trigger their side quest. Kamurocho feels like a generic RPG overworld. With shops where you buy healing items and weapons. No sense of time either, it's either night or day depending on the story.
Compare this to Shenmue, with it's living, breathing world. Every NPC has a personality, a voice, dialogue, daily schedule, etc... A lot of them have purpose, they direct you to your objective. Time is flowing naturally, day/night cycle, weather system... Interactive world where you can pick things up and examine them. The amount of love and detail that has put into this world is staggering. And unlike Yakuza, you move on... From Japan, to China. Every location is unique with it's own feel and culture.
The gameplay design in Yakuza is so very formulaic and repetitive. You spend the vast majority of your time getting into random encounters with brainless thugs every 10 seconds... Then you undertake a "mission", where you mostly go to the enemy headquarters, beat a boss, then you go back to the street. Rinse and Repeat. Let's not even tackle the way the game frequently uses "fetch quests" in it's main missions... Remember when you had to buy homeless people some treats (spread over multiple stores) in order to advance the mission? Forgot which Yakuza that was, they are so similar it's hard to tell.
Whilst in Shenmue, the gameplay is varied mix of exploration, playing detective, fights, QTEs, Puzzles, and other unique mini-games like jobs. It always keeps things fresh and interesting.
I won't touch things like story, atmosphere, music, as they're fairly subjective, but I believe Shenmue absolutely trounces Yakuza in those aspects, especially atmosphere and music.
That Resetera thread makes me miss Spaghetti, whenever someone there started spouting falsehoods like "Yakuza does everything Shenmue does, but better!" he puts them in their place... But then I remember that if I were him, I wouldn't touch those threads to keep my sanity intact.
This post made it seem like I hate Yakuza, I used to be a fan, but after I played 1,2,3,4,5 and Zero. I just got burned out. It's the same shit, over and over again... Same story beats, same locales, same "lul so funneh" side quest design, same gameplay loop. People who started this franchise with Yakuza 0 are in for a rude awakening after realizing just how similar the rest of the Yakuza games they missed are.