Time passes and is more than a cosmetic change. Head out in the morning, and you'll see smart-suited salary-men heading to work; walk around in the evening, and the same salary-men are stumbling home merrily from after-work drinking sessions. Play long enough, and you'll start to see the same people walking around, just like in your own neighborhood.
Just like society, the game puts limits on you. Freedom, after all, is a concept that cannot be defined without limits. If you had an appointment for 2:00 p.m. tomorrow, you had no choice but to wait, a touch of realism that infuriated some players so much, Shenmue 2 allowed the player to skip ahead. But it was in that time spent waiting that Shenmue came alive: This was your world, and you had to fill your own time in it.
You found yourself rushing home late at night so as not to upset Ine-san, your kindly surrogate mother. You woke up in your bed in the morning and looked at your diary (helpfully starting with "I'll get revenge for my father!" as if he was likely to forget) to decide what you were going to do that day.
But aside from the environment, one of the reasons Shenmue is so immersive may not even have been intentional. Ryo is a poorly written character, but an excellent avatar. His relationships with the people around him are just vaguely defined enough to allow the player to assume them. He appears helpless at times, as in his ability to respond to his schoolmate Nozomi's affections, but this allows us to overlay our own feelings on his actions. How much of this was intended by the game's writers is questionable - the point is, it works.
Stiff Little Fingers
Or at least, it did for some. Shenmue was the Dreamcast's flagship game, but it failed commercially, and in retrospect, it's easy to see it has limited appeal and practically no cool factor whatsoever. Then came the second act. If Shenmue is Lord of the Rings, Yakuza is its Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, a darker, meaner imitation.
Stephen King once wrote that all high fantasy writers like Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan were "trying to bring Frodo and Sam back from the Grey Havens because Tolkien is not longer around to do it for them."
"A thousand pages of Hobbits hadn't been enough for three generations of ... fantasy fans," said King, and 100 hours of Shenmue wasn't enough either. In picking up Yakuza, many players were trying to bring Ryo back from China, because Yu Suzuki is taking too damn long to do it for us. Yet on first play, Yakuza is static and limited. Only selected buildings could be entered, and only selected characters could be talked to, and even then, it was text-only. For those who dig deeper, Shenmue's influence is apparent: Its mixture of about-town exploration with Virtua Fighter-inspired fighting, its optional extras like mini-games and collectibles to pass the time, its feeling of being caught up in a good murder mystery.
Yakuza's creation of Japan is just like its fights: based in realism but exaggerated enough to be fun. Just as the fights can cause the player to wince and laugh all at once, so too does Japan combine humor and realism. It is to the real Tokyo what the stories of Raymond Chandler were to LA. Yakuza is often compared to Grand Theft Auto, but the comparison flatters GTA's cartoonish world. Apart from the tendency to get attacked by thugs every four steps, walking down the streets of Kamuro-cho is like real life, or at least a movie: neon stores, word-perfect street signs, schoolgirls standing in front of convenience stores, chatting on their cell phones. Real-life stores like Don Quixote stand exactly where they would be in real life.
