Shenmue The Animation: Episode 13 Review
The following article contains spoilers for Shenmue: The Animation.
How to tackle a giant? That is the question Shenmue’s Yu Suzuki must have asked himself when retelling the game’s story in anime format, and also the same one needed to solve for Ryo Hazuki to take down Don Niu in his final rooftop battle. However, while the anime does succeed at wrapping up Shenmue 2’s story, the differences between the game and series become even greater in an oddly paced finale.
Prior to this, discrepancies between the two were rather small, mostly being tied to the timing of some events, yet the anime decides to give viewers one extra fight that might be worth it for some and seem out of place for others. That, coupled with the show’s decision to quickly run through Ryo’s long-awaited meetup with Shenhua in rural China is what ends up defining an ending that is neither action-heavy nor achieves too much in terms of character exploration.
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The episode is simply titled “Shenmue”, so there’s not a ton of meaning to look for in that and it does happen to get going fairly quickly as it immediately connects to the last one’s ending, the rooftop battle. In the game, series villain Lan Di is happy to watch Don Niu get beaten by Ryo and ultimately gain very little from his second run-in with the young Hazuki, nevertheless, this part gets rewritten in a way that arguably fits in better with the overall story.
See, here Lan Di actually descends to face off against a raging Ryo, blinded by his desire for revenge, and as in Shenmue 3, he has no problems defeating the protagonist who at least gets a reminder from Ren of everything he is supposed to have learned from Xuiying. Lan Di also gets some proper
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