10 Video Game NPCs With Awesome Details You Totally Missed

When Shenmue arrived in 1999, it shook the foundations of gaming as a medium and proved that a cinematic, believable, realistic human story could be told with... well, still with melodrama, but plausible melodrama.

Part of what made Shenmue such an incredibly rich experience was that the NPCs are all unique and diverse (with some, like Tom, the hip-hop hot dog-selling “Jamaican”, more outlandish than others), but also had set daily routines.

For example, the housekeeper (and all-round human doorstop - let’s be honest here, Ryo, the protagonist, treated her like crap) Ine-san would wake up, go to the shrine to pray, and come home to clean up your nonsense.

But if you’ve enjoyed following people around enough like the creep you are, you might notice Yoshikazu, a well-dressed salaryman who always seems to be on his way to work.

Follow him around enough, and you notice he never makes it to an office - he’s just anxiously killing time before his home time. With enough uncovering, you discover he actually lost his job weeks ago, and now he’s just too scared to tell his family.

Who wasted more time though - him, or you, for following the poor guy around all day?