Shenmue is one of the first games that I’m revisiting on my Dreamcast. Originally released in 1999, Shenmue is an open-world RPG/life simulation set in 1980s Japan. It was the most expensive game ever developed at the time and I think it shows.

When I originally played Shenmue, I remember being blown away by the level of detail and that every NPC has voiced dialogue (the English voice actors weren’t great…but I don’t think I cared much at the time). The world has a realistic day/night cycle and people and shops follow realistic patterns. Sometimes, you’ll need to enter a shop or restaurant and it doesn’t open until a certain time, but unlike a lot of modern games you can’t enter a menu and pass the time. Instead, you must wait or kill time in game. Thankfully one of the early areas has an arcade where you can spend in-game money to play classic Sega games like Space Harrier (which was also developed by Shenmue’s designer, Yu Suzuki).

Playing Shenmue today, I think the graphics and game design holds up fairly well. But it’s definitely a different approach to games of this type. The pace is slow. You have no choice but to be patient at times. There’s also no map in the menus or HUD. Instead, you must find maps in the game world and figure out how to navigate from that. The controls feel a bit awkward, for some reason forcing you to use the d-pad for movement while the analog stick serves as a sort of first person view camera movement input.

There’s several more modern ways to play Shenmue, but I’m happy that I can revisit the original on real hardware. And with the mods installed in my DC, it looks better than it ever did in 1999!