Additional Thoughts

I have a feeling that this review will remain a black sheep of whatever body of work I end up with. I remember being in a really weird headspace right after releasing the Yume Nikki review and feeling like I had to quickly follow up and prove that I was capable of doing it more than once; moreover, I remember wanting to do something that showcased a completely different set of skills than the Yume Nikki video. A lot of people liked the research I did for that project, but I wanted to do something which relied more heavily on my ability to synthesize interesting thoughts than my ability to just present obscure information in a well-organized way.

Honestly, reading the script again, I'm pretty proud of most of it. I've never seen someone approach Shenmue from a postmodernist/hauntological perspective before and I only feel more and more strongly with time that this is exactly what makes Shenmue an interesting game. I've also just generally become more well read on these subjects with time and I still don't feel like my assessment back then was overly simplistic or shallow. If I could change anything, I'd probably take out the experiential games section (it's impossible to try to coin something without coming off as egotistical) and rewrite the final chapter (I totally rushed those final few paragraphs because I was getting uncomfortable with all the sentimentality).

My explicitly legal and not pirated version of Premiere Pro started falling apart when I was making this video: for some reason hardware acceleration broke, so I let my computer try to render it all on the CPU and it crashed 16 hours into exporting. I think I ended up having to move everything to a new project file and render as slowly as Premiere would allow me to. There's a minor bug with the intro (I think?) but there was no way in hell I was gonna successfully export the video again so it is what it is. The room video in The Present (Continued) is actually a 3D map I built in Unity and ran through a PS1 rendering effect.

I love the way the OST for this video turned out, ambient/vaporwave is not a difficult genre to make but some of those pads came out so dense it's just drowning in atmosphere. The thumbnail for this video was somewhat controversial but rest assured that Charlie & I deliberate over all of these thumbnails for weeks before anything gets finalized. It's actually a direct reference to the face Ryo makes after drinking a soda, which Yu Suzuki pointed out as one of his favorite parts of the game & explicitly requested must be kept in (yall woulda known that if you were real fans just saying). It doesn't fit tonally with the content of the Review at all and that's kinda why I loved it at first, that dissonance just makes the video feel so weird.

Beyond that, the chapter end graphic washes were done by me in Kid Pix 4 and the intro datamoshing was done with Avidemux and a Pixel Sort plugin for AE. This video is probably the closest I've come so far to making something that is right in the aesthetic niche that I want to be in: nocturnal, low-fidelity, early internet.

Originally, the final section of this video was written to be exclusively about how the internet complicated culture/interpersonal relationships, and how Shenmue acts as a nostalgic reminder of pre-ironic earnest communication via a comfortable small-town story. A lot of that material is still in the final video, but I realized that this script came off as a bit too fatalistic in basically shunning modernity to get to the core of why Shenmue is interesting. I thought that making a two-hour long video that ends with such a depressing conclusion kinda sucks, so I tried to figure out how to spin a positive out of that observation. From there I kind of naturally decided to weave this personal narrative into the review about my own nostalgia for the simplicity of communication in my youth, and then recognize the fact that Shenmue can even be used to talk about such complicated perspectives on the world as indicative itself of the power of art to bring people together. The way that my own story is resolved by me making the Yume Nikki review turned out as a kind of meta way to prove the real capacity for art to defeat nihilism.

So yeah, even if this video is a bit isolated from the style of stuff I did before and after it, I still actually like it quite a bit.

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