After making fans wait more than a year and a half, Sega released the second installment in Yu Suzuki's epic Shenmue last week in Japan. While the first chapter set Ryo Hazuki's adventures in the small Japanese town of Yokosuka--with little progress to the storyline to boot--most will be pleased by how Shenmue II for the Dreamcast has turned out. Your adventures begin as Ryo arrives in Hong Kong in order to find a martial artist by the name of Lishao Tao, who Ryo hopes will help him locate Yuanda Zhu, the person who sent the letter to Ryo's father in the original game. If you have a cleared save file from the first game, your items, skill moves, money, and date of departure to Hong Kong will be carried over. Those who happened to missed the first game can watch a summary movie that fills you in on the key events.

Ryo runs into some unsavory personages.

Simply put, Shenmue II is a natural extension of the first, but its pacing and the progression of its story are quite well executed when compared with those of its relatively slow-paced predecessor. There are more "quick timer events" (QTEs) and free battles, both of which start to occur early on in the game. This time, though, the story continues on even if you fail the QTEs, though you'll still have to fulfill the particular objective at a later date. For example, if you are chasing somebody in a QTE and you fail, you lose track of him, but you'll be given another chance to find the person at another time and location. There are still some instances, though, in which the QTE will keep looping until you fulfill it, similar to how it worked in the first game. There is also now a new type of QTE that's command-based, but due to the way it displays the required inputs onscreen, most players probably won't get it right the first time. And even after you've been exposed to it, it's hard to determine the timing required to properly execute the command. It becomes quite annoying when you keep failing this new type of QTE and it keeps looping infinitely--without allowing you to skip the cutscenes.

In Yu Suzuki's Hong Kong, it's "roll or be rolled."

When you have spare time during the day, you have a lot more options to keep yourself entertained. In addition to playing the slot machines or hitting the arcades to play classic Sega games, you can visit one of the many vendors in Shenmue II's Hong Kong that allow you to gamble--you can play pinball-type games, you can roll dice, and you can even arm wrestle. You can also work carrying wooden crates in a QTE-type minigame, but you can find a more challenging job as an employee of the gambling vendors. If you choose such a job, you are given a certain amount of cash by the owner of the establishment, and your job is to lure potential customers in and play a pinball-type game against them. If you win, half of the earnings go to you. Luckily, even if you keep losing, you only lose the owner's money. But if you simply don't want to bother working, playing games, or gambling, you have the option to fast-forward time at particular instances to expedite the arrival of appointments and the like. Unfortunately, you can no longer use your spare time to visit a park and practice your moves to gain experience. The only places you can earn such experience are the free battles that crop up as your game progresses.