Shenmue: a game that emphasizes story, atmosphere, and character development Game Info Publisher Sega Developer AM2 Genre Adventure Origin Japan Lead Designer Yu Suzuki Number of Players 1 Force Feedback YES Release TBA Peripherals Analog Memory Pack The classic Shenmue image, and the first confirmation of the game's splendor.

This is Yu Suzuki's description this past April of his five-year-old Shenmue project. Those carefully chosen words reveal much about the game, more, perhaps, than a thousand pictures ever could. For in those words lay an explanation of why Shenmue is what it is; Suzuki and the talented developers at Sega's AM2 division have apparently made the focus of their massive Project Berkeley such elements as story, atmosphere, and character development, as opposed to gameplay and graphics, elements that have been at the core of AM2's previous games.

Story, atmosphere and character development - these are typically the focus of the role playing game genre, but Suzuki has chosen not to classify Shenmue in the same category used to describe Final Fantasy, Grandia, and Lunar. Instead, Sega has concocted a new genre in celebration of the game: FREE, an acronym for Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment. Embodied within this decidedly Japanese catch phrase is, apparently, a description of game. I suppose you could read the phrase as saying that the player will gain entertainment value by reacting fully to all visible objects in the game world. That's a pretty good description, but there's just so much involved in the twenty million dollar project that it's damned near impossible to do the game justice with a simple phrase.

Take, for example, the game's world. No previous game has seen its surrounding world filled with such detail as that of Shenmue. Streets have street signs, complete with either Chinese or Roman characters depicting street names; shop exteriors have the vertical billboards characteristic of the East; building's aren't mere blocks, but look as if they've been constructed from bricks and stone (where in the world did AM2 get the idea for that, eh?); trees aren't flat bitmaps, but seem to be covered with individual leaves and petals. The finest testament to the level of detail in the game is, I'd have to say, the sheer amount of crap lining the streets. Looking at these images, one takes note of garbage cans, garbage bags atop the cans, and actual garbage surrounding the cans. It's an ugly notion, that of garbage lining a street, and I suppose that in real life, a streetside with even the barest remnants of a living presence would look absolutely hideous. But when seeing such detail for the first time in a game, one cannot help but be taken away by the beauty of it all.

AM2's aspirations for astounding detail didn't end in these little things. The game takes place not in an ancient time, nor in a galaxy far, far away. Instead, the game's first half is set in 1985 Yokosuka, with its second half taking place throughout various cities of China (including, primarily, Hong Kong). Now, depending on preference, you may consider 1985 to be ancient history. However, the important thing is that there is a reality to the game's world, complete with factual information that the development staff could look at during development. The team has indeed risen to the occasion and conducted tremendous research with the idea of replicating the real world as accurately as possible. Geographically, you'll recognize well-known streets, shops, and buildings, but similar effort was devoted to replicating one particular aspect of the environment: weather. AM2 supposedly retrieved old weather records from the various places featured in the game's world, and has attempted to incorporate proper trends into the game. You'll see the same environment under snowy, rainy, foggy, and sunny conditions, and you can rest assured that the game is an accurate representation of reality in that respect.

The game's 1200-or-so rooms are also loaded with tremendous detail, despite the fact that they're more than likely fictional. You'll be witness to rotary telephones (the foreign variety, with the jumbo bases), papers and folders covering tables, along with individual cassette tapes. Rooms have different shapes, different carpeting, and different furniture. It's more like the real thing than you've seen in any game before, and it should serve to solidify the Shenmue world.