There are very few games you can go out and say, "It's truly amazing." This is one of those very rare games...
You start as Ryo Hazuki, a teen (eh) kid (eh) older kid (yea), who sets out to find who killed his father. Now if Yu Suzuki would have skipped the opening seqeunce when his father was killed he probably would have made a much more interesting story. But he didn't and that's all I can say about that. You have to gather clues, go off leads, find people. It's very much Chinatown, without Jack Nicholson. There are so many places you can go for a dreamcast game. It has Dobita, which is the main town where you'll see everybody go, live and learn. Shenmue was the first to master the "Everybody has their own life," malarkey that every game claims to have. No this game was the innovator and the ender of this. People wake up, work (if their kids they go play and talk to people), go out after work, sleep. Also everybody has their own schedule everyday, so if Yakima-san is looking at T-Shirts then you know he is interested, it doesn't feel like the developers just said "Throw an animation here, throw one there." The city feels alive. With passion, story and a great amount of fun. To close it up I have to say that Shenmue isn't perfect. I gave the sound a 8 because the realness of the city is so, you'll hear things you wont normally hear in a game. Makes me wish it was in 5.1. But the thing that plagues it is it's bad voice acting. It's not really really annoying Japanese voice work but it is almost that bad. The graphics are amazing on the dreamcast. In fact I wish they would port it to the xbox then to the 360. It's a game I would pay 60 bucks just to play again in HD widescreen, 5.1. I hope everybody see's that this game isn't just a crappy RPG, because it isn't it's a detective story without the detective. It's really great and I hope alot of you see that.
Richard Lederer