- Joined
- Mar 11, 2020
- Favourite title
- Shenmue II
- Currently playing
- God Slayer
The Yokosuka and Hong Kong chapters were shown in some early Japanese promotional video, that I can't for the life of me find right now. It actually showed some of the pages as well. The video quality was extremely poor, though, so I could only make out a conversation between Yuan and Dou Niu, in his office, about failing to find Yuanda Zhu. Those are the "novelizations" of the story everyone talks about.That being said, the booklets clearly say The Legend of Akira and contradict the tiles. Those pictures never came out before S3 development but we have no clue when they were written. It just seems to contradict earlier sources which show Suzhou as a later chapter and no Baisha.
Suzuki has said before that he doesn't rely on the manuscripts to plan out the gameplay elements at all, though. I suppose another possibility is that the 11 chapter cards represented the in-game chapters for the original VFRPG, and not necessarily the story chapters.
I mean, basically, divorce the idea of tulou from the idea of Baisha. The concept art doesn't technically say it's Baisha, so it could have maybe been the Chuxi Tulou in Xiayang, Fujian, south of Shanghai, just as a suggestion. Baisha comes later in the story, but maybe it relies too much on Xi'an. So my speculation here is: Remove/postpone Xi'an (and I guess whatever location Baisha actually was), and replace it with a previously cut location from the Suzhou chapter. I think there are potentially some inaccuracies with this idea, but it was something I couldn't technically rule out.It's definitely Baisha if you ask me, the tulous are very distinct. However, those are S3 concept art. It seemed like he really wanted to put Baisha into the game because he liked the strategy gameplay mode.
I guess the other thing, though, is that Miyawaki mentions just one town being cut from Shenmue II (where there were a bunch of people who trained like Shaolin monks).
Akira is shown in his VF2 kenpogi from the eighth chapter card on, though (after Cangzhou). It doesn't necessarily have to be this way, I just think it's most likely that any concept art after a certain point in the story (training with the grand masters) would have shown Akira in his VF2 kenpogi, and not the green one.It's so hard to tell I agree. I think the kenpogi isn't an indicator though since all the S3 concept art shows him in it.
I am highly suspicious of this information. I could certainly be wrong--I only minored in East Asian Studies, and China wasn't my focus--but the closest thing to Guilin I can find is the section in about as far northeast as you could go in Hunan province.Regarding the great wall, I was corrected on this by another user, but there is actually remnants of a wall near Guilin.

That is technically just the next province north of Guilin, and apparently it's close to Fenghuang, but still.
I kind of see it the opposite. I think most of Niaowu was the Guilin chapter, with parts of the storyline of Xi'an, While Baisha would have continued with the Baisha chapter story, along with some elements from Suzhou/Shanghai (ending up partially rolled into the castle in SIII). That's sort of similar to what you're saying, I just think the origins are slightly different. I do personally believe that the initial showdown with Lan Di was originally meant to come before Guilin, though.My thought is Niaowu covers a lot of what the original Suzhou chapter was supposed to while incorporating some of the Guilin chapter (Niao Sun). Baisha was originally supposed to be an expanded castle section essentially with a new gameplay system. When it got scrapped the essence of the story elements got used for the games ending. I do think some Baisha story elements remain for S4 though, namely the 4 bosses. If these were meant to be the CYM leaders we will definitely see more of them, unless they were meant to be sub bosses for S3 only.
That's a really good point, I would think it should follow the original structure, but even a lot of the beta footage for Shenmue on Dreamcast only ever seemed to show Yokosuka, Hong Kong, Kowloon, and Guilin.What I'm curious is about is how much development was done on the Saturn. We know they got up to Guilin but is that following the original outline i.e. was Suzhou or even Baisha completed on the Saturn? Or was it a similar structure to what we got in S1 & S2? If it's the latter then it shows the story changed early on, but other sources indicate that the games didnt change in scope until the Dreamcast
I'm kind of throwing my hands up at this point, though. I'll just wait to find out more.