I don't think he knew that prior to the first games release. That's what you're getting at, right? At least that's how I read it. It implies that Yu Suzuki planed beyond the release of the first game, wich he sure did but not in a way that he expected it to bomb and thus planed to let the second one end like it did.

Shenmue was his baby, he put so much time, effort and love into it. If you're giving that much of your life to a game like that I'd say you'll be absolutely sure that it will sell well. Yu Suzuki had a lot of experience in the market and since he did his best, he absolutely had the right to have faith in his work.

The decission of letting Shenmue II end on that cliffhanger was rather because the Dreamcast was already almost on it's last leg when they were in the middle of the developement of Shenmue II. I guess that it was originally intended to end at the end of disc 3, wich would go perfect with the ending of the first game. Then they decided to add the Guilin part very late in the process. It may seem strange to add more to the game in a desperate situation like that as one would assume it's the other way around and they actually cut off the game. But I think they all knew that there won't be a Shenmue III on Dreamcast and since Sega's future was unsure they knew there wont be a sequel in many years (and man were they right...)

I guess they added that part of the game for the players really. Like "Hey you're possibly have to wait a decade or more for III but at least here you finally have the meeting with Shenhua, the girl from Ryo's dream and that was on like every artwork and cover of the games." Maybe then they actually planned to spark a huge demand for Shenmue III among players with the massive cliffhanger. Interesting thoughts...

I just got this shirt today. I had to order it on Amazon Japan through SMJ because I didn't have the credit card needed for the order directly at their shop.

Anyway I carefully took it out of the packaging to take a closer look at the back side wich is obviously the interesting part about it. It looks just like you'd imagine it by looking at the pictures. The print is very nice and the fabric is rather thick and strong. Good quality I'd say and a worthy Shenmue shirt to have!

I find it simply epic how much this pulls all the fans in. May it be long lost users, long time lurkers or fans who've just stumbled across the Dojo. And in 5 minutes the internet is going to explode!

Well that end sucked quite hard. Still nothing about the future of the series. Not even last words by Yu or anything.
Oh well, we gotta wait for E3 or whatever for any announcement anyways, if there's going to be one.

@Shensun: Allright, tell me what your ki signature feels like and I'll use the instant transmission and I'll be right there in a minute. :lol:

@el_cown: Nah, your really thinking too far here. Just because he showed a veeeeery crude overview of the story, including how the big fight ends and what happens after that doesn't mean Yu gave up on Shenmue. Let's be honest about those two points. Everyone probably already figured out that that's going to happen. The fight with Lan Di has to happen (like I said earlier, even when Ryo gave up on revenge) and the ending is really cliche and common in all sorts of media. I wouldn't say these are actual spoilers at all.

Right guys, im going to GDC right now, to find that twat that asked about Space Harrier, the camera, and the bloody bike. Don't be surprised if i get done for murder.
Be gentle with the guys who asked about the camera and the bike, those were actually somewhat okay questions.
You can punish the fool who asked about Space Harrier three times as hard to make up for it. He truly deserves it!

"If Ren ran in circles around the fountain at Pigeon Park, how fast would he run?"

You should try your luck when the chances of winning are doubled. That happens on 24&25 Dec., 1-4 Jan. , 14 Feb. and 14 March. With the odds increased like that I once won all four cassette tapes, both Saturn games and the stereo, all in one playthrough!

It's been quite a while since the last video but I finally have something new. Look what happens if you lose the fight against the Mad Angels on the first day of work!

It bugged me enough that there's still no answer what happens after the thugs are gone so that I played myself and took a video of it. Now we all know exactly what happens.

viewtopic.php?f=37&t=46812&p=1070984#p1070984

Yup, there is something special on that day. The same thing happens, that I wrote in your other topic.
The chances of winning at the raffle are doubled.

BlueMue wrote: That happens on 24&25 Dec., 1-4 Jan. , 14 Feb. and 14 March.

Sorry for not responding earlier, had to work and do other stuff. Here's a first attempt at the title screen.
I can give you the repacked SPR file when it's okay.

This is awesome! Really well done getting Ryo into that game. Too bad I just don't care about Final Fantasy at all.
Maybe Ryo will make me play it.

Now that's what you call a great marketing slogan!

That just made my day! I never knew that you can actually hit that gong. How did you find that out? I'm surprised they've hidden that by having to perform somewhat cryptic actions.

Man I just love it when I learn something new about Shenmue. The game really is like life, you always and forever learn from it!

I like the theory. I like all these theories because it just fun because it's like a detectives game on it's own.
Thinking about the plot of Shenmue is a never ending puzzle as long as we don't finally get the whole thing. It's just such a massive and compley story.

If you look close you can see that the mysterios man looks very chinese. The almost bald head with just a bit of hair in the back, the style of the beard. It doesn't seem to be grey so I guess that man is around 50-60 years old wich fits the image of a leader that stays in the background for me.

In case anyone is still wondering about the mysterious downtime of shenmue.com. I've been informed that some of Sega's servers have been attacked about 10 days ago and a lot of their sites are down right now.

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsega.jp%2Ftopics%2F140512_0%2F

They don't actually list shenmue.com but it's easy to conclude that it's affected by the server attack just like the other sites.

Thief wrote: Honestly -- Shenmue is one of those games in which I'd be very sad to know that I've seen everything there is to see.

You can't have seen everything. There is always something new to see in Shenmue! It just never ends to amaze.

Boot up the sequel, WOW! What a world of difference. Much tighter controls, better..just better everything.
Yup. Shenmue II has much more improvements under the hood then one might think. You have to play them back to back to fully notice the changes in the controls, camera, capsule toy machine animation and so on.

Also the much more vibrant colors and massively improved sky dome with tons of awesome textures and clouds instead of that flat pixelated panel in the background. People rarely mention it but to me this is the greatest graphical advancement from Shenmue I.

You can't read about it and look at pictures to get an impression. These things only give you that powerful impression when you play the game.

Hope you'll enjoy it more then you did the first one. ;-)

This is incredible! It's unbelievable how much this has spread! I'm in awe to see how far this has gone and just happy what this great community has been able to achieve!

That is such a tease but it really made me smile.

Back here again with something new.

I've read about this ages ago but never saw it or found any prove that it's true. With the power of Demul's quick save feature I've finally took on the challenge, tried it and succeded. I just love it when I find out something new about Shenmue!

http://youtu.be/bklP_R3bbN8

You've seen the airplane fly over Wise Mens Qr. But have you seen the alternate scene?
I have something huge in the works now so take this little video as something to hold you over.

Here it is! 45 minutes of pure Fangmei gold. ALL of the conversations with questions and all of Ryo's responses.

The game forces you to go to sleep at Xiuying's place at the Da Yuan Appartments one last time so you'll get the cutscene with the photo of Xiuying and Ziminig when they were young. If the game wouldn't skip time you could potentially continue the story so far that you don't have to sleep there anymore.

If you take it slower and go to the Da Yuan Appartments on your own after 8 pm earlier in the story then you'll trigger the cutscene yourself. And then when you go to Guixang the game will not skip to the end of the day after you've learned the Chawan Sign.

Sonikku wrote: Why of course Ryo is a time traveler. How the heck do you think he got a Sega Saturn in 1986?

Because his father is voiced by Segata Sanshiro. How often does this have to be mentioned until you guys get it?

Once the analysis is complete, they could then somehow incorporate elements that make a game sell into these HD releases
No thanks. I don't want a Shenmue full of shooting, killing, stupid licensed music, profanity and tons of tutorials.
And yes I deliberately left the second half of your sentence out of the quote.

How is Sega supposed to make Shenmue interesting to the current market without ruining the game?
We all know what kids these days love about video games... Why should they even try it in the first place?
Shenmue is anything but mainstream and it simply shouldn't adapt to other games at all.
That's Shemue's strong point after all.

All that Sega should do is simply market it as just that! A unique experience among the endless stream of soulless action games.

I agree that some things need to be updated in a remake though. Smaller things that simply make the game more enjoyable and use the power of the current hardware. A time skip option, save anywhere, modern and classic control schemes, better animations for the NPCs, a newly done dub, more to explore and such.

You don't need to look at other games to figure those out. I repeat myself: Shenmue should stay Shenmue and Sega should market it for it's "uniquity".

Kickstarter of course isn't the way to make a game of this magnitude but it could be used for parts of it.

I imagine funds from kickstarter could be used to build the very fundament of the game. Yu Suzuki could use the money to finalize the script, redesign characters and enviroments up to current technology and actually build the base of the new game engine far enough for tech demos with more advanced weather, NPCs, combat, animations and whatnot.

With something like that at hand it would be much easier to finally get someone to fund the actual making and release of the game.

It's simply a bank statement, you know the things everyone had to get to know how much money they had on their bank accounts before there was online banking. I wonder why they didn't place a bank in Dobuita that you have to go to in order to get the money. Would've been a lot more realistic then the "magical" money transfer into Ryo's pocket. Well I guess they left that out because you already walk around so much for the ticket.

Well hearing that Yu Suzuki talked with someone who really knows how well crowdfunding a game with Kickstarter can go surely doesn't mean that something is gonna happen now. But at least it makes clear that Yu is really thinking about it.

I happily take all this talk about Shenmue and media coverage of Yu Suzuki. Keeping up the interested is better then dead silence, isn't it?

Ever heard of Hashima Island? It's a japanese offshore island about 15 Km from Nagasaki. It's also called Gunkanjima Island because from a side view it looks somewhat like a battleship. It was originally used as a coal mining facility under the control of Mitsubishi and was officially closed in 1974 and has been falling appart since.

Now, why am I posting a thread about this? Because it totaly reminded me of Kowloon when I saw pictures of it. And the best thing, you can explore the island with all it's ghost buildings in Google Street View! So try it out and take in the awesome eerie atmosphere.

https://www.google.de/maps/place/Hashima,+Japan/@32.629056,129.738782,3a,75y,137.44h,101.48t/data=!3m5!1e1!3m3!1sLxaLYt8IeYZVLqVRNCsEPw!2e0!3e5!4m7!1m4!3m3!1s0x3515469d4b782379:0xa8d331536ecbeea4!2sHashima,+Japan!3b1!3m1!1s0x3515469d4b782379:0xa8d331536ecbeea4

Just got this crappy little "game" with the post today.



But there's something awfully great about it. It's the last of the 216 games that goes into my shelve.
I've got a complete DC PAL library now.

Congratulations for finally cracking it, awesome! Can't wait to try this out!

Well I've already scanned all the stuff and made a pack. I hope they are usefull to you.

http://www.file-upload.net/download-929 ... e.rar.html

Okay, I found it now and shared it. And you know what, I decided to make a twitter account after all. I don't care how shallow my reach is a newly registered guy with no followers whatsoever but I just want to support #SaveShenmue however I goddamn can!

I was wondering if there's a way to get out of a move instruction without properly mastering it in Shenmue I.
Turns out, there really is! You just have to fail hard. Video coming soon.

Alright, another one already! I just couldn't resist the urge to try this out in Shenmue II.

Not because I wanted to see it there but how the teaching of the Iron Palm is followed by the Wude lesson.
I was really curious how the game would handle the situation here and got something totaly unexpected.
Shenmue never stops to give... [-o<

http://youtu.be/ybg9HIDeLFk

This is what you get when you don't manage to properly execute the move instructions for too long.
Quite interesting to see because who has ever been that stupid? Oh and listen careful at around 1:18.

I wanted to ask how many of you have played the Xbox version of Shenmue II in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround and what your impressions are.

I recently expanded my stereo system to 5.1 with a modern (but few years old) AVR and gave Shenmue IIx a try.
I always wanted to hear how it sounds in surround, finally made the jump after years of thinking about it.

I have played the beginning until you get the bag back and then all of the Yellow Head Building.
I have to say that I'm rather dissapointed, Shenmue IIx has pretty lame surround mixing. The surround speakers do add a bit of "room" in areas like the sewer under Kowloon, where there's a lot of reverb, you know.
They rarely give off discrete sound effects though. In the intro you can hear the pidgeons fly past the camera but that's a rare example.

The center speaker is pretty much never used at all. The entire front field is produced by the stereo speakers. Combined with the weak surround speaker output it really doesn't give much more impression then stereo.

The only time the game produces real 5.1 sound is during the rooftop cinematics. The voices are of much higher quality then anywhere else in the game and they actually come from the center speaker. You can hear the chopper behind you, the music coming from the front and then you hear Dou Niu to your right, where he's holding Wong.
After the fight, when the chopper flys over you, the subwoofer gives a nice punch. Works and sounds quite well but that's only a fraction of the cinematic action in the game. Maybe the final scene with Shenhua will be mixed good aswell but I don't remember it having those exceptional clear voices so I kinda doubt it.

It's really rather sad. There really wasn't much effort or passion put into the surround mixing of Shenmue IIx.
Guess that goes well together with the dub... It's really a shame as the Xbox can do a lot better and Shenmue II definately deserves a nice 5.1 sound in every cutscene.

That was nice and just what I needed to ease a bit of my frustration. Very intersting to see it played with an instrument like that. Thought it was some kind of shamisen but then it's actually a phillipine instrument.
Sounds kinda similar though.

Anyway, why am I frustrated? I'm trying to win the grand prize at the Abe Store again, for my videos.
But moreso because it's pretty much the only thing in Shenmue that I've never done. I must get that damn prize!

So I've been trying this on Demul. I use my 10 winning cans in a row and then I reload and do it again.
The results are definately different each time and I've won the 1st prize three times already.
But the grand prize... I've drawn more then 650 raffle tickets with that method and it's just not happening!
I've even tried to increase the chances by trying this on christmas eve for the last couple rounds but that doesn't really seem to do anything at all.

That old lady is evil. She's cheating. The Gold Dural is a lie! I can't believe I've still never won it after so many tries.
I know the chances are only 1/400 but it must happen at some point, right? I will continue but I'd really need some "soul support" from you guys, just so I don't go insane over this.

Took on another side project because I needed another break from trying to win that damn Dural Gold.
Seems this has become a task for an entire life...

Anyway, I decided to upload the warning messages you get when you put the Shenmue GDs in a CD player.
They haven't been uploaded yet, at least I couldn't find any video of them. So I did my best to put these together, with some nice pictures. It's in HD even!

http://youtu.be/uQBfDgTjuqQ

Yeah, I don't really know, what I was thinking. I like my Snatcher on the Mega CD but this Saturn version is going to be tough. I can't read enough Japanese to know for sure, what option I'm picking and the 32-Bit versions of the game are kinda sucky. The way they've redone some of the graphics and especially the music...

Well, it's still something nice and unique to have and it was pretty cheap, so I'm not complaining.

http://s7.directupload.net/images/140825/5w6ra22c.jpg

Shenmue II Trailer in that order:

http://youtu.be/rklkc-OnrfA
http://youtu.be/PFIScQIs248
http://youtu.be/Ym7FR7h8-eQ
http://youtu.be/dhom2inAhoM

These are of course from the final game. The music in the trailer is a bit different in places. Guess these are from preproduction and not likely to be produced by the Dreamcast in real time. Much like the Shenmue OST sound different then the music in the game. I guess we would've gotten these versions, if they had released a Shenmue II OST but as we all know, there is none. These versions don't exist outside of that trailer.

Axm wrote:but had to wait for stupid Europe to get it.

Hey! Don't be hatin us just because we are the ones that got a good release for once. Hate Peter Moore!

Just got a hold of the Get Bass Fishing Controller Box that was the last missing piece in my DC collection.
So I just use the opportunity here to show off my now complete Dreamcast PAL collection.