Graphics: Amazing, gorgeous, brilhant, phenomenal, great... it's simply the best graphics ever grace on the history of the games at a 640x480 resolution at 30 frames per second. The graphics are full of detail, textures are clean, charactes and structures have a lot of polygons. It's is masterpiece.

Sound: Well, the sound is epic, makes you feel that you are inside a movie, the voice acting is great too, they are exactly the voice that you thing that characters would have.

The whole "FREE" moniker is nonsense. Shenmue is an adventure game with some action bits thrown in (primarily two varieties -- the Quick Time Events, which is sort of like participating in a cutscene, and the fights, which are nice but a long way from Soul Calibur). The plot mostly consists -- as it does in most adventure games -- of asking NPC's for information, moving on to the next clue, solving the occasional puzzle. Nothing new here. To all you PC gamers out there I would recommend "Outcast" as an interesting contrast. Yes, the graphics are way worse, but it's more expansive and less linear than this one. An indication of Shenmue's inherent simplicity is the fact that you can't pick your lines in dialogue. Ryo, your surrogate, will always have only one thing to ask NPC's -- the current plot point. This means the game really can't juggle multiple storylines, so in that sense it is incredibly linear. Although you have complete freedom in terms of where you are going to go next, you can only move the plot forward in a highly structured manner.

But let's step back a bit here. Granted Shenmue doesn't live up to the idea that it invented a new genre; but that doesn't mean it's entirely conventional either. I think I have a bead on what Yu Suzuki was trying to do. He was trying to make a game in which the everyday events are as important as the ones that move the plot forward. Where you are so "in the moment" with your character that you are just as engrossed by playing a game of Space Harrier, by watching the rain fall on a fishpond outside your house, by petting a kitten, as you are by seeking vengeance against those who slew your father.

To get the best possible experience out of Shenmue, one must approach it in that spirit, and slow down one's expectations of what "playing the game" is supposed to be like. The graphics are so good that Suzuki very nearly pulls this off; certainly I have spent a lot of time staring at that fishpond, and every store interior is a little masterpiece of virtual production design (I've never seen building-interiors rendered anywhere near as well as this before -- the Buddhist shrine in the Hazuki house is breathtaking in its detail).

The problem is that we don't generally buy computer games so we can pet kittens and admire sunsets in them. We can do that in real life, and the graphics are better (there's tactile and olfactory sensation there, too!). A computer game is presumably something similar to Hitchcock's definition of a movie -- "Life with the boring parts cut out." Shenmue doesn't cut out the boring parts. You must embrace them. You must love them too. And the exciting parts -- let's call a spade a spade -- aren't THAT exciting. I think a game like "Baldur's Gate II" for the PC (admittedly a different genre with far inferior graphics) has about 500 times as much story content for the same price. Remember that no matter how gorgeous the graphics are, they will wear off and the gameplay has to be there too.

It's funny, isn't it, how we can be in awe of the virtual representation of things that are totally mundane. What exactly are we reacting to? In Shenmue you may gasp when you see the perfect detail with which a street scene is rendered -- telephone polls, streetlamps, pedestrians, everything. And yet to see the same thing in real life -- as each of us does every day -- is totally mundane. So what we are reacting to here is not the environment per se (well, a little -- I admit I've never been to Japan, and it is nicely evoked), but the sheer graphical virtuosity of pulling it off inside your TV screen.

Shenmue does retain that lingering fascination, that sense of a pretty little world living in your Dreamcast, so tangible that you can almost touch it. But to be honest, there's not that much game to go along with it. This is one best rented first.

Though, if you don't have decent reflexes, you might find Ryo getting plastered across the pavement more often or not. But the game does have areas where you can practice that too. It's great to watch Ryo suddenly bust out the karate and start beating the heck out of the bad guys. At least, I'd assume it would be Karate. After all, that's Japanese, and Kung Fu is Chinese...though there are so many different schools to that too. Maybe it's neither. Why can't they make a Bruce Lee game like this?