How long has it been since I could write something with "AM2" in the "Developer" heading? Well, if you wanted to fudge things, it'd be Virtua Fighter 3TB, but strictly speaking, Genki coded that one, so it would be...the original VF3, three, four years ago? Since then, Amusement Machine R&D Division 2 has been perhaps the highest-profile group of game producers that wasn't actually producing any games. Until now, anyway. Shen Mue Chapter One has arrived in our hands, and it is undoubtedly a landmark. This is the first Dreamcast game to provide what really feels like a leap beyond the previous generation; never before could you encounter this level of environmental variety and detail in a console game. It's a powerfully immersive world.

The matter of action and interactivity is another one, though. I like Shen Mue a great deal, but I get butterflies in my stomach wondering whether it will play very well to an American audience. It is not an action-oriented game. You'll master the controls in a few minutes, once you figure out how to compensate for the odd turning (you walk in a small circle, rather than pivoting on a dime) and effectively use the quick turn-around control. It seems, at least in the early stages, that it's focused on exploration: wandering about, seeing what you can see, and discovering a myriad of people and places. If you're one of those types who made sure to talk to every single townsperson in Lunar: Silver Star Story, this is absolutely the game for you. If you'd rather your games moved in a straight line, though, and let you blow plenty of stuff up, you may wind up nodding off after too long a stretch of fiddling about.

Then again, maybe I'm just paranoid. If you get too burned out, you can always head to the arcade for a few simple, straightforward games of Space Harrier.

Yep, Space Harrier. Sega has made good on their promise: quite early in the game, exploring the first town, you'll come upon a games arcade with perfectly emulated versions of Hang On and Space Harrier, two very early AM2 efforts. The story begins in 1986, you see, back when they were quite the thing.

Space Harrier MPEG 1 - 3.1 MB
Space Harrier MPEG 2 - 1.4 MB

Hang-On MPEG 1 - 1.8 MB
Hang-On MPEG 2 - 3.0 MB

I could see myself letting the rest of the game go hang and just playing Space Harrier for hours. My parents would never allow me to have a videogame console back in the days when you could play that one on the Master System. Trouble is, further reminding me of my lost youth, the darned game keeps telling me it's bedtime and making me go home.

Zelda 64 fooled around with a realistic day/night cycle, but it always felt like a bit of an annoyance to me. In Shen Mue, though, it's a tremendous part of the environmental realism. Time moves at an accelerated, but still manageable pace, so you're neither bored nor hurried; new things to do and people to meet pop up at just the right time to keep you from finding yourself at a loss for activities. Sleep in a little and you'll catch people going out for lunch. Then, when the afternoon rush ends, and there's no-one to talk to in the street, the bars open up and offer you new options (although I haven't been able to use the karaoke machines yet). Once you're done interrogating bartenders, your watch alarm goes off and it's time to hit the sack in preparation for a new day. All the while, the character of the environment changes to suit the weather and the time of day. In midafternoon, the streets are empty, until everyone heads home from work at five or so. When it rains, there are fewer people on the street, and they all carry umbrellas. The sunsets, furthermore, are lovely.

Indeed, absolutely everything about Shen Mue's world is beautifully crafted. It has the coherent design and variety of setting that marks the cities in Crazy Taxi, with the minute detail that AM3's fast-moving racer lacks. It sounds a little glib, but it really is true: this feels like a real environment. No fooling. The first area you'll encounter is small in comparison to the cities to come, but remarkable nonetheless. It's the dojo that's home to protagonist Ryo Hazuki. Inside, the decor is spare, very Japanese. The rooms have razor-sharp texture detail (the contents of some drawers, indeed, are represented by photorealistic images), and there's enough refinement in the polygon models to avoid the garish, overdone look of something like Dreamcast Vigilante 8. Walk outside, though, and you'll be even more impressed. The garden is exquisite, down to the koi swimming about in the pond, as minute currents move the lily pads back and forth.

From this, you gradually move on, through quiet suburbs to a decent-sized town, experiencing the gradually expanding vista of Yu Suzuki's world. From the dojo, with a couple of people to talk to and maybe half a dozen small rooms to explore, you make your way to a city center with at least twenty separate establishments to visit and goodness knows how many people to talk to. This is perhaps half an hour into the game, mind you, and every inch of the streets around you looks authentic. If I'm in an introspective mood, I don't mind simply wandering about and seeing the sights. I'm supposed to be looking for something, but what does it really matter? What's right in front of me is interesting enough, and after all, tomorrow is always another day.

Perhaps this is why the language barrier isn't bothering me at all. Shen Mue spills over with spoken dialogue, almost all of it naturally in Japanese, but the pace and character of the game is such that comprehension of the details is secondary to absorbing the general atmosphere. Rushing through the game would spoil it completely; it doesn't come with a handy little percentage indicator, like Gran Turismo 2 or Symphony of the Night, but I get the feeling that it would take a fearsome amount of rose-smelling to even find a sizable fraction of what the game holds. My compatriot Brian Osserman has told me he completed the game in 25-30 hours (see his review over on Sega-Dreams, but something gives me the feeling that he didn't quite take his time.

The one thing everyone seemed to be nattering about when the early details on Shen Mue made their way out, from the Spring TGS, E3, the What's Shen Mue demo, and so forth, was the lack of control, certain sorts of interactivity, and straightforward action in the game. The somewhat unkind epithet "Shen Mue Lair" was coined and used fairly frequently on Usenet. I would argue against that sort of attitude on two points, however. For one thing, the gameplay isn't nearly as unwaveringly simple as that of the sequences showcased at E3. Rather, Shen Mue is a sort of jack-of-all-genres (or several, anyway). Yes, it has Dragon's Lair's simple twitching (brought back into vogue in more contemporary creations like Bust-a-Move), but developing your skills in the Free Battle mode, a sort of simplified Virtua Fighter 3 arena, is also vital to your success, and I personally can't wait to come upon the forklift racing. Aside from all this, if I haven't successfully conveyed this impression already, there's much, much more to do in Shen Mue than tap your way through fights and Quick Timer Events. If all you're doing is charging from confrontation to confrontation, slow down, because you're missing a veritable masterpiece of world-building.

At this point, that's what Shen Mue comes down to for me. Its story construction and gameplay pale before its achievements as a feat of 3D art, world design, and character development. When you get your hands on Shen Mue, be it the import or the American translation, be patient with it. Slow down; don't go rushing after the guys in the black suits right away. Kill the lights, and make sure there aren't any distractions around you. Then, take the time to look around. Strike up a conversation. Drop a few yen down the gumball machines. Pet the cats. Play some Hang-On. You'll be surprised how the time will pass by.

Massive, Beautiful Intro MPEG - 10.1 MB
Opening Cinema MPEG - 4.4 MB
Phantom Kempo MPEG - 5.1 MB
Childhood Flashback MPEG - 6.2 MB
Prayer MPEG - 3.5 MB
Walking About The Yard MPEG - 2.2 MB
Gum Machine MPEG - 2.1 MB
Pleasant chat over flowers MPEG - 2.6 MB
Uncouth chat over hog MPEG - 4.5 MB
Shopping MPEG - 2.5 MB
Aquarium Glow MPEG - 1.0 MB