Another possible censorship first featured in the Xbox version of Shenmue II

[RyoHazuki36]

I do not know if this is widely known, and if it is I apologize, but I came across an interesting post from Shenmue 2 Differences (@Shen2Diffs) on Twitter that showed something I had no idea about until now:


Looks like another small censorship that was actually first featured in the Xbox version of Shenmue II and not the PAL Dreamcast version like the other censorships.

It seems this guy's outfit originally looked militaristic, and they changed it to avoid controversy.

Here's actual Chinese military uniforms that look exactly like this guy's original uniform:

 

[Wong Shen]

thats a cool find, I played the DC version of Shenmue II and didnt paid attention to all those tiny details

 

[RyoHazuki36]

thats a cool find, I played the DC version of Shenmue II and didnt paid attention to all those tiny details

Yeah I've played the DC, Xbox and remaster versions and when I played the DC and Xbox versions years before the remaster even came out, I had no idea there were so many different texture changes in the Xbox version.

I first saw some of the differences on the old Shenmue Dojo site years ago. They're also on that guy's Twitter page, and they had some weird changes like changing then $5 price tag on the drink vending machines to 100 yen? Wtf? Wonder why they bothered to go through the effort to change that when they were porting the DC version that had the correct price tag. Lol...

 

[red]

xbox original shenmue 2? strange.

i thought games consoles were banned in china up until recently, so i doubt they were censoring the game for the chinese gov approval. (game consoles were banned in china from 2000 until 2015)

 

[RyoHazuki36]

xbox original shenmue 2? strange.

i thought games consoles were banned in china up until recently, so i doubt they were censoring the game for the chinese gov approval. (game consoles were banned in china from 2000 until 2015)

Yeah the change was made for the original Xbox version. I'm not sure if the change is still intact in the remaster, but I bet it probably is since they used the Xbox version as the base for the remaster.

 

[Seaman]

xbox original shenmue 2? strange.

i thought games consoles were banned in china up until recently, so i doubt they were censoring the game for the chinese gov approval. (game consoles were banned in china from 2000 until 2015)

Yes but to my understand the ban applied to western imports mostly and the chinese gov allowed for small scale production (in chinese scale, so big for inner market consuption) and importing exceptions from Asia releases for clone consoles.