It would be neat to identify this location. It looks like a digitized photo of an actual place.
To be honest, the picture it's too lowres to assure it's a photo rather than a detailed drawing. Moreover there's some horizontal patterns suggesting hand trace or it could be, falling at your side, a photo turned to sepia and with a scratches overlay to simulate hand-drawing. As I write, it comes to be more obvious the latter... also makes sense, during Yu's China trip a lot of photos were taken for capturing the game mood so it's very logic and less time consuming than drawing from scratch to take some of the stock footage and convert it to prop pictures with few photoshop clics. Yes, it has to be that.
So for my grain of sand, the first thought is that's a real place in China
I see:
- Roman architecture style arches?
- unidentified columns
- unidentified trees
- unidentified structure at center of image. I can't figure if this structure its:
a) attached to the dark construction/grass from the floor, being a fountain
b) embedded into the arch-wall like some kind of altar, and the thing in the floor is a trail leading to it.
Also, this tower-like structure ends on its top with a cocoon silhouette which reminds me more persian/indonesian than chinese... but Im far of being an architecture expert. I mean, I can see indian temples and say "Oh that looks persian".
edited again because it was a mess:
At first, that white round form on it puzzled me "it's a clock?? in a fountain or altar?
suddenly I see it clear: it's the space between the legs of a human figure statue, with both arms raised over its head and on top of a pedestal. Maybe im biased but to me its clearly a path heading to a statue on top of a pedestal.
Yu Suzuki was about 10 yrs old when the kung fu movies madness took place in Japan with Lo Lieh and about 15 when Bruce Lee. I bet he mimicked a lot in front of the tv being a kid and probably went to some iconic locations in those movies when at his China trip.
Epic places like Devil's Peak appeared in many different movies like that one of Jackie Chan and iirc one starring Hwang Ing Shik in main role.
You do an excellent work and i love phantom blog.