An experience that has to be lived in order to claim you're a game lover.
The game begins as young Ryu Hazuki is arriving home from school. He sees his house's door beaten down and a strange car parked outside. Once inside, his friend is tossed out of their dojo, and his maid is lying on the ground. He learns the house has been invaded by some men and they were confronting his father inside the dojo. Ryu rushes inside to find his father fighting a strange chinese man. LanDi demands to know where the 'dragon mirror' is and threatens to kill Ryu if the master of the house doesn't tell him what he wants to know. He ends up finding out and kills Ryu father because of something he did in the past... and this is where the journey begins. A journey that has yet to be concluded even to this day. A jopurney that will lead all the way to China, to the heart of the Guilin Mountains...
Shenmue is such a multi-task game that it is hard to describe it. It has a lot of item collecting from vending machines and lottery drawings, some Virtua Fighter-style fighting and even some button-press minigames. And this is just the tip of the iceberg, since you'll need to investigate like in an adventure game, while trying to keep up with all the side-quests and Ryu's life (both normal and love life) while trying to beat the clock, since if you don't complete the game by a specific time, you'll loose.
Graphics-wise the game pushes the Dreamcast to its limits and shows how that system was a great machine. Lots of detail everywhere, from faces to shop fronts, everything looks and feels just like it should. You'll be immersed in the Japanese culture and feel like you're staying in Ryu's house in Sakuragaoka.
The soundtrack in the game is really special, and talking about it just doesn't make justice to it. It's a incredibly well orchestraded and composed track and it is worthy of a purchase if you managed to find the OST somewhere. The voice acting in the game is generally well done in English. Ryu's actor is kind of robotic, so if you can, play the japanese version or even the european version, that keeps the subtitles but the voices are in Japanese - speacially if you're going to play the european or japanese version of Shenmue II.
There's so much content to this game. From all the dialogue to the minigames, you won't be able to see it all in only one play. Simple as that. You'll need various play-throughs and different ways to find everything there is to enjoy here. It's one of those games you'll play for a long time and find new things as you do. And I didn't even mention the perfect translations of the classic arcade games made by Suzuki...
Shenmue is THE game to own for the Dreamcast. If you don't own it, it is your duty to go out and get it. I don't care how you do it, you have to play it if you call yourself a Dreamcast fan or even a game player... to put it simple: this game is an experience to be lived, it will in fact change the way you think of games.
Thanks for reading!