I recently went over to Hong Kong to meet my future in-laws and my fiance surprised me by arranging a few trips to some of the locations featured in Shenmue 2. I know this kind of thing has been done before, but I thought I would share a few pictures for anybody that's interested in seeing them. I've also added a couple of pictures from a recent trip to Yokosuka as I happened to have them to hand.
Aberdeen.
This is probably one of the areas that felt most like the game. Although it's clearly changed since the era the game was set, there are still a lot of small fishing boats around the harbor that really reminded me of the scenes with Wong towards the end of that section.
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Man Mo Temple.
Although a really interesting place to visit, the temple was nothing like it was depicted in the game. The temple grounds were significantly smaller than they were made out to be although I supposed it did maintain some of the musty feeling I'd imagined thanks to the ridiculous amount of incense that was burning inside the temple. The exterior of the temple is currently being renovated, so you will have to excuse the lack of decent shots from the outside.
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Wan Chai.
As with the original game, the scaling of Shenmue 2 is pretty off when it comes to the distance between the locations featured and many of those locations are fictional (albeit inspired by real world locations). With that in mind, it simply isn't possible to go from area to area and so there was quite a bit of wandering around the central area. There were plenty of pawn shops around and the area immediately next to the Man Mo temple was full of antiques shops (a little similar to the Wise Men's Quarter). Queens Road definitely had a Golden Quarter feeling to it, but that was about all we could find.
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Kowloon.
The walled city of Kowloon was by far my favorite area of Shenmue 2, but unfortunately it was demolished in the 90's and replaced with a couple of parks. There are still parts of the original city left standing including some of the original gates, some walls and the foundations of one or two of the buildings though. They also put up pictures and information detailing the history of the city and built a scale model showing what the city was like, which was pretty interesting.
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Yokosuka.
I've been to Yokosuka a few times as it's not too far from where I'm living at the moment. I actually feel as though the original game is less representative of the real life Yokosuka than the sequel is of Hong Kong, which really did surprise me. That may well be because of how things have changed in the thirty years since the game was set though. The one thing that is definitely noticeable walking around the city is the Western influence that having a U.S. naval base stationed in an area is inevitably going to bring. Yu Suzuki was able to capture this very well in the game. Unfortunately, I did my 'let's look for Shenmue locations' thing on my first visit to Yokosuka and lost all of my pictures, so I only have a couple showing the whole area from the ocean and Dobuita Street.
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) Shenmue hoodie and take some pics
But let me tell you about my laundry!! This crow...!
