SPOILERS - SHENMUE THE ANIMATION EPISODE 13 "SHENMUE" THREAD

I think there's a bit of a change in the anime, Shenhua says she grew up with the tree, and they show a flash back of her with her parents. But I thought in the game that flashback was a dream of a previous life where she grew in an imperial capital (I guess the era of the Tang Dynasty where Bailu Village's ancestors came from, exiled nobles) and not the same place this incarnation of Shenhua grew up.

Isn't there a flashback in S2 of Shenhua on the Shenmue tree swing in Bailu as well?

My memory's a little hazy so I could be wrong. Either way I think they both work.

Also no floating sword in the anime.

*
Disappointed to honest. I felt really let down by how they adapted disc 4, or to be more accurate.. how they didn't.

The anime really needed a couple of more episodes imo.
I get being disappointed in them not recreating disc 4 but think of it from a storytelling perspective. It would've felt like a bizarre anti-climax to the entire season. I could tell 2-3 eps from the end they weren't going to do it.
 
Man, what an ending. Absolutely loved how the anime adapted the rooftop fight and really enjoyed how they added some Lan-Di fighting, even if it was very brief. Kind of sucks that Disc 4 was basically scraped down to 5 minutes but that means a hypothetical Season 2 will actually cover Shenmue 3 and up which I would hope gives us some of the content that was on the cutting room floor for 3. Hope to see a Season 2 and will definitely be buying the Blu-Ray of Season 1.
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On the overall series: wow, what a treat for the community. I understand and respect those who did not enjoy it as much, but for me these 13 weeks have been an absolute joy and I loved at least 90% of everything I saw (for now this series is an easy 9/10 for me, at least).

On the episode: this episode exemplified the best and the worst of the adaptation.

The best: all of the Hong Kong/Kowloon stuff.
I thought the rooftop and goodbyes were done extremely well. I think people are taking the Lan-Di fight a bit out of proportion. They can easily still do the SH3 confrontation with just a minor tweak (Ryo lands a punch/kick)?

The worst: disc 4 cut content. In my dreams we would have gotten a full episode of just the walk, but that dream died by about episode II. I was expecting at least a montage of them walking, but this was a bit too abrubt.

Overall a very good episode and I wonder if non-gamers would enjoy it more.
 
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The anime has attracted hundreds of thousands of casual fans. It's been a great success.

The Guilin section is fine for newcomers. it's only hardcore fans that can tell it's been rushed from the games. No big deal to be honest given the 13 episodes we had to work with. I would have liked it to be its own episode, but beggars can't be choosers.

One thing, a portion of the fanbase needs to stop doing is expecting the anime to be a 1-to-1 replica of the games. That doesn't make any sense and would be terrible. This is an adaption and a damn good one as well. Not to mention, we don't have the budget to do a full Shenmue anime experience. We're lucky to even get 13 episodes.

I'm still convinced a portion of the fanbase won't like season 2, Shenmue 4, or Shenmue 5 and will only preach about the first two games when it's all said and done. It's a shame, but no big loss. If the franchise can be finished and grow its audience, then I'd rather they push on forward and leave those fans behind in the past.
 
The anime has attracted hundreds of thousands of casual fans. It's been a great success.

The Guilin section is fine for newcomers. it's only hardcore fans that can tell it's been rushed from the games. No big deal to be honest given the 13 episodes we had to work with. I would have liked it to be its own episode, but beggars can't be choosers.

One thing, a portion of the fanbase needs to stop doing is expecting the anime to be a 1-to-1 replica of the games. That doesn't make any sense and would be terrible. This is an adaption and a damn good one as well. Not to mention, we don't have the budget to do a full Shenmue anime experience. We're lucky to even get 13 episodes.

I'm still convinced a portion of the fanbase won't like season 2, Shenmue 4, or Shenmue 5 and will only preach about the first two games when it's all said and done. It's a shame, but no big loss. If the franchise can be finished and grow its audience, then I'd rather they push on forward and leave those fans behind in the past.
Agreed. Overall it is a very good series for Shenmue 1 and 2. Got all the key story points.

I was only a little bit disappointed that Zhu didn't show the projection of 7 points from the Phoenix mirror.

The ending is very good and I am emotionally hit by the scenes and prophecy. We definitely need Season 2 and Shenmue 4 sooner rather than later.
 
Isn't there a flashback in S2 of Shenhua on the Shenmue tree swing in Bailu as well?

My memory's a little hazy so I could be wrong. Either way I think they both work.

Also no floating sword in the anime.

*

I get being disappointed in them not recreating disc 4 but think of it from a storytelling perspective. It would've felt like a bizarre anti-climax to the entire season. I could tell 2-3 eps from the end they weren't going to do it.
I think the journey, the so called rocky path, to Bailu Village is an important part in its own way. I would have preferred to move this chapter to series 2, if they couldn't do it justice. If it wasn't action packed enough, they could have Ryo running into the Blue Spiders whose hide outs were meant be among the lijiang river. I imagine there's a lot of ways they could have adapted the journey through Guilin without having Ryo just knocked out and waking up. I wonder if it was a budgetary decision though.
 
Absolutely loved the full series. Yes, it would have been nice to get more of the disk 4 content but I can understand the cuts they had to make to fit both games into 13 episodes. I just see the anime as a streamlined version of the story and I find it pretty impressive that a video game plot holds up so well in this format. There are so many great characters! I’m delighted that the series seems to now be acknowledged on Crunchyroll as one of the most popular shows and I hope we get the second and third season it will presumably require to complete the story. Hopefully the show has gained the franchise a few hundred thousand more fans. Let’s get Shenmue 4!
 
The Gulin section being cut down doesn't really matter. New fans won't know Ryo has to travel 2 days to reach Shenhua's house. In the anime, it seems her house is right near the port where the boat arrives. It's a good, convenient change to fit in the last section of Shenmue 2.
 
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One thing, a portion of the fanbase needs to stop doing is expecting the anime to be a 1-to-1 replica of the games. That doesn't make any sense and would be terrible. This is an adaption and a damn good one as well. Not to mention, we don't have the budget to do a full Shenmue anime experience. We're lucky to even get 13 episodes.
Plus I would argue that the anime has given us so much more that we didn't have in the games.

- More Nozomi
- More Joy
- More Wong
- More Ren
- More Lan-Di!

If you told me we'd keep the 13 episodes, make it more faithful but take out all of the secondary-character growth and instead focus only on Ryo - then I'd prefer what they did for the vast majority of the anime. I'll take the Joy yellowhead building scenes over more floors for Ryo/Ren to discover etc.
 
Plus I would argue that the anime has given us so much more that we didn't have in the games.

- More Nozomi
- More Joy
- More Wong
- More Ren
- More Lan-Di!

If you told me we'd keep the 13 episodes, make it more faithful but take out all of the secondary-character growth and instead focus only on Ryo - then I'd prefer what they did for the vast majority of the anime. I'll take the Joy yellowhead building scenes over more floors for Ryo/Ren to discover etc.

yep completely agree. They done the side characters justice and made them even more awesome
 
Absolutely over the moon with the entire first season of the anime. What a brillant last episode of the season to close off S2's storyline. Absolutely love it!

Now we need season 2 to cover S3 and S4 and season 3 to cover what would have been S5 and create a grand finale to the Shenmue franchise.

If the Anime has taught me one thing, it's the fact that I personally absolutely do not need more Shenmue games. If the Anime can keep up this level of quality, I'd be more than happy to hear that Yu will cooperate with Crunchyroll/Toonami and Telecom Animation to finish the series through the medium of anime.

Thank you, Crunchyroll! That was a treat. Bluray release, please! 😁😃😍
 
The coolest thing about the anime is, not only is it a great retelling of S1+2 for those who don't want to play a couple of 20 year old Dreamcast games, but it's streamlined enough that going back to play the games afterwards (for those who want to) is still 100% worth it, and fills in lots of little gaps, with a bunch of neat little differences.

Imagine having watched the anime first, then jumping into the games and doing things like investigating the black car, poking around the Hazuki basement, or storming the Yellow Head building? I'm honestly jealous of the newcomers!
 
I loved the anime and I hope it has done well. Obviously the anime can't be a 1:1 replica of the game and there will be some of us who won't be satisfied with some rushed parts but in general it was a 8/10 serie.

If the decided to invest more money in animation and the duration of the season it'd be a 10/10.

The worst part for me is that if the decide to make a second season (I hope so) Shenmue 3 don't have the same amount of history that Shenmue 1 and 2 have and it's too much for a season based on Shenmue 3. So I hope they include Shenmue 4... but I don't see that before releasing the game... I'm looking fordward to see how this all develop!
 
Right. Before I go into my views, I just want to thank Matt, James, Switch, Titch and everyone here for a fantastic 13 weeks of Shenmue fun. To think there has been almost 24 hours of YouTube discussion on a 13 episode series. Amazing stuff and your hard work has been greatly appreciated.

And what a journey it's been. Waking up first thing on a Sunday morning to watch a new episode has been such a treat.

So does the last episode stick the landing? Yes and no. Yes in that it successfully got many of the thematic beats done correctly, but no in that it breaks my heart a little that disc 4 was crammed into essentially 8-9 minutes. But i'll get to that in a bit.

The episode started off a little on the wrong foot as the flashbacks felt more powerpoint presentation than episode. I wasn't sure what to think of the Ryo vs Lan Di battle, but I found it worked quite well; clearly nothing like the Baihu fight in the last episode and the graceful moves of Lan Di work well. The Dou Niu fight was cool and i'm glad that the iconic finish move was done. And who knew a dance remix of the Shenmue theme could work!?

My favourite part was all the fan service of Ryo saying goodbye to everyone (suddenly my criticism of Ryo not saying goodbye to Xiuying etc has disappated). So all in all the first 3 discs of Shenmue II was done pretty damn well.

However, i'm not sure how I feel about Guilin. I can almost understand fast fowarding the rescue of Shenhua to go to her house, but it still feels a bit jarring. My favourite part of Shenmue II (and by extension one of my favourite gaming bits of all time) is the hours you spend learning about Shenhua on the way to her house. To be fair, I can't imagine it's something easily adaptable without slowing things down to a crawl, but I still think an episode should've been dedicated to it. It cheapens things somewhat.

Still - all in all - we have had a fantastic show and my criticisms are relatively minor in all. I think it works in a way, because if new fans play the games, they'll appreciate the depth of the games so much more. It's a show for new fans as well as us and I truly believe that the tightrope balance between placating old fans like me and making things easily understandable for new fans has been well and truly been done.

I tip my hat to the staff for bringing a little joy to the world. Now let's get Shenmue The Animation Season 2 and Shenmue IV.

I await whilst praying ❤️
 
This episode was fucking awesome lol. Think it might be my favourite now tbh. Going to have to go back in a few weeks and watch it all back to back to see for sure though.

The whole rooftop section was just 10/10 for me (I don't think it could have been any better... I just watched it again!). Lan Di coming down from the chopper made me loose my shit, and it's crazy to see that they had the S3 fight playout there. I think that it's better in the Anime too, as you can really feel how menacing Lan Di is. My favourite part of that scene in S3 is the move where Lan Di grabs Ryo's arm and kicks him over the arm into the neck, so I was thrilled to see them carry that into the show. The animation work here (and on that move) is insane. The same can be said when Ryo delivers the Counter Elbow Assault as well, it just looks perfect! Even when Ren dispatches the last guy in the black suit, the body just ragdolls, slightly bounces and slides and looks lifelike lol.

This episode was full of the feels for me too, and I got slightly emotional in a number of places. The music paired with the goodbyes in Hong Kong made me so happy as I was worried they'd leave them out. The fact that we managed to go back, see Xiuying and receive the Yin Yang stone adds to the theory that we will meet with Ziming in the future for sure!

Just overall extremely happy with how the whole season turned out. Every Sunday I see so many tweets of people who are watching the Anime, and now saying that they would like to play the games. That was the ultimate goal and the anime seems to have fulfilled that.
As per the tweet last night, Jason Demarco is very happy with everything and wants to do a Shenmue the Anime Season 2. We need to do everything we can so that that happens lol. Season 1 captured Shenmue 1 & 2 perfectly and even managed to add additional storylines, personalities and reasonings to the original narrative. Shenmue 3 is great, but it's more of a blank canvas in comparison to Shenmue 1 & 2 (when it comes to story), and the Anime Team have done such an awesome job of filling in/fleshing out S1 & S2, that they could really work their magic with S3! It would be so interesting to see what they do there, probably even more so than in Season 1!

The future is looking bright for Shenmue, probably the brightest it's ever been :D!

Edit:- Also, I wanna know who this bad boy is lol. He's not in the room that Ryo stays in in S3 right?
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Maybe it is the disappointment I have felt from several of my various beloved franchises over the past few years (Halo, Star Wars, etc.).. but, in my mind, Shenmue the Animation is the greatest adaptation of a videogame to a television or movie format ever.

Be sure to introduce it to someone that is new to Shenmue.

We need more Shenmue fans.

We need Shenmue IV.
 
A good season one. For me it made Shenmue's story feel new again. Very faithful to the characters with some tweaks. I liked how they opened up some of the characters backstories.

Really feel that the ones who made the show were fans of the games themselves. There were so many little moments that made me appreciate the thought put into each episode. Like in this last one, Dou Niu still tosses Wong to the floor even though he was told to put him down.

Though not gonna lie I miss many moments from the game that weren't included. I hope this team does the second season, if it does happen. I'm not completely giving up on some of those moments that were loss. I feel like they can still squeeze in some of them in a season 2. Like Ren's coins!

But overall I like this version of Shenmue too. It has just as much heart put into it, just like the game does.
 
The Gulin section being cut down doesn't really matter. New fans won't know Ryo has to travel 2 days to reach Shenhua's house. In the anime, it seems her house is right near the port where the boat arrives. It's a good, convenient change to fit in the last section of Shenmue 2.
Nah I'm sorry it was terrible how they did it. The journey was beautiful in the game, they didn't need to do it exactly the same, they can streamline it, but what we got was nothing.
 
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