Shenmue 1: How to Save Your Game

How to Save Your Game in Shenmue

If you look at Shenmue from the perspective of someone in 1999, you might fall in love with it. Hell, some people may even fall in love with it using a 2018 lens. There’s no denying Shenmue had some major innovations that paved the way for open world games. At the time, people were blown away at what you could do. Still, there are loads of outdated features that don’t hold up 19 years later. Arguably, one of those things is how to save your game, so we will be showing you just how to do that. It’s not entirely obtuse, but little quirks like these make Shenmue feel like a nearly two decade old game. With the release of the remastered versions of Shenmue 1 + 2, there will be many people jumping into this for the first time, with many more fans gearing up for Shenmue 3 in 2019.

To save your game, you must have control of your character. First, you’ll want to press the triangle button for PS4 or the Y button for Xbox One.

This will bring up your Item menu. From here, you’ll see a lest of tabs you can scroll through. You can use the triggers, R2 + L2 for PS4, or RT + LT for Xbox One, to scroll through the menu to select different sub menus.

Use the triggers to go all the way to the “Save” tab. It should be the second one from the right. Three presses of the right trigger will do the trick.

After this, use the Action button, X for PS4, or A for Xbox One, to select your save file. Confirm it by selecting “Yes.” Voila! You just saved your game in Shenmue.

Hopefully, this will help newcomers figure out how to save the game. In 2018, we’re all probably used to an autosave system, but 1999 didn’t have that luxury, unfortunately. Despite that, Shenmue remains one of the most influential games to date, even with its weird little nuances.