Endurance Run: Shenmue - Part 27 (Epilogue)

Mark Mark, I know you're excited, but take it easy, man!

Stay golden Shenmue.

@corwag: Sorry you were offended, I forgot some people are more sensitive than others.

I only know one thing about Shenmue 2, but god damn it makes me want to see Vinny play that game so god damn much!

Yakuza Endurance run

My favorite part was the action shot of the map getting spun around.

Loved the Endurance Run. Cannot wait for Shenmue 2: Hot Dog Boogaloo. That passport disc sure is a weird thing, but I guess a cool inclusion that didn't happen much with most games. I will have nightmares about Marks' mouth.

Dat shredding butt rock during the forklift preview!

There were stats and leveling in Shenmue, they just didn't do any of it lol. Man i want to fire up shenmue 2 now!

Can't wait for that Shenmue II!

How did that stuff work? I get that your moves got better if you spent time training, but I'm a bit fuzzy on the details.

Also, the million dollar question: if Vinny had maintained his training, how big a difference would it have made during those late-game battles?

@melodiousj: The moves not only get more powerful, but faster. Some of the moves become new animations, basically new moves, when leveled up.

Are you serious? The game pronounces his name multiple different ways. It's literally been the topic of conversation in multiple episodes on how the game has no one set pronunciation of his name. Half the cast calls him Dio, for fucks sake.

Getting a demo derby vibe from this.

I wound up feeling similarly. While Vinny, Alex and Dan have a pretty good dynamic going, I don't think the material ended up doing any favors for the endurance run format or vice versa. Shenmue seems to be a game designed for a leisurely and explorative play style, while endurance runs and quick looks tend to work better when the player is consistently encountering new stimulus to react to. I feel that the nature of this game resulted in an endurance run that had moments of brilliance interspersed with periods of little interest.

@shaunk: Dio is just an overcompensated Japanese R-sound, so it's still somewhat correct (just a bad accent). Absolutely no one in the game says Ryu, which the crew says a good 90% of the time.

Sweet dreams, Shenmue.

I love that Vinny never went into the Abe store in Sakuragaoka. It's pretty wild since he ran past it twice a day every day, pretty much. Quite an achievement for someone who is usually so curious.

It makes a difference in the sense that you can find one or two effective moves and then make them really effective, so that you do them very quickly and do more damage. Then you can just spam them and it makes the fights much easier. The way it works is repeating the move in free training fills up the bar, and when it hits certain break points it levels up into a more effective version. There's a very strong elbow move that you can do extremely quickly that knocks people over once it's levelled up, and you can win almost every fight just by using that over and over. The idea is that your proficiency with the moves carried over to Shenmue 2. Also, you can get move scrolls throughout the game but if you don't train with them, you can't do them in a battle. So you have to learn them overnight, particularly the throws, which are very powerful.

But Vinny didn't have much problem with the fights anyway, so it wasn't necessarily worth spending time training. Definitely could have used the bed time training though. It's remarkable that they never even pressed the button really. If they had levelled up a move they'd have seen it hits harder, and I think is less likely to be parried. You can see in the final fight Chai parries almost every move Vinny tries that isn't a counter, and the fight goes on for a long time, because none of his moves are levelled up.

Since they won't be able to carry their move progress over to Shenmue 2, and anyhow they sort of did away with the training idea in Shenmue 2 anyway, there wasn't much reason to do it in the end.

I was curious myself, so I searched online a bit. Apparently, it's the name of a tree (possibly an ancient tree) that has the Shenhua flower. It resides in a small village name Bailu, which is where the stone mirrors are from. It appears towards the end of Shenmue II.

Thank you for this endurance run. Wasn't sure at first, but your commentary made it very enjoyable. Loved it.

I'm glad I never had to play this game. Holy cow this game sucks. Glad you guys endured it! Thank you for all the laughs

So is that just common knowledge in Japan? The game seems to make no reference to it.

I have to give credit to this game. Despite all its flaws, it really tries to make the world seem like a real believable place. Too many modern open world games just don't give shit. Looking at you, Watch_dogs and all your bus stops but no buses.

I regret never having owned a Dreamcast. I bet I would have enjoyed this game back in my teenage years.

No, because while the tree in Shenmue 2 is based off a peach tree, the name "Shenmue tree" is fictional. Like everything else about the Shenmue games, this is part of the slow burn. You're not meant to know what it means until the end of the second game. Some people will find that to be a weird choice, but it's deliberate.

I really like Chai's theme. It's a tune that I would be super nostalgic for right now if I had played the game.

Even if Shenmue 2 wasn't a proper ER but more like a weekly/semi-monthly feature |I'd be cool with it. Too bad they hate the game, as the second really is more interesting and they introduce some new things.

I remember really liking Shenmue when it came out, but now feels like it could've been a graphic adventure/point-and-click and I would've been fine.

@obeast: I so wanted to see Vinnie's "Wall Hit" stat. When I played this back in the day, I nearly rage quit after considering some torture universe where keeping it at zero gives the "good" ending.

shen-moo