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This Week in Anime
Is Shenmue the Animation the Perfect Video Game Adaptation?

by Steve Jones & Nicholas Dupree,

A protagonist that's thick as a brick, plenty of goons to bust, and all the forklift action a Shenmue fan could ask for. Is it possible that Shenmue the Animation is the perfect video game adaptation?

This series is streaming on Crunchyroll and Adult Swim

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @mouse_inhouse @NickyEnchilada @vestenet

Steve
Nick, I'm here to kick ass and hug my dad. And I'm all out of dads.
Nick
Well don't worry Steve. We're headed to 1980s Japan which, according to the historical document known as Shenmue, was 90% muscly bad guys per capita.
Pretty much all I know about living in the '80s comes from action films and Yakuza 0, so that percentage seems right to me. Maybe a little conservative.
During the Reagan administration it was law you had to be able to bench press a hundred pounds to leave your house, and only so you could congregate outside abandoned warehouses to lick knives and steal lunch money.
This is fact.
Meatheads everywhere sneering on top of oversized crates and menacingly juggling children's soccer balls. It was an international epidemic.
So yeah, today we're covering Shenmue the Animation, perhaps one of the least likely modern anime adaptations I've seen. Like I know the games have a dedicated fanbase who suffered through 19 years of silence and then also suffered through Shenmue 3, but I can't imagine that was a big enough market to spur this little revival from Adult Swim and Crunchyroll.
It staggers the mind, but in the same way Shenmue itself staggers the mind. A game that started as a Virtua Fighter RPG, transformed into a proto-open world adventure beat-em-up, cost the most money to develop of any video game at the time, debuted to monumentally disappointing sales, and then somehow became one of the most notorious cult favorites in the biz. And now, yes, it's an anime.
I'm only passingly familiar with Shenmue, which is to say I know it mostly through memes. Like all I knew is we had to wait until we got an episode with forklifts before we covered this thing, in order to get the True Shenmue Experience.
I haven't played it myself, unless you count watching a let's play back when YouTube wouldn't let you upload videos longer than 10 minutes. But as a weird little experiment that really dug into people's brains, I respect the game and it's glacially-paced yet hypnotizing tedium a whole lot.
It's certainly a unique IP! And while the anime can't really communicate that type of interactive experience, I do think the show's managed to communicate some of the oddball charm of the original games. Like how Ryo is immune to flirting.
Oh my god, yes. If we took an X-ray of his head, all we'd see is a miniature dojo with an even more miniature Ryo practicing his punches. Every time Nozomi tries hinting towards their future together, the camera just zooms in on his utterly blank face. It's hilarious.


This happens MULTIPLE times.

Sorry Nozomi, only way you're getting down with this boy is if you convince him sex is a secret finisher move, and make him go through at least three side quests to learn how to properly hump. It's all he knows.
And, jokes both aside and included, that is what makes Ryo so likeable. There's not really much to his character, but the story it completely committed to what little there is. There isn't a problem that crosses his path that he can't solve by doing martial arts or learning about martial arts. In other words, if you remove the video game from Shenmue, it just turns into a silly kung fu flick, and those have a very high entertainment ceiling.
It's the magic of Shenmue. Ryo should be a dirt simple and uninteresting protagonist, but the way he both conflicts and meshes with his absurd martial arts movie world somehow shoots the moon and lands back at endearing. It helps that basically everyone else around him is a total weirdo who he nonetheless accepts without question.
It also helps that a lot of Ryo's enemies are total weirdos, too. The standout from the first part is this little goblin who stalks Ryo and mutters to himself about mirrors all the time like a particularly vain Gollum. He's just always in the background laughing it up. He's like Shenmue's version of sickos.jpg.

And some of those weirdo enemies also turn into weirdo friends. The franchise has got it all!

Everyone needs a buddy who knows the best piss spot.
As I understand it, running into these weirdos is the core gameplay loop of the games. You run around talking to different people to slowly piece together a breadcrumb trail as Ryo tries to find out why this random guy showed up and merced his dad.

Also for anyone new hoping to get those answers, uh...don't. Shenmue was planned as a horrifically ambitious SIXTEEN PART game series, and we've gotten a grand total of three in the last 20 years. So consider this the prologue to the prologue.
It's also funny to consider that the entire first game amounts to just the first five episodes of the anime. And the anime doesn't feel all that rushed either! It's just that Shenmue's novel intersection of life sim elements with adventure game obtuseness really ballooned the experience—and not in a bad way, necessarily. But yeah, if the goal was to get all sixteen parts of the story into people's hands, then honestly an anime might have been the better delivery service.
Eh, Yu Suzuki's not the kind of guy to go the conventional route. But that does mean the games' stories fit pretty well into an episodic TV anime structure. Every episode, Ryo encounters some new person, gets involved in their story, and comes out of it with a new lead on Lan Di. The overall story might not advance much, but you hardly notice because there's always something going on. Except for the Shenhua segments. Those definitely drag.
It is funny, though, that the show keeps cutting back to this quaint little village and this girl with a pet goat, with no indication of who she is or what part she plays in the story outside of the cryptic prologue. Like, obviously it's a moot point considering the show is targeted at fans of the game, but it's an amusing structural decision to consider for newbies.
It seems to be there entirely so we know that yes, Ryo will eventually make it somewhere outside of his rusted out harbor town. But personally I think that time could be better used having him kick more dudes' faces in.
Can't leave this kid alone for 5 minutes without him wandering into a dive bar and starting a fight with some hoodlums.
It's all he knows, ok. The only things his father ever taught him were how to fight, and how to maintain a ruggedly handsome scowl at all times.
Also gotta love how efficient the show is. Dad is in a grand total of one scene before Lan Di shows up to punch his entire heart out, and he's completely out of the picture before the premiere's midpoint commercial break. All so we can move onto the important stuff like Ryo getting stuck in a trash can.
I will say, for as cliché as the dead dad thing is, I do like how the story emphasizes Ryo really didn't know his old man very well. Part of his quest is revenge, yeah, but it's also a journey to learn who his dad was beyond the rigid martial arts master he knew.

It's nothing deep, but there is an emotional hook there if you're looking for it.
That is good, but if you're irony-poisoned like me, you'll also enjoy how every sympathetic goon that Ryo runs into also coincidentally ends up having daddy issues.
To be fair I'm pretty sure daddy issues comes standard with your Teenage Delinquent starter pack. And for the Underground Crime Boss expansion too!
Guizhang is Ryo's part 1 boyfriend. And if you have to ask me how they bond, then you haven't been reading the column.
This is just how dudes bonded in the 80's. It's normal for boys.
Men will literally teach each other very large kicks called Swallow Dives instead of going to therapy. And it works.
Fellas, is it gay to fight at the docks and take each other out with a simultaneous finisher move, only to reveal it was all a ruse to draw out your real enemy and beat up his army of goons?
Yes. Very yes.
Welp. Sorry Nozomi. You better learn some dope scissor kicks if you want to compete.
And as good as the BFs are, they're not even close to the most compelling part of the first game's material.

#ForkliftStruggles
See this is the real fun of coming in with only secondhand knowledge. I knew there was a whole section focused on forklifts, but I had no idea they were Chekov's Industrial Equipment and would come back in the climax of the story. Now I know why these games are still beloved so long after the fact.
Mai is so good. Just raring to get into a tiny electric vehicle with a top speed of 15 mph and save the day despite zero training.
Thankfully Mark is here to keep her from spiraling into a life of work safety violations. Only properly certified adults should storm gang warehouses and pin henchmen to the sides of storage containers like cartoon characters. OSHA says so.

Also I should note the show takes the time to establish those dude Mark pins down do, in fact, piss themselves. Because that's how Shenmue rolls.
Ryo also secretly signals Goro to rescue Nozomi by writing a message by their aforementioned usual piss spot. Not every story is brave enough to let urine save the day, but that's why Shenmue is so important.
I also love that the big villain gang leader's plan was to just have a ton of guys bum rush Ryo and Guizhang. Like that was his evil scheme. Send an obscene amount of dudes at these two guys and hope they don't all get their asses beat. Spoilers: They do.
Bad guys so often forget who the 'em in beat-'em-ups refers to. It ain't the hero. And adding more 'ems to the 'em doesn't make much of a difference. At the end of the day, those 'ems are still getting beat up.
Somewhere in the middle of all this Ryo finally earns enough money to travel to Hong Kong for the next chapter of his search for Lan Di, leading to a thrilling and romantic goodbye with Nozomi.
F's in chat for Nozomi. At least we get a few scant feel-good romantic vibes from the conclusion to Goro and Mai's arc. Although I'd argue them tying the knot is redundant when they were already very clearly well into their marriage the first time we saw them.

Though before Ryo can depart he does have to show the fruits of his training by kicking Gizmo's ass real quick.
Done. Next.
Alright then, now he just needs to find a new girl to be completely oblivious to.
That's what Hong Kong is for! There are a lot of changes in Shenmue 2, and the most overt one is how the wife quotient immediately goes through the roof.

But you know what they say, the more things change, the more Ryo still wouldn't recognize flirting if it karate-chopped him in the throat.
To be fair, Ryo has much more important things to do, like talk to old men in parks who speak exclusively in philosophic riddles pertaining to martial arts.

This is Ryo's love language.
Then he must really, really love street thugs.
He loves any opportunity to mimic the protagonist of an after school special.
Though I do like how this particular instance it's a trick and the kid he's protecting just steals his shit. It's a trap perfectly placed for this show/game's protagonist, like the real asshole tricks in FromSoft games.
Ryo gets read like a book the minute he steps off the boat. Like, can you imagine how eerie it must be for a woman to guess that you have wishes? And for her to be RIGHT? Blows his mind.
To be fair, she also senses that he's got some sexist ideas about fighting and is more than ready to kick them out of him.
Only takes about 20 seconds too.

God I wish that were me.
Well if you were willing to palmstrike a tree all day for weeks on end to earn the blessing of a mysterious old guy in a park, maybe it would be. Ever think of that?

If it weren't already obvious, Shenmue metamorphoses into even more of a kung fu flick in its second part. It's all about teaching Ryo the hollowness of revenge, while also teaching him how to exact that sweet, sweet revenge with the steeliest palms ever.
It's a fun changeup from the more straightforward mystery solving of the first part, and while we're only two episodes into it I have to say I find it more engaging over all. Partly that's just because Ryo's new allies are all way hotter though.
Yeah I definitely agree it plays to the series' strengths a lot better. And like, it's literally set in Hong Kong. They absolutely knew what they were doing, and they ran all the way to the end zone with it, with guts, glory, and yes, more goons abound.

Also Joy pouts once and it's very good.
They also take the time to lecture anyone in the audience getting impatient for us to get to the Lan Di factory.

Just chill guys. The magic of Shenmue is sparring in a convenience store parking lot for a while because the store you need to go to for your current side quest doesn't open for two in-game hours.
And that's the sad part: there's no way for the anime to replicate that without becoming unwatchable. It can never fully capture the quintessential Shenmue experience. But by the same token, I guess I never really got the full experience myself. And the anime, both in spite of and due to its quirks, ends up being a surprisingly fitting reflection of Shenmue's own idiosyncrasies. I don't know if it's what I'd call good, but I certainly have enjoyed it quite a bit.
For what it's worth, I've had a lot of fun with this adaptation. It's quirky and unique enough while following familiar story beats, and ends up a super easy watch. It's not perfect, and it certainly won't revive the all-but-dead game series, but I'm glad to spend time with it nonetheless.
Yeah, going back to your first point, it's pretty incredible that this exists at all, even considering our current inescapable miasma of cultural nostalgia. Plus, it's all the more incredible that it really seems to "get" what makes Shenmue's story and tone so engrossing, so good on it.
And who knows, this is a property that managed to come back nearly 20 years after it was left for dead. So maybe we'll be talking about Ryo punching goons in untold locales again one day.
And just imagine the kind of day-to-day minutiae future video game technology could facilitate throughout the next 13 installments. The possibilities are truly limitless.
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