Shenmue Dojo Blog

Welcome to the Shenmue Dojo's first episode recap of Shenmue the Animation! A recap of each episode will be published weekly after its air date. These recaps will be spoiler heavy and written with the intent of being easily digestible for those who have never played the games. There will be a section toward the end of the recap detailing differences between how the anime and games present the narrative. The energy building for this adaptation since the premier date announcement has been palpable. An excited buzz can be felt again in our fanbase that I haven’t felt since the days of the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter campaign. I share the hope of many this TV show will bring in new fans, some of which will look to experience the trailblazing...

In the Shenmue games we have a lot of characters, many NPCs with backstories and information, especially in the first game, but there is one character that remains mysterious for me, this character is Ryo's mother. It is curious to notice that we don't even know how her character was designed and anything about her background, even in the Passport disc the only information about her is that she died. We only know 2 pieces of information about Ryo's mother, we know that she died of an mysterious illness when Ryo was 3 years old and that her name is Akane, did she really die? Why would Yu Suzuki make this character so mysterious? Maybe because she will appear at some point in the story? Some people even have a theory for this, the...

To open the brand new Shenmue Dojo I will talk about the Shenmue anime and the things we can expect to see. I saw the two new trailers of the anime and it is now clear to me that the anime will be a new take on the Shenmue franchise. Yu Suzuki is the executive producer of the anime & he shared many pages of the original material with the anime team, we will probably see scenes that were cut from the original games. An example of this come from a long time ago. Yu Suzuki commented that Ryo's scar is from the last match of the tournament, this is not in the game. We will see this tournament in the anime? From what we saw in the trailers it looks like we will see this tournament in some capacity though how much remains to be seen at...