The first thing that will strike anyone about Shenmue, unsurprisingly enough, is the graphical splendour of the game. A short intro features a young girl standing on top of a cliff delivering a monologue, while the camera swings and pans around her, following the flight of a beautifully detailed bird of prey before zooming in dramatically to a close-up of her flawless face. This scene alone outshines the quality of anything seen to date from a console game, coming startlingly close to the standard of FMV seen in the likes of Final Fantasy VIII, and this standard of graphics is perpetuated throughout the entire game. If you gasped when you first came across Hyrule Field in Zelda 64, Shenmue will have you doing a convincing impression of a fish out of water for most of the time spent playing it; from countryside roads to bustling towns, villages and dockyards, the game constantly astounds the player with both its depth of vision and of detail at once.
Perhaps more impressive than the environments are the characters themselves. Central characters such as Ryo himself are modelled with painstaking care, right down to having moving eyeballs, eyelids and lips – meaning that scripted scenes can use a whole range of facial expressions and movements. Many of the scripted scenes, fight sequences in particular, are very impressively animated, and extensive use is made of motion blur and slow-motion to create martial arts effects which wouldn’t look out of place in a good kung-fu film. However, the animation of the characters outside of the scripted scenes can be disappointing – Ryo himself seems to shuffle about like someone with a gammy leg much of the time, and other characters can seem very stiff in their movements, which does let down the otherwise unprecedented graphical look and feel of the game world.
(actually, Huber handled it much more calmly than I expected)