Shenmue The Animation: Episode 12 Review
The following article contains spoilers for Shenmue: The Animation.
In its penultimate episode, the Shenmue anime continues to fulfill its desire of adding more character depth to Ryo’s friends, while at the same time finding room for some unusual funny moments. While it won’t be to everyone’s liking, it’s definitely a very entertaining take on the Yellow Head building raid, save for one crucial mistake.
Series creator Yu Suzuki has indeed played it safe when it comes to changing meaningful events in the story and his decisions have mostly served to enhance the plot thanks to essentially leveling up every single NPC from the games into characters with real personalities and motivations. However, “Guidepost” is possibly the biggest departure from his own source material and it doesn’t even finish Shenmue's trip to Kowloon, leaving the most exciting part of the game for next week’s finale. Related: The 12 Best Anime Series For People Who Don’t Like Anime
Much like Suzuki handled the final part of the first game, the tone for the finale in the Shenmue 2 section of the story is being set by side characters and not by Ryo, for that reason the episode kicks off with Wong getting away from a few Yellow Heads brutes to find Joy and tell her what’s going on. Most notably, the scene shows Wong’s real reason to help out Ryo from his perspective — as an orphan he’s always felt like there are no opportunities for people like him, he’s always craved for a better life and Ryo made him believe in that, this is real character development.
In Joy’s case, her motives have already been more carefully drawn out, yet with both characters having a deeper background, it finally makes sense why these two relatively harmless NPCs decided to ‘barge in
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