@vlaphor: He also spent a month on the ship between Japan and Hong Kong with (I assume) multi-lingual passengers. Ultimately, it's a plot convenience/contrivance and shouldn't be looked into much more than Solid Snake not using CQC until MGS4.
Man, it is devastating to know that they reach the item they need 17 minutes in, but don't think to press A.
I get that a prompt would help (and Shenmue II does add a better HUD like that), but they spent the entire episode interacting with items without a prompt and already established that the prompt doesn't always show on smaller objects.
Even without a prompt, what's the harm in just pressing A? Have modern games made us entirely unwilling to just try buttons out to see what they do?
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