What's Shenmue ?

Shenmue is a 1999 adventure game developed by SEGA-AM2 and published by Sega for the Sega Dreamcast, produced and directed by Yu Suzuki. Suzuki coined a genre title, "FREE" (Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment), for the game, based on the interactivity and freedom he wanted to give to the player.

Suzuki intended to achieve this by simulating aspects of real life through the game, such as the day/night/sleep system, real time variable weather effects (unheard of in a game of this kind at the time) and various other interactive elements such as vending machines, arcades, and convenience stores.

Shenmue borrows gameplay from many different genres but largely consists of open-world adventure segments with real-time 3D battles interspersed throughout. Shenmue was followed by a sequel, Shenmue II, with at least one more planned as a Dreamcast killer app series, although production on the series ended with the second game, leaving the story at an unresolved cliffhanger.

Project Information

It all started on the French Metagames forum. A lot of people were asking if Shenmue 1 or 2 were available in French language. The answer was always the same: None of Shenmue episode was translated in another language. All in-game subtitles are in English.

One day of reading yet another post about Shenmue, Manic decided to check if that was possible to modify the in-game subtitles. It worked fine. That was in 2006 and we're still going on!

The tools to modify cinematic subtitles for Shenmue 2 were released back in 2007. The NPC (Non-Playing Characters) subtitles tool was released in 2008.

Later, the tools were adapted to hack Shenmue 1 and What's Shenmue game files. SiZiOUS joined the team around 2008. He's the main coder of this project now.

The SHENTRAD Team, here to breake the language barrier!