Mystere wrote:I suppose it's possible that both are true, and Miao village will be introduced later than originally intended. The Shenmue Wiki confuses things further by claiming that Bailu Village and Miao Village are one and the same:
"Bailu Village (白鹿村), also known as Miao Village (苗村 Miáocūn) in cut content of Shenmue II (Miao refers to the tribe), is a village in Guilin, China."
I'll give you that; there's no concrete confirmation of anything, other than an area was cut that wasn't Bailu and the description of it matches those screenshots perfectly. The Wiki stuff confuses it even more, but it's a wiki, so anyone could have put that there and there is also no source cited. But it's very clear from the description of the cut area mentioning the guys practicing on those bars that it's the one in those images and not Bailu.
The common tower structure featured in the mystery village and Bailu from 3 is not necessarily an indication of it being the same area. The purpose of the tower may indicate why it could be necessary to have them in villages found in that region. (Maybe it's just a watch tower to watch for bears / wolves / something?)
The justification for it being the cut area from 2 is that they allegedly didn't develop much of anything beyond what was finished for 2. (I'm referencing the comments made at some point that there was no Dreamcast version of 3 ever in development, they basically stopped when 2 was finished and it wasn't like 2 where they had started that stuff already before reducing the scope of 1. I do not remember where that information comes from.) Why would they add a loading screen for an area if it wasn't planned until Chapter 8 and nothing had been developed for that far out? And why is the scenery consistent with what we've seen already of the area near Languishan? Perhaps it's another story element that got moved so Ryo could meet Shenhua before the end of Shenmue 2?
Either way, the main point of my post was to point out that we already had confirmation that those screenshots were not Bailu but in fact the area cut from 2.