Shenmue The Animation: Episode 4 Review
In its fourth episode, the Shenmue anime pushes the fast forward button to advance the series’ plot at an astonishingly quick pace, however, in doing so not only does Yu Suzuki serve his game great justice but also manages to expand and improve on the story he wished to tell 23 years ago.
How does Shenmue achieve all of this? Well, while the obvious answer might be discarding all the mind-numbing tasks and errands Ryo has to attend to on his Dreamcast life, the fact of the matter is that the anime prioritizes its characters over anything else. So despite the third episode reaching halfway through the game’s runtime, this week’s outing leaves Ryo almost on the verge of leaving for Hong Kong and sets up an exciting and action-packed fifth episode.
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Things start off with a dream sequence featuring Shenhua, which might just be teasing that the jump to Shenmue 2 is just around the corner but besides that, Ryo starts looking for the cheapest trips to Hong Kong so that he can continue his quest for vengeance. This leads him leads to encounter a Mandarin-speaking travel agent, whose dialogue implies that Ryo understands this Chinese dialect, which might be important later on when he’s in Hong Kong (Cantonese language) and mainland China.
Even though these types of details were easy to overlook in 1999, the Shenmue anime has already featured Lan Di speaking Mandarin, so while the anime might stick to standard Japanese voiceovers (or English) even for Shenhua, these snippets improve the overall sense of immersion.
Speaking of which, what “Shackles” episode does best is convincing viewers that all the Shenmue NPCs are real characters that are part of the story, for example, when Ryo sees
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