BANALITY IS BRILLIANT. AS I’VE GROWN OLDER, I FIND MYSELF PINING FOR HUMDRUM HIGH JINKS FROM MY VIDEOGAMES.
Shenmue has made this ageing grump appreciate mundanity
As I ease into my mid-30s with all the grace of an alcoholic bull stomping around a shop that sells Ming vases to millionaires, I’ve come to a realisation: banality is brilliant. Increasingly, I find myself craving the mundane. A dream day for this surly Scot involves almost zero human contact, six litres of English Breakfast tea, and, above all, absolutely no surprises. Strangely, I’m also starting to pine for similarly humdrum high jinks from my PlayStation games.
I blame/thank Shenmue. I’ve been playing a lot of Yu Suzuki’s recently remastered action-adventure, and hoo-boy has it made me appreciate how oddly compelling profoundly grounded, fantasy-free videogame settings can be. Indeed, Ryo Hazuki’s earnest, often campy tale of revenge can be so dull there’s a good chance your own day-to-day life is more exciting. In many ways, Shenmue is the antithesis of every Call Of Duty and similarly bombastic triple-A title that have dominated the market for years. If Ryo’s adventure was a dish, it’d be a bowl of steamed celery next to COD’s habanero-stuffed, foot-long chilli cheese dog. This is a game that doesn’t just facilitate the mundane, it positively revels in it.
Not one syllable of that is a criticism. Part of the reason Shenmue’s appeal is so enduring is that it’s remarkably unlike almost any big-budget game to appear on PS4. For large swathes of time, Ryo is given nothing to do as he tries to track down the man responsible for his father’s murder. With no fast travel features, and no way to fast-forward in-game time until Shenmue allows you to put Ryo to bed at 8pm on any given day, you often find yourself with upwards of 30 real-world minutes to kill. And you know what? It’s thoroughly engrossing. The game’s steadfast refusal to let you cut corners helps to ground you in its slightly downbeat, often resolutely unexciting world. There are no nuclear weapons to disarm. No 100-foot mechanical dinosaurs to dismantle. Hell, Ryo rarely fires off a dirty look in his mild-mannered quest, let alone a gun. As you explore the sleepy, often rain-lashed streets of Yokosuka, you have to make your own fun as you wait for the next clue surrounding the murder of Ryo’s pop to emerge. Spoiler: said fun usually involves loitering around the local arcade, not fighting waves of bionic ninjas with a katana.
MUNDANE CLOWN POSSE
All these hours aimlessly wandering around making affable, idle chitchat with the game’s slightly harassed, perpetually baffled NPCs, has made me appreciate Shenmue’s unwavering commitment to the mundanity of everyday life. You wake up, you walk to work – in this case, a forklift job Shenmue physically makes you perform for an in-game week – then you go to bed for the night. The occasional karate showdown with low-level goons aside, the action is rarely exciting, yet always relatable.
In contrast, most modern videogame heroes are starkly unrelatable precisely because their games make you complete such fantastical, worldaltering tasks. Modern Warfare’s Captain Price may have a glorious soup-straining ’tache, but what do I have in common with a man who’s saved the world from nuclear annihilation multiple times? Know who I can empathise with? A dude with too much time on his hands who just wants to get through the day with as little hassle as possible. Ryo, your brand of banality is just my jam.