The Chapters and Locations Confirmed in a Concept Art Video

[Spokane]

And as you know Guilin is like a county, an area that has a few smaller sized cities and towns in it along with the natural scenes we are all familiar with.

[Peter]

Sorry yaochung, didnt realise your map was just of the Guangxi region only

[yaochung]

No problem, Peter. Discussions are always welcome.

[R3N]

Chapter 5. The kanji is illegible (to me), but it suggests a river's name. It may be one of the rivers along which Ryo travelled by boat to Guilin. I think this chapter contains minor details to the game, so it was left out as was Chapter 2.

It looks like Li River (漓江) to me. Yes. It's said that there used to be a considerable length of journey between Hong Kong and Guilin.

As for the "someplace near Shanghai," it has to be Suzhou (蘇州) as you see in this map.



Thank you for the topic. Interesting speculations.

It would had been so great to play at Korea.
I wonder what Ryo would have done there. It is just so interesting.
2 Chapters in Korea how cool is that!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul

Maybe the Chi Yo Men headquarters is at Korea instead of China.
I would had seriously love to play a 80's Korea in shenmue.

[Spokane]

I concur, being able to explore and experience yet another culture in Shenmue would be awesome.

[yaochung]

I would like to know whether there has been any clue about Korea in the original series.
As of now, I think the map with Korean places only applies to Shenmue Online, because it surfaced when the game was under development.
Shenmue's story was told to take place mostly in China at the game's inception, so any Chinese place is fine.
Korean places are different in the sense that not much information about them has been told.
However, I think visiting Korean places in the original series is still possible.
At least Korea is in the same direction as where Ryo is heading to, say, Luoyang and Beijing.

[Fenix]

If you wanna see Guilin region you can easily view the terrain in google earth. Curious.

[MiTT3NZ]

Hmm... interesting topic. Definitely worth a bump. Is it possible that Korea was included due to a Korean developer being attached to Shenmue Online? Plus the fact that it was initially due to be released in China and South Korea only. I understand the logic in Ryo following a path that essentially leads to Korea, but I remember reading a statement from Yu where he basically said that Shenmue Online was non-canon and based around Shenmue II's story only. I've a feeling that certain Chinese and Korean locations were just token gestures for the intended target audience.

[ThyDarkAngel]

^Shenmue Online relation with South Korea and China is mostly because those countries are huge in terms of online gaming.

[MiTT3NZ]

I meant the inclusion of Seoul and Busan as locations in the game lol.