Reader Question: Shenmue's Legacy
originally posted on Cohost, 09-25-2023
Anonymous asks: what do you think’s the legacy of Shenmue? is it more remembered for itself, or for how it inspired games to come?
Shenmue is an interesting case because I only just got around to it last year, after living my entire life in a post-Shenmue world (Shenmue released in 1999, I released in 1998). In this way, I was shocked playing Shenmue the same way I was shocked when I first watched Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro or Citizen Kane, which is "Wow, every single thing in the world has been trying to be this the whole time." The sheer amount of games that crawled out from Shenmue's shadow has of course dwarfed any consistent presence any single game could hope to retain. I can think of other similar situations with Out of This World and Panzer Dragoon Saga. There's simply so many games riffing on what these games pioneered – and then yet more games continuing to riff on those riffs, and so on – that the culture has shifted so far beyond what the single point of ictus catalyzed that it'd be impossible for them to be remembered just for themselves anymore. These are all excellent games on their own (two of these three I mentioned are in my all-time top 10, of course), but there's no denying that the whispers and echoes and ideals of them have lived on far longer than their actual immediate mechanical existence. I think we'd live in a better world if everyone who, for example, ever played a Yakuza game went back and played Shenmue, or everyone who ever played a game by Fumito Ueda or Yoko Taro went back and played Panzer Dragoon Saga, or anyone who ever played any kind of cinematic prestige game went back and played Out of This World, but that is not the world we live in. It's simply not how people engage with things. For this reason, the reverberation of the clap will always last longer than the clap itself.
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