GACHA LATTE

Meandering through SHENMUE's wonderfully sedate revenge quest

- Matthew Elliott

A word of advice to any aspiring villains reading: if you're going to smash up a business, choose one whose revenue flow has nothing to do with fighting. If you take a crowbar to PC Gamer Towers, to use an unwise example, it's less likely that you'll enrage someone who'll spend a lifetime training to defeat you.

I suppose the big difference is that in Shenmue, Ryo Hazuki’s dad gets murdered, which we could consider an additional motivating factor. That makes it sound like Shenmue has some sense of urgency, which is absolutely not the case. Ryo knows basically nothing about the man who killed his father, except that he’s Chinese, wears a coat with a dragon on it, and drives a black car: a character profile that could put him on a collision course with almost every broadly sketched East Asian baddie in gaming.