Again, I think you could make this argument of many of the events and elements that have taken place in the series so far.
Sure, if you want to leave out the bad guys that only serve to temporarily inconvenience Ryo (Chai, Terry, Dou Niu, Yuan etc.) but ultimately don't affect the larger narrative, that makes total sense.
If Xiuying had shown up and given Ryo the pendant at the beginning of Shenmue 3 or had Ryo been given the poetry scroll by master Feng and told that it was one of his father's old possessions, would it really make a difference?
Finding Xiuying is literally Ryo's first objective in Shenmue 2, she's responsible for him learning the wude, she saves his life multiple times, trains him, is instrumental in Ryo's ability to beat the final boss, she will almost certainly be coming back and tells him about a character we will almost certainly meet who has connection to the CYM. If she shows up in S4 the way Chai unceremoniously shows up in S3, S4 has
big problems. Either way, no summary of S2 could
possibly leave her out, even in the cheeky way we're doing it. And to the best of my knowledge, the poetry scroll is a hidden item that can be missed in S1.
What if Xiuying giving the pendant to Ryo was simply a metaphor for her letting go of her brother and the guilt that she felt for not convincing him to stay? Him leaving as a child and her inability to convince him not to go is something that she's carried with her for her whole life. Ryo following the same path in spite of all of her warnings and training may have helped her to accept that sometimes, people's minds simply can't be changed and that there was nothing she could have said or done to have stopped her older brother from leaving all those years ago (especially considering that she was only a child at the time).
I really hope we meet Zimming and that the pendant has an impact on that situation, but there's no guarantee that either of these things are going to happen.
True that there's no guarantee, but I would consider it to be a colossal missed opportunity as well as frankly poor storytelling if that was the first and last we heard of Ziming.
Conversely, we are given an amber pendant by Elder Yeh during Shenmue 3 and are also told by Shenhua that she had been given an amber pendant by her father when she was a child. How can you say with any surety that this pendant won't come into play somewhere later on in the story and that the pendant itself doesn't have some kind of connection to her powers?
Because I sold it for $300? It's also not mentioned in any kind of context that would imply it has anything to do with Shenhua's powers or the story at large, unlike Xiuying's pendant which is given as she's talking about someone who swore revenge and was looking for the CYM. It's also her parting gift which generally implies a pretty big deal.
Agreed, but I think this is emblematic of Ryo's inability to put his emotions aside and accept his own limitations as a martial artist. We see this at several points throughout the story - and that his first reaction after getting his ass kicked by Mr. Muscles mk.1 is to go straight back for a second round suggests that he still needs to learn the virtue of patience before he can progress as a martial artist.
I feel like by the end of part 3 of a 5 part series, the main character should've maybe moved past that initial character flaw. But in the context of S3, yes Ryo is shown to be impatient and overestimating of his abilities from the beginning to the end (he loses nearly every major fight initially), which is why many, including SEPW, claim that his character is in the exact same spot. Better not run Lan Di!
I really don't subscribe to this idea that Yu saw Shenmue 3 as nothing more than a launchpad for Shenmue 4. Unless a deal was struck with Deep Silver to publish both Shenmue 3 and Shenmue 4 (which I suppose is possible, if not a little improbable), Yu had no reason not to put his all into Shenmue 3 and make it the best game he possibly could.
I don't think he viewed it as a launchpad, but he may have been cautious about committing to anything and thus structured the story in such a way that it could be scaled up or scaled down (with the adverse effect of leaving S3's story feeling inconsequential) depending on how things went. There is no mention of the four leaders of the CYM for example; perhaps he left himself room to leave it as simply Niao Sun vs. Lan Di in order to truncate the story if he couldn't get a bigger budget? I'm not saying this was for nefarious reasons, simply practical ones. I don't think Suzuki is trying to pull a fast one on anyone, if I did, I wouldn't be here.
